20 - Providing Fulfilling Undergraduate Research Experiences on a Budget

Leanne Boucher

College of Psychology

W. Matthew Collins

College of Psychology

On one hand, many undergraduate students are looking for a meaningful research experience, but oftentimes there are not as many research opportunities as there are interested students. On the other hand, there are many studies that need large diverse participant pools, but oftentimes there is not enough participation available at a single site. The Big Team Science (BTS) movement solves the latter issue. There are many BTS organizations whose mission is to collect data from a culturally and ethnically diverse population from around the world in order to examine important questions. One such organization is the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA). The PSA is a decentralized organization that works with labs around the world. The faculty authors here first worked with the PSA to study world-wide responses to the COVID pandemic. Since our first involvement, we have worked with over 20 students on PSA projects. Students learn about the BTS and open science movements, prepare study materials, collect and analyze preliminary data, present at conferences, and will be co-authors on a peer-reviewed paper. This semester our long-time students will be involved in hypothesis generation for an original study that will culminate in publishing a registered review. In our talk, we hope to inspire other faculty to join BTS projects, which require minimal resources, to help undergraduates obtain meaningful undergraduate research experiences.

Participants will be able to:

1. Describe the BTS movement and how they can get involved

2. Feel confident that they and their students can get involved in these large-scale data collection projects