Enhancing Undergraduate Research Engagement: A Semester Research Program and Motivation Assessment

There are ongoing efforts from universities to increase the participation of undergraduate students in research programs. However, few undergraduate students pursue a research program due to the lack of interest and unappealing project offerings. In addition, there are few programs in Latin American universities for undergraduate students to pursue research. This paper provides an overview of a semester research program created for undergraduate students in a Latin American university. The most critical aspect of conducting a research semester is finding students interested in research and keeping them motivated. There are several challenges to address for a semester research program; one is that students have to consider at least 40 hours of weekly work, and the other one is that the final deliverable is a conference paper. We provide the steps to track the students' progress in their research semester and the associated grading system. To know if the students are motivated through the research semester, we conducted the MUSIC
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inventory model of motivation regarding the research semester and its usefulness. So far, our methodology has been implemented successfully with four students. The results suggest that this methodology maintains students' interest in research projects. Whilst the proposed model can be replicated easily, the motivation students' results might not be easy to generalize.