2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Assessing the effectiveness of entrepreneurial mindset training materials for undergraduate researchers

Undergraduate research is a high impact practice. Studies consistently show that it improves students’ engagement in learning and their retention in college. In addition, leveraging undergraduate researchers as professional scholars who are part of the research lab ecosystem can increase the productivity of the lab and help prepare future graduate students. Despite these benefits, many labs have difficulty implementing undergraduate research (UGR) programs. To support undergraduate students as productive researchers, we offer a framework that emphasizes curiosity, connection, and value creation in research activities to foster an entrepreneurial mindset (EM) in undergraduate research. The goal is to make research training more efficient, increase overall lab productivity, boost undergraduate research effectiveness, and improve student intrinsic motivation and satisfaction.

Our team developed a series of faculty-led workshops for undergraduate researchers focusing on research skill development, with an emphasis on integration of EM in the research process. Workshop topics include framing research questions with EM, building resilience in research, thriving in a research environment, developing an elevator pitch, using EM to drive effective data presentation, and focusing next steps in research to maximize research impact. Each workshop includes video content, a workbook, and a moderator guide, with workshops designed to be deployed either in‐person or virtually facilitated by a workshop moderator. These workshops can be offered at the department or college level for new undergraduate researchers, providing efficient training while minimizing the workload of individual faculty members. Additionally, they offer a valuable opportunity for students to connect, build a community, and support one another throughout their research journeys.

In this paper, we will discuss the implementation and assessment of our workshops across five partner universities ranging from primarily undergraduate institutions to large research-intensive universities. The undergraduate research workshops were held in a variety of formats, based on institutional needs, and we will share key learnings from each context and recommendations for adapting this work to additional institutions.

To assess the impact of our workshop-based interventions on student research productivity and attitudes toward research, we developed a retrospective, post-experience survey and a one-year follow-up survey for students participating in the workshops. We collected survey data from our workshop participants across five partner universities, along with a baseline cohort of students who participated in undergraduate research but did not complete the EM-focused workshops. Our initial results indicate that students who participated in our research training workshops showed increased gains in areas such as setting goals in their research, documenting their work for future researchers, and understanding the needs of stakeholders in their research. Students who participated in the workshops also indicated feeling a greater degree of control over their research.

Understanding the impact of training materials on student skills and motivation in UGR can aid in the design of improved workshops and courses for undergraduate researchers, as well as provide direction for individual faculty who are interested in leveraging EM in their mentorship of undergraduate students.

Authors

Dr. Irene Reizman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0585-2213 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Irene M.B. Reizman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Alfred R. Schmidt Endowed Chair for Excellence in Teaching at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She holds a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, and impacts of undergraduate research experiences on student learning.
Maysam Nezafati http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9249-4479 Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech & Emory University [biography]

I am a senior lecturer at Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech & Emory University. I have been working on educational research since 2016. My main focus is on problem based learning core courses. But specifically I work on
Dr. Michelle Marincel Payne Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Michelle Marincel Payne is an Associate Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology, and her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla (same school, different name). At Rose-Hulman, Michelle is co-leading a project to infuse an entrepreneurial-mindset in undergraduate students’ learning, and a project to improve teaming by teaching psychological safety in engineering education curricula. Michelle also mentors undergraduate researchers to investigate the removal of stormwater pollutants in engineered wetlands. Michelle was a 2018 ExCEEd Fellow, and was recognized as the 2019 ASCE Daniel V. Terrell Awardee.
Dr. Liping Liu Lawrence Technological University [biography]

Liping Liu serves as the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research in the College of Engineering at Lawrence Technological University. She holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary research expertise lies in the fields of thermal sciences and fluid mechanics, with a focus on addressing transport phenomena in energy processes. Her work primarily aims to enhance the performance and efficiency of energy generation, conversion, and utilization across multiscale and multidisciplinary applications. She is a member of ASME, ASEE, ASHRAE, and SAE International, and she is also actively engaged in the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN).
Dr. Mary Lauren Benton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5485-1041 Baylor University [biography]

Mary Lauren is an assistant professor of bioinformatics at Baylor University. She received her B.S. in Bioinformatics at Baylor University before completing her M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Blake Everett Johnson University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Blake Everett Johnson is a Teaching Associate Professor and instructional laboratory manager in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include experimental fluid mechanics, measurement science, engineering education, engineering leadership, and professional identity development.
Mitchel Daniel Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Jonathan Rylander Baylor University

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025