Delivering Impact via Student Research: Sharing Best Practice

The aims of the project were to • collect evidence of success (converting undergraduate projects into peer-reviewed publications) both internally and externally. • redefine undergraduate projects to develop staff-student collaborations that enable final year projects to be converted into peer-reviewed publications. • identify areas of good practice that can encourage cultural change. Background/context to project: This paper reports on a small-scale empirical study stems from the desire of our team of UK university engineering staff to develop our research outputs. We wanted to find ways to capitalise on final year undergraduate dissertations that could result in peer-reviewed publications. The university is already committed to ensuring all students have access to research-informed teaching, and encourages academic tutors to engage in a range of teaching pedagogies that support students’ learning. Within the Engineering programmes, students often undertake small-scale research projects for their final year assessment, but much of this work is commonly shelved on completion. We were interested in encouraging students to engage in authentic research, and how that might be disseminated. We wanted to find ways that tutors and students could publish co-authored academic papers that add to the team’s research profile.