Undergraduate Researcher Personas

Abstract: Personalized undergraduate research programs can help increase undergraduate students' participation in research. Personas of undergraduate researchers are a powerful means of encapsulating the richness of students' various goals, motivations, and experiences in research. Student personas can support the design of research programs with student-centered approaches that better engage undergraduate students across multiple disciplines. We used interview data and drew on Self-Determination Theory to identify students' various goals and motivations in order to build three undergraduate researcher personas in physics.