Celebrating Undergraduate Research: How Faculty Support leads to Student Success

Posted: July 9, 2024 by Ralph Hale

Ralph Hale is Associate Professor of Psychological Science and winner of the 2023 Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award.

Each year, University of North Georgia's Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (CURCA) recognizes faculty for their contributions to undergraduate research. In 2023 I was awarded CURCA's Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award. I am tremendously honored by this recognition and would like to share some of the work my students have been doing under my direction.

In 2018 I founded the Hale Vision Lab, a student-focused research program designed to provide students with research opportunities and experiences related to vision, memory, and cognition. To date, our lab has involved 11 undergraduate researchers. These students have learned to conduct literature reviews, design studies, create complex stimuli, code and program, use research technology (including eye tracking and virtual reality), obtain IRB ethics approval, test human visual acuity and color vision, collect data with in-person participants, organize and analyze data, generate conclusions, write conference abstracts, create conference posters, and write research manuscripts. These research assistants are not "worker bees" that do my scholarship for me. They are students learning skills to prepare them for their futures. As such, 100% of my time and energy goes into mentoring, teaching, and providing opportunities that will serve them.

For our students to be competitive for admission to graduate programs and for the job market, they need presentation experiences. Therefore, I prioritize helping students obtain these opportunities. In the lab courses I teach, students present oral and poster presentations. As the faculty advisor for Psi Chi, the undergraduate honors society in psychology, I have helped create and facilitate a biannual undergraduate research event that has featured dozens of posters from our psychology students over the last two years.

Additionally, research assistants in the Hale Vision Lab have presented at regional, national, and international research conferences—18 total to date. In 2021, I hired two student researchers to work on a funded grant project through the Faculty Undergraduate Summer Experience (FUSE) program. Each student had their own complementary experiment to conduct over the course of eight weeks. The students presented their progress every two weeks, culminating in a FUSE poster presentation event. This was a tremendous experience for these students. A second FUSE application was funded for 2023, thereby providing this opportunity to two new students. In addition to the experiences described above, students I work with on research benefit from being part of the writing and publication process. Currently, I am working with six students on a total of four manuscripts. One manuscript was recently published in the Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research. A second article is conditionally accepted, pending final editorial approval. I anticipate the other manuscripts will be published in the 2024-2025 academic year.

The University of North Georgia's mission is to provide "a culture of academic excellence in a student-focused environment that includes quality education, service, research and creativity." Since joining UNG in 2018, I have seen this institution honor and make progress toward that mission through the collaborative hard work and dedication of our faculty, staff, and students. The mission, culture, and values of UNG have affirmed and shaped my current teaching philosophy. For students to be successful, they need to learn transferrable skills that will serve them later. Psychology is a research-based field. Our curriculum allows us to expose students to the research process. I often teach Research Methods and other Laboratory courses in which students work collaboratively to design, conduct, and analyze psychological research. I average 12 of these IRB-approved collaborative studies each year – 60 in all since starting at UNG. Additionally, I have taught research-focused independent studies as part of our psychology major and neuroscience minor. The projects are professional in quality, spanning from literature review through dissemination of results (e.g., conference abstracts, posters, manuscripts). I volunteer to take on this uncompensated work because my focus is on student growth and student experiences.