Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) on River and Coastal Restoration—a Center Approach to Creating a Unique Research Experience for Undergraduates
Abstract
At the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED), the NSF-sponsored REU on River and Coastal Restoration provides students an intensive research experience in a center environment that incorporates many aspects of the typical graduate student experience at an NSF-funded Science and Technology Center. These include a team-oriented approach in which students work closely with one another while completing their individual research projects, team-mentoring that brings together NCED faculty, staff, and graduate students to meet students’ advising needs, and an approach to research that incorporates field research, laboratory experiments, and an introduction to computational and quantitative methodologies. In addition, students' individual research projects constitute a contribution to larger ongoing field campaigns, allowing them, often for the first time, to understand the role of their own research in a larger context. Students join one of two teams: Team Marmot participates in an ongoing campaign to document the geomorphic response of the Sandy River to the 2007 removal of the Marmot Dam; Team Delta participates in research on coastal restoration of the Mississippi River Delta. After an orientation period at our headquarters, the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory in Minnesota, each team spends the majority of their summer in the field. The teams are then reunited for poster sessions at the end of the summer at which they share the outcomes of their research with one another and the larger NCED and University of Minnesota communities.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009AGUFMED23B..06D
- Keywords:
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- 0810 EDUCATION / Post-secondary education;
- 0825 EDUCATION / Teaching methods;
- 0850 EDUCATION / Geoscience education research;
- 0855 EDUCATION / Diversity