HomeAnnotated BibliographiesUndergraduate Research The relationship between undergraduate research participation and subsequent research performance of early career STEM graduate students Share: Section NavigationSkip section navigationIn this sectionAnnotated Bibliographies Capstone Experiences Conditions for Meaningful Learning Global Learning Internships Learning Communities Mentoring Service-Learning Student-Faculty Partnership Undergraduate Research Work-Integrated Learning Writing Transfer In and Beyond the University Reference List Entry:Gilmore, Joanna, Michelle Vieyra, Briana Timmerman, David Feldon, and Michelle Maher. 2015. "The relationship between undergraduate research participation and subsequent research performance of early career STEM graduate students." The Journal of Higher Education 86: 834-863.About this Journal Article:While many studies on the benefits of UR have used self-report measures, this study used research skill performance in graduate school as its main measure. All students were first year graduate students in a STEM program. They wrote research proposals at the beginning and end of their first year of graduate school. Some of these students had engaged in UR as undergraduates and some had not. Two trained raters independently evaluated the proposals using a pre-established rubric (composed of four subscales) and inter-rater reliability was high. On the pre-proposal, students with UR experience outperformed those without UR experience on 3 of the 4 subscales (Data Presentation, Results, Total Score). On the post-proposal, students with UR also outperformed the other group on all parts of the rubric except Introduction and Context. The authors underscored the importance of UR for successful graduate school performance.