Impact of a senior research thesis on students' perceptions of scientific inquiry in distinct student populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Senior research thesis courses are a hallmark feature of many undergraduate science programs, with several documented benefits, including the development of research skills and scientific identity alongside career exploration. In this study, we investigated how the senior research thesis experience is perceived by distinct student populations. We surveyed undergraduate students from two programs at a mid-sized, research-intensive university: Biochemistry, a basic science-focused program, and Biomedical Discovery and Commercialization, a hybrid program combining science and business. Both groups were enrolled in identical fourth-year laboratory-based thesis courses. Our analysis measured the impact of the thesis experience on students' scientific inquiry skills and beliefs; furthermore, we examined how these changes influenced their professional socialization as researchers and their postdegree career goals. Our findings suggest that completing a senior research thesis increased students' perception of their research-related skills, regardless of program enrollment. While there were fewer significant changes regarding student epistemological beliefs around scientific research, qualitative and quantitative measures support the idea that students have developed a more positive perception of failure and resilience within research. Additionally, while students within the science-business hybrid program experienced no significant changes in career goals, completion of a senior research thesis had a significant impact on students within the science-based program. Overall, our results demonstrate that laboratory-based thesis courses can have a notable effect on developing student research skills, beliefs about scientific research, and career goals, and that these effects vary based on the student population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".