ABSTRACT
Interest in undergraduate research is clearly building within American higher education. This chapter examines the current state of undergraduate research, as it exists in practice. The chapter includes an overview of current rates of participation in undergraduate research, differential patterns of participation across institutional types and disciplines, and various other aspects of student and faculty involvement in the process. The NSF study was in one respect more comprehensive than the Boyer Commission (2001) study, insofar as it included graduates from a wider variety of four-year institutions. The College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) Assessment Program was a national initiative for the study of undergraduate students' educational experiences in college, which operated continuously for 35 years, initially based at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is an ongoing project that deals with students' experiences in college, focusing specifically on activities and conditions that have been shown to be associated with student learning.
