Apprentice Researchers at QUEST
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Apprentice Researchers at QUEST In an effort to encourage young adults to choose a career in science, a high school student program has been developed at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center for Quantized Electronic Structures (QUEST) at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The six-week summer program, which incorporates each student into a graduate-level lab project, enables high school juniors to appreciate the excitement of new discoveries along with the effort and interactions required for fruitful research. When the program was initiated, the graduate students and professors were skeptical that high school students would be able to understand or contribute to the ongoing lab research. Most students had taken only one chemistry or physics course. From our experiences during the first two summers, however, we find that the students surpass all expectation. In fact, some become so valuable to their labs that they are hired as assistants in their senior year of high school. The primary goals of the apprentice researcher program are to: • have students gain confidence in their ability to contribute to a research project, • teach them as much science as they are able to learn, • excite students about research, and • teach them to talk about their scientific work, both casually and formally. Though we select students who have already expressed some interest in science, their confidence level for tackling lab research ranges from tentative to extremely ambitious. We take this variation into account when we match each student with a graduate student mentor and a project. Each project includes some early experimental tasks that are easy to learn and require little knowledge of the science involved. This allows the students to feel a sense of accomplishment early in the program. In addition, they take a crash course in electronics, computer programming, and semiconductors (the majority of the projects involve gallium arsenide) during the first three weeks of the program. Such courses provide the foundation and vocabulary to enable the students to work safely in the lab and understand more about their graduate mentor's experiments. Since we want to take students as far as they can go intellectually without overwhelming them, we encourage them to ask their mentors as many questions about the related science as they can. It
can be difficult to estimate students' comprehension of the material when the primary means of teaching is verbal. The mentors, therefore, use many approaches to probe understanding, including quizzing the students informally on the previous day's events, encouraging the students to write a brief description of their project, or asking them to report on how to operate one of the lab instruments. Students also keep a current lab notebook. This constant exchange helps them understand the science and experimental procedures in more detail since the gaps in their knowledge are readily apparent from their answers. In addition, the mentors provide reference materials t
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