Mentorship of undergraduate research experiences: Best practices, learning goals, and an assessment rubric.

Student engagement in research is a principle of quality undergraduate psychology education. Research experiences can take many forms, but they all should ideally lead students to achieve American Psychological Association (APA) undergraduate major goals and prepare them for the workforce and graduate study. Therefore, research mentors should ensure high-quality research experiences that yield positive outcomes. There is expert consensus on what constitutes best practices in mentoring undergraduate research experiences and quasiexperimental evidence that research experiences are associated with positive student outcomes. However, researchers have not directly established a relationship between mentorship best practices and student outcomes, nor have they aligned outcomes with APA undergraduate major goals. The absence of such research is attributable to the lack of a common outcome measure and the small number of students who engage in research at single institutions. To facilitate assessment and research on best practices, mentors require a common measure of learning that is specific to undergraduate psychology research. Thus, the current paper proposes a new analytic rubric that synthesizes best practices in mentorship and the APA undergraduate major goals. The rubric’s design will allow for assessment of APA undergraduate major goals related to research. In addition, the rubric could become the foundational element in a national assessment effort to determine the impact of varied research experiences and to evaluate the efficacy of mentorship best practices.