Exploring Students’ Attitudes and Intentions in a Student-Staff Led Research Initiative

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to explore how the experiences of two Hispanic-Latino graduate students acting as members of a Directorship Team (DT) that led an extracurricular, undergraduate research program called the Holistic Foundry Undergraduate Engaged Learners (FUEL) program influenced their attitudes and intentions with respect to this student-staff partnership. The Holistic FUEL program and the experiences of the DT were guided by the Renaissance Foundry Model (herein the Foundry) an innovation-driven learning platform. This provided a unique opportunity to evaluate how this Foundry-guided program shaped the attitudes and intentions of the two graduate student coordinators working with faculty within a student-staff partnership. As part of this case study, an inductive analysis of secondary data —including graduate coordinators’ post-program reflections, recruitment announcements prepared by the coordinators, and meeting notes— provide preliminary themes and insight into the ways in which their experiences influenced attitudes and intentions regarding partnerships with staff. Lessons learned offer insight into the internal personal transformations and type of relationships that support student-staff partnerships for implementing similar undergraduate programs.