Undergraduate students gain valuable experience from assisting faculty research. Faculty and other administrators also make gains from the research support undergraduate students provide. 

That’s the take-home message of a new research paper by University of Delaware researchers in the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics. 

The paper, published in the journal Applied Economics Teaching Resources, explores the symbiotic relationship of having undergraduate students work on experimental economics research. The authors, UD’s Kent Messer, Leah Palm-Forster, master’s student Carl Nelson-Poteet, and Lusi Xie, who completed her postdoctoral research at UD in 2023, highlight numerous successes and challenges of involving undergraduate students in experimental and economics research. They also lay out 10 recommendations for how agricultural and applied economics researchers can design enriching experiences for undergraduate researchers. 

The Center for Experimental and Applied Economics is a UD research powerhouse that conducts a plethora of evidence-based research that informs agricultural and environmental policy. 

The center was founded in 2007 and has supported more than 70 undergraduate researchers who have taken on numerous research responsibilities, from designing economic experiments to collecting research data. CEAE has even provided high school students with volunteer and internship opportunities to further their interest and help grow the talent pool of people pursuing economics careers.

The team surveyed 35 alumni who worked with the center in undergraduate research positions from 2010 to 2023, about their perspectives on their experiences at the center. All survey respondents said they gained a better understanding of how research works. The majority said they were happy with their CEAE experience (91 percent), and said it helped improve their decision-making skills (94 percent), problem-solving abilities (91 percent) and knowledge of expectations in a work environment (91 percent). Most (74 percent) said their experience with CEAE helped them improve their ability to summarize scientific results and findings.

“It was surprising to me how near consensus the responses were for so many of the questions about gaining skills and satisfaction,” said Nelson-Poteet, a research assistant at the CEAE who is pursuing a master’s degree in water science and policy. “So this shows me that at least in our Center, undergraduate research is a positive for the students, especially because you get paid on top of all the gained skills and experiences.”

Nelson-Poteet was once himself an undergraduate assistant for CEAE. He started there more than three years ago and worked his way up to research assistant.

“Everything I know about research, I know because of my work at the center as an undergrad,” Nelson-Poteet said. “A lot of the survey’s respondents reported research growth and growth in professional skills like decision-making and independence. I certainly felt that, too.”

The research paper came about from the UD researchers responding to a call from the journal Applied Economics Teaching Resources looking for studies for a special issue about working with undergraduate student researchers.

“In economics programs, there’s often the sense that undergraduates don’t know enough to be able to contribute to research, when, in fact, that’s not true,” said Leah Palm-Forster, an associate professor of applied economics and the center’s director. “There's a lot of different things they can do to contribute to research and to be learning and gaining research skills themselves.”