The Researcher Incubator: Fast-Tracking Undergraduate Engineering Students into Research via Just-in-Time Learning

An “incubator” in the research context is a place where the formation and development of new skills and ideas is encouraged, while the resulting new discoveries are spun out for further external development. To meet the need for trained researchers in the new Mechanical and Energy Engineering (MEE) Department at the University of North Texas (UNT), the faculty and undergraduates collaborated to develop a “Researcher Incubator” to integrate research experiences into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. This group’s missions are 1) to train UNT engineering undergraduates in the essentials of engineering research, 2) offer a pragmatic educational experience reflective of the skills necessary for engineers in the 21 century, and 3) fast-track undergraduates into successful research experiences much earlier than would be possible within conventional engineering programs. To eliminate barriers to entry for undergraduates, the Researcher Incubator uses “just-in-time” learning, a subset of inductive learning, which is modeled after manufacturing processes that deliver products to customers simultaneously with the moment of purchase. The hallmark of just-in-time learning in the context of research is that students are empowered to select and learn the specific elements necessary to solve a problem at the moment that a need for a solution arises. This approach is critical because it frees faculty advisors from being central repositories of knowledge and experience, eliminating a major bottleneck to progress by redistributing this responsibility to undergraduate researchers. The hypothesis of our just-in-time learning experiment is that if undergraduate students are 1) taught the skills needed to discover technical information and knowledge themselves, 2) enabled to work in collaborative groups that facilitate idea exchange, and 3) vested with responsibility to manage and execute serious research projects, they will spontaneously find or develop the theoretical and practical engineering knowledge required to successfully complete a project. In this paper, we outline the approach used at UNT to formalize, package, and teach just-in-time learning methods to undergraduate students through the Researcher Incubator. To highlight the validity of our hypothesis, we compared the research performance of undergraduates to that of graduate students over a 14-month period. Two metrics commonly used to gauge faculty success at engineering research universities were applied in this comparison: 1) the number of technical papers presented in a public forum or journal and 2) the dollar value of research