What undergraduate research can tell us about research on learning

Anyone who desires to give his hearers a perfect conviction of the truth of his principles must, first of all, know from his own experience how conviction is acquired and how not. He must have known how to acquire conviction where no predecessor had been before him-that is, he must have worked at the confines of human knowledge, and have conquered for it new regions.1 The reader who has attended the recent Project Kaleidoscope assembly at the University of Richmond2 will notice that I have transposed the title of the plenary session. The published title, supplied by PKAL, was “What research on learning can tell us about undergraduate research”. A previous plenary had touched on the impact of the National Research Council’s book, How People Learn3, a useful report on what might be called the cognitive science of learning. When Dr. Elaine Seymour and I began our collaborative research on the benefits of undergraduate research experiences we were aware of the book, and I recall citing the book in our original grant proposal. We wrote a passage on “learning theory relevant to undergraduate research”. Here is what we wrote: Just as there is a lack of research on the impact of undergraduat