CRA-W/CDC Summer REU Programs Report More Experience With Publication Process

Undergraduate students who had participated in summer REUs were asked about the degree to which they obtained experience with the publication process while engaged in those REUs. Experience with the publication process was measured via an aggregated measure of three items with the following prompt: How much experience, if any, did you gain through your summer research experience in these activities? Writing or co-authoring a research paper or report; publishing a research paper or report; summarizing published research results. Responses ranged from (1) No more than I had to (4) Quite a bit more. Participants in CRA-W/CDC summer REU programs indicated that they had obtained significantly more experience with the publication process than students who had taken part in other summer REUs, p ≤ .05.

Note: Majority male students = Asian + White men. Underrepresented minorities and women (URM+W) = American Indian, Black, Hawaiian or Hispanic men + women of all ethnic/racial backgrounds. CRA-W/CDC REU programs = Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU) + Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) + Multidisciplinary Research Opportunities for Women (MRO-W). Other research experiences = summer research projects at one’s home institution or another university + a research internship in an industry or government lab. Error bars represent standard errors.

This analysis brought to you by the CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP). Want CERP to do comparative evaluation for your program or intervention? Contact cerp@cra.org to learn more. Be sure to also visit our website at https://cra.org/cerp/.