Resumen de Engineering students’ epistemic cognition in a research environment
Courtney Faber, Penelope Vargas, Lisa Benson
Undergraduate research experiences provide students the opportunity to solve complex, open-ended problems in theirfields. As such, it is expected that these opportunities influence students’ development of problem-solving skills and beliefsabout how knowledge is constructed in their fields. This exploratory study utilized a qualitative approach to understandhow students acquire, understand, and justify knowledge (epistemic cognition) within an undergraduate researchexperience in biomedical engineering. We interviewed six undergraduate biomedical engineering students with diverseresearch experiences. Transcripts were analyzed using an iterative process that employed emergent and a priori codingusing previous work in epistemic cognition as a lens. Our analysis revealed that many of the processes students use whenselecting a research topic and making research decisions aligned with processes that are commonly used in the field ofbiomedical engineering, representing students’ integration into the community of practice and adoption of thecommunity’s epistemic processes. Our results suggest that students’ time in research, personal goals, research groupculture, and the nature of the research project impact the processes students use to make research decisions. Four emergingresearcher profiles (novice, passive, developing, and contributing researcher), based on students’ time in research,autonomy in the lab, and use of research heuristics emerged from our data. The results of this work can inform thedevelopment of authentic problem-solving environments, such as research experiences and inquiry activities that aim forstudents to develop the epistemic practices of a specific community.
