This cross-disciplinary volume incorporates diverse perspectives on mentoring undergraduate research, including work from scholars at many different types of academic institutions in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It strives to extend the conversation on mentoring undergraduate research to enable scholars in all disciplines and a variety of institutional contexts to critically examine mentoring practices and the role of mentored undergraduate research in higher education.

Mentorship is a catalyst capable of unleashing one's potential for discovery, curiosity, and participation in STEMM and subsequently improving the training environment in which that STEMM potential is fostered. Mentoring relationships provide developmental spaces in which students' STEMM skills are honed and pathways into STEMM fields can be discovered. Because mentorship can be so influential in shaping the future STEMM workforce, its occurrence should not be left to chance or idiosyncratic implementation. There is a gap between what we know about effective mentoring and how it is practiced in higher education. The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM studies mentoring programs and practices at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It explores the importance of mentorship, the science of mentoring relationships, mentorship of underrepresented students in STEMM, mentorship structures and behaviors, and institutional cultures that support mentorship. This report and its complementary interactive guide present insights on effective programs and practices that can be adopted and adapted by institutions, departments, and individual faculty members.

How to Mentor Undergraduate Researchers is written for faculty members and other researchers who mentor undergraduates. It provides a concise description of the mentoring process, including the opportunities and rewards for both students and mentors of the mentoring experience.

This book is a guide for mentors on how to recruit, mentor, and support students through a student research experience in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Being a successful research mentor benefits from the self-awareness and planning, strategies and skills that Success in Mentoring your Student Researchers can help you build and develop. These are useful for mentors working with any students, but especially those who have been minoritized in STEMM or are the first in their family to attend college. The first part of the book introduces mentoring undergraduates and how it differs from traditional classroom instruction, active learning, and flipped classrooms; mentoring is collaboratively teaching research while doing research. A mentored undergraduate research experience also helps your mentees develop the skills necessary to be successful scientists and become part of STEMM communities. The central part of the book presents the undergraduate research experience as a “three-legged stool” whose legs—research, education, and community—each have unique values in advancing your mentees’ path in STEMM and all of which require setting, communicating, and realizing expectations for “success”--your mentees’ and your own. The last part of the book looks beyond the research experience, from evaluating your success as a mentor through helping your mentees to continue to develop and grow their STEMM careers and become mentors themselves. This book is the mentor’s companion to the authors’ book for students, “Success in Navigating your Student Research Experience: Moving Forward in STEMM.”

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view. These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a ‘liminal’ state of transition, a ‘betwixt and between’ space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner’s development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts. This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education. Cover image: Detail from ‘Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent’ c.1520–25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.

A Mathematician's Practical Guide to Mentoring Undergraduate Research is a complete how-to manual on starting an undergraduate research program. Readers will find advice on setting appropriate problems, directing student progress, managing group dynamics, obtaining external funding, publishing student results, and a myriad of other relevant issues. The authors have decades of experience and have accumulated knowledge that other mathematicians will find extremely useful.