Preventing a BoonDoggle: Assuring a Short Term Research Abroad Activity is an Educative Experience

Scholarly Commons 2020-04-16T18:41:28Z

georged8
Whealan-George, Kelly A
Clevenger, Aaron D.

At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, an annual short-term, research abroad non-credit program was created in 2012 as a core component of the undergraduate research initiative that achieves learning outcomes in a meaningful way. In order to describe, and analyze the short-term research abroad activity, an instrumental case study design was created. The instrumental case study was chosen as a means of allowing the facilitators/authors to communicate how they attempted to assure that the program was educative. In order to determine if the program was in fact educative and that it met its goal of being an effective research experience the authors utilized two additional research methods. The first was a document analysis of the participant’s research artifacts. Each participant was required to communicate their findings by writing a paper that was submitted for publication to an applicable research journal. The study found that an experiential education as a pedagogical framework coupled with a short-term research abroad activity can lead to a substantive educative experience, where the authors described and analyzed attempts to ensure that the short-term research abroad program was educative, it also describes the educational assessment findings which describe what was found when the authors tested whether they, in fact, met this goal. During the design phase of the short-term research abroad program, the authors turned to experiential education as a principle for how they would ensure that the program was grounded in an acceptable educational theory. Experiential education is a widely accepted educational practice used in experiences such as co-ops and internships, study abroad, undergraduate research and service learning. To frame the short-term cultural research abroad program as something from which student could learn the authors utilized the National Society of Experiential Education’s (2013) list of eight principles of good practice. In order to safeguard th

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

FER oai:commons.erau.edu:discovery-day-1421
https://commons.erau.edu/discovery-day/db-discovery-day-2020/poster-session-faculty-and-grad/14
https://commons.erau.edu/context/discovery-day/article/1421/viewcontent/ACCU_boondoggle_poster_v2.pdf
1192432110

EMBRY-RIDDLE AERONAUTICAL UNIV DAYTONA
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