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Applied Psychology
Those benefits and others are the findings of a number of studies conducted across the country, including one published in the Journal of Higher Education in 2003. That study found that undergraduates who took part in research were far more likely to go on to graduate school. In addition, respondents who took part in research reported greater satisfaction with their undergraduate experience, and increased intellectual curiosity, research skills, and communications skills.
Other studies have found that taking part in student-faculty research resulted in higher college retention rates, particularly for minorities and those from low-income families.
But, one skill not mentioned widely in the literature is leadership ability, something psychology major Allison Foertsch, a junior, has in spades. Foertsch has spent more than a year researching how memory is helped or hindered by emotions in the young and old, and has taken on a leadership role with a team of seven other undergraduate researchers, all of whom work for Assistant Professor of psychology Marisa Knight.
“I work closely with them to make sure that protocols are being followed properly and data is being collected efficiently,” Foertsch said.
Before jumping into research, Foertsch said her education was more about absorbing information without a sense of how it applied or what was important. But, having to translate that knowledge into action through first-hand research caused her to sharpen her attention from general psychology to a specialty.
The research into emotions and memory relates to the “positivity effect,” the phenomenon of people tending to recall or focus on more positive memories as they grow older.
“We want to determine the particular strategies younger and older adults rely upon to regulate emotion and how they impact emotional experience and memory. If we can learn about the strategies that are most successful, it is possible to help other people (particularly younger people) to regulate their emotions, which is better for overall emotional well-being,” Knight said.
Intent on pursuing a doctoral degree in cognitive psychology, Foertsch has coauthored a research poster board-sized overview of her work, which she’ll present at the Association for Psychological Science conference in San Francisco in May.
Attention Shoppers
Picking brains is also the focus of sophomore Sofia Martinez’s research. One of the youngest researchers on campus—most are juniors and seniors—Martinez is working with seniors Riana Hermawati and Margareth Gunawan, both of Chinese descent, on marketing research for Mandy Ortiz, assistant professor of marketing.
“We are looking to define a new marketing construct called retro-acculturation,” Ortiz said. Translation: the team is researching life events that spur Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans, born in the United States and brought up speaking English, to be drawn back to their native culture.
“At some point, certain individuals actively seek out cultural practices from their parents’ or grandparents’ country of origin,” Ortiz said. “They learn the language, how to cook, how to dance, what music is important, etcetera.” Ortiz has learned a great deal from her student researchers, who can relate to the pressures of acculturation personally, having grown up in multi-lingual and multi-cultural families.
The team’s objective is to better understand how to market to Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans, both growing populations inside the United States. 
“The idea of researching something that hasn’t even been defined yet seemed very fascinating,” Martinez said.
Ortiz believes the work will pay off with a journal article coauthored with her students that defines retro-acculturation and discloses the team’s findings by year’s end.
Projects like Ortiz’s, in which she depends heavily on students’ translation and interview capabilities, illustrate to what extent students have become intertwined in research across various subjects at USF. Still, there is more to be done. What is needed is a sustained, long-term commitment over years, said Brown, who mentored undergraduate physics researchers for six years.
“I think it’s close, but we have not quite turned the corner to the extent we’d like to see,” Brown said. “But, there certainly appears to be a greater systematic and administrative awareness and fondness for undergraduate research now.”
One indication of that fondness is an uptick in funds spent on student-faculty research by some USF colleges, usually in the form of grants and student researcher salaries. In 2008, the College of Arts and Sciences, which comprises almost 60 percent of USF’s undergraduate population, spent about $117,000 on research assistant salaries, up from $56,000 five years earlier.
In addition to the money spent on research assistant salaries, about $458,000 was spent on faculty research and development in Arts and Sciences, a major portion of which went toward projects involving undergraduate research. That’s a jump of 58 percent from 2003. Another $18,000 went directly to Arts and Sciences faculty who hired undergraduate researchers last year, under an ongoing program established by Turpin to provide grants for faculty who wish to involve students in their research.
In the School of Business and Management, comprising USF’s second largest undergraduate population (25 percent), the 2008 faculty research and development budget jumped almost threefold over five years to $300,000 after Mike Duffy, dean of the business school, carved out additional resources.
The Tao of Research
Funding isn’t the only obstacle to promoting undergraduate research. Assistant Professor of mathematics Stephen Devlin, who has mentored undergraduate student researchers for five years, frequently advises students who are pulled in multiple directions by competing activities and volunteer responsibilities.
“Some can be too busy and spread too thin, whereas graduate students are solely devoted to one subject,” said Devlin, whose research tests evolutionary game theory and suggests that social networks, at least in some species, such as humans, play a role in altruistic behavior. He believes the research teaches undergraduates about life as much as math.
“In some sense, I think it’s good experience for students to work on an open-ended project like this,” said Devlin, who intends to coauthor a journal article with one or more students when the research is complete. One of his students, senior Brendan Foley, has already presented portions of the research at two conferences. “When you’re in school and in a class there are always neat questions with neat answers. But, actually in research, as in life, there are lots of questions and very few answers,” Devlin said.
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