External Resources for Mentors
Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) - CUR provides support and professional development opportunities for faculty, staff, administrators, and students for establishing, nurturing, and institutionalizing undergraduate research programs. Activate your free membership (OUR sponsored) to CUR.
CUREnet - CUREnet was established in 2012 to support networking among faculty developing, teaching, and assessing CUREs, to share CURE projects and resources, and to develop new tools and strategies for CURE instruction and assessment.
FLAMENet - Focuses on cultivating the next generation of resilient, risk-taking STEM innovators.
Squirrel-Net - Inquiry-based lesson plans take students out of the classroom and engage them in research on locally relevant and widely distributed mammals. In the process, students collect data with standardized protocols and submit their data to a national database. Students can test their own hypotheses with data they collected, as well as the combined, larger dataset. Preliminary assessments suggest that being part of a larger, nation-wide project provides a sense of community and accountability among the students. You can join our network and have your students add to our growing database here!
External Research/Resources on UREs/CUREs, by Discipline
- Other/Any Disciplines (CUR)
- Arts & Humanities (CUR)
- Biology (CUR)
- Business (CUR)
- Chemistry (CUR)
- Economics (article from AEA)
- Education (CUR)
- Engineering (CUR)
- English and Comparative Literature (UNC)
- Geosciences (CUR)
- Health Sciences (CUR)
- Mathematical, Computing, & Statistical Sciences (CUR)
- Physics & Astronomy (CUR)
- Psychology (CUR)
- Social Sciences (CUR)
Recommended Books/Articles
Purdue Libraries added access to many Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) resources for free via e-books. To view these resources go to the CUR Collection. Also consider the CUR publication the Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research (SPUR).
Mentoring UR Students
- How to mentor undergraduate researchers by T. Q. Sibley & A. J. (2010).
- Entering mentoring. by Handelsman, J., Pfund, C., Lauffer, S., & Pribbenow, C. (2005).
- Excellence in mentoring undergraduate research. by Vandermaas-Peeler, M., Miller, P. C., & Moore, J. L. (2018).
Undergraduate Research: Competencies
- Undergraduate research experiences for STEM students: Successes, challenges, and opportunities. by Stephens, A., Brenner, K., & Gentile, J. (2017).
- Mapping the Impacts of Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Inquiry Experiences to the NACE Career Readiness Competencies. by Mekolichick, J. (2021).
- What is Career Readiness? by National Association of Colleges and Employers.
- Undergraduate Research as a High-Impact Practice. by Elon University.
Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)
- A guide to course-based undergraduate research. by Dolan, E. L., & Weaver, G. (2021).
- Modeling course-based undergraduate research experiences: An agenda for future research and evaluation. by Corwin, L. A., Graham, M. J., & Dolan, E. L. (2015).
Research Methods & Purdue Resources
The following are common references used by students, which may be useful to mentors making recommendations to student researchers.
- Surveys:
- How to conduct surveys : a step-by-step guide. by Fink, A. (2013).
- Qualtrics (Purdue access)
- Qualtrics Topics from A to Z
- Statistics:
- Discovering Statistics Using SPSS. by Field, A. (2018).
- SPSS Survival Manual. by Pallant, J. (2020).
- SPSS (Purdue access through Community Hub)
- Qualitative:
- Interviewing as qualitative research : a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. by Seidman, I. (2019).
- The coding manual for qualitative researchers. by Saldaña, J. (2021).
- NVivo (Purdue access through Community Hub)
- Visualizations:
- Tableau (Purdue access depends on campus role)
Peer Institutions
Within the Big Ten, the Purdue OUR is connected with the other institutional peer "offices" for Undergraduate Research listed below. (Institutions not listed have programs for UR, but not a specific institutional office.)
- Indiana University
- Michigan State University
- Northwestern University
- Ohio State University
- Pennsylvania State University
- Rutgers University
- University of California Los Angeles (Sciences)
- University of California Los Angeles (HASS)
- University of Illinois
- University of Iowa
- University of Maryland
- University of Michigan (UROP)
- University of Minnesota
- University of Nebraska
- University of Oregon
- University of Southern California
- University of Washington
- University of Wisconsin