Innov High Educ DOI 10.1007/s10755-015-9327-6

Technical Publications as Graduate Class Projects: Advantages and Potential Disadvantages Carolyn A. Copenheaver 1 & S. Andrew Predmore 2 & Nicholas E. Fuhrman 3

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract Graduate students are rewarded with better job opportunities if they can demonstrate a productive publishing record. In this article we report on a writing program that generated technical publications in a discipline-based graduate class. Seventeen student authors were interviewed about the influence of the experience on their professional development. For many students the most powerful experience was working as a member of a research team. Master’s students benefited from being able to transfer research experience into their thesis programs. Doctoral students stretched the definitions of their disciplines and learned new research methods. One cost of the research project was that less discipline-specific content was covered in the course. Overall, students improved soft skills through participation in the project. Keywords graduate education . natural resources education . publications . technical writing

Carolyn A Copenheaver earned a B.S. from Juniata College, an M.S. in Forestry from the University of Maine, and a Ph.D. in Forest Resources from the Pennsylvania State University. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech. S. Andrew Predmore earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia, an M.S. in Forestry from Auburn University, and a Ph.D. in Forestry from Virginia Tech. He is the Associate Director of Sustainability at Indiana University, Bloomington. Nicholas E. Fuhrman earned a B.S. and M.S. in Forestry from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Education and Communication from the University of Florida. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication at the University of Georgia.

* Carolyn A. Copenheaver [email protected] 1

Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA

2

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

3

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

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The phrase Bpublish or perish^ has traditionally been applied to higher education faculty; however, it is becoming increasingly more relevant for graduate students. Within the past decade, it has become the norm for graduate students in science-based disciplines to publish multiple peer-reviewed journal articles during their degree programs in order to increase their competitiveness in the academic and research job market. Students completing their doctorates in education in the 1980s and 1990s averaged 1.3 publications by graduation, but by the early 21st century doctoral students averaged 5.7 publications by graduation (Barnard-Brak, Saxon, & Johnson, 2011). For graduate students, co-authorship with faculty members increases confidence and motivation, increases their sense of being well-prepared to function as an expert, and allows them to form a mentor relationship with a faculty member during the publication process (Burgoine, Hopkins, Rech, & Zapata, 2011; DeFrancisci, Wood, Petkova, & Shatkin, 2009). In particular, graduate students in technical fields who attempt to publish without a faculty co-author are often unsuccessful because standard graduate coursework does not provide them with the training needed to prepare a technical manuscript. Although graduate students occasionally persevere through the publication process alone, it is typically though co-authorship with an experienced faculty mentor that graduate students can publish in high-profile, international journals (Kamler, 2008). Historically, graduate student publications originated from research associated with a thesis; however, if doctoral students wish to pursue careers in academia, they must publish on research outside the scope of their dissertation during their graduate program (Mangematin, 2000). As expectations for graduate student publications rise, faculty members are placed under increasing pressure to co-author with students on publications. However, for faculty members co-authorship with graduate students is inefficient and requires a considerable amount of additional work. When graduate students strive to share their work in peerreviewed outlets, they often struggle to adjust their writing style and content for a specific audience, fail to develop and support a logical argument, provide too many or too few details in the methods section, and commonly make grammatical errors (D. Belcher, 1994; Linder, Murphy, Wingehbach, & Kelsey, 2004; Zigerell, 2013). Additionally, graduate students often refuse to complete multiple drafts and respond to the editorial comments of faculty co-authors (D. Belcher, 1994). The intensive mentorship required for publishing with graduate students means that faculty members are only likely to co-author with them if there is a mutual benefit. One of the ways faculty members fit co-authorship with graduate students into their work requirements is through teaching a graduate class in which the students prepare publications as part of the graded class assignments (W. L. Belcher, 2009). Graduate classes that require students to author a publication often limit course enrollment to those students who already have sufficient data and information to prepare a manuscript. Instructors use the weekly class structure to portion out writing assignments that follow the section headings of a technical paper and culminate in students preparing a manuscript for submission by the end of the class (Gladon, Graves, & Kelly, 2002). Class time is typically spent in a workshop format with the faculty member guiding students through manuscript preparation and students providing peer reviews of each other’s writing (Figgins & Burbach, 1989). Most writing-intensive graduate classes cover content related to the publication process and avoid discipline-related content (Gladon et al., 2002). Within discipline-based graduate classes it is common for students to write research papers, and occasionally an instructor will suggest that a student partner with them to add content and convert a paper written as a class assignment into a publication. We suspect that these sorts of partnerships are relatively rare because they require that the graduate students prioritize the publication within a busy schedule

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of exams, grading papers, teaching, conducting thesis research, and assisting with their advisor’s research program (Pasco, 2009). It is uncommon for instructors to attempt to both cover discipline-related content and involve students in authoring a publication within the context of a single 15-week semester course. Our goal was to examine one such class: a graduate-level forest ecology class that has generated 17 peer-reviewed publications co-authored by 50 graduate students, 5 faculty members, and 1 research technician during the 12 years it has been taught. The purpose of our examination was to identify how graduate students who eventually pursued careers related to research benefited from the publication experience in this class. Specifically, we were interested in whether participation in the class project improved students’ (1) ability to collect and analyze forestry-related data, (2) comfort with crafting a technical publication, (3) ability to work as a member of a supervised research team, and (4) understanding of the publication peer-review process.

Method To assess the impact of participating in class-based research projects on students who pursued research careers, we conducted scripted interviews in 2013 and 2014 with former students who had co-authored publications based on their class projects. The class enrolls both master’s and doctoral students, but we limited our interview population to those students who were pursuing doctorates at the time they were enrolled in the class or to master’s students who pursued doctoral degrees after completing the class.

Class-Based Research Projects Advanced Forest Ecology is offered once a year to master’s and doctoral students. Half of the students enrolled in the class come from forestry; and the others come from biological sciences, environmental science, geography, and wildlife science. Since its inception the class research project has been a required part of classwork for all students, and participation in the project has accounted for 25% to 50% of a student’s grade. The research topic is selected by the instructor and research objectives are described on the first day of class and in the syllabus. When more than 6 students are enrolled in the class, two different projects are offered; and students are able to select the one that interests them the most. The instructor often attempts to match research projects to the disciplines of the students. Thus, although most projects were within the realm of forest ecology, others have explored environmental history, forestry education, forest economics, and women in science. The class projects focus on current research areas in forest ecology, and for the first two months of the semester weekly reading assignments involve journal articles related to the same subject area as the class project. Students give weekly presentations on assigned topics, and presentation topics shift from methodology to results as they become more familiar with the semester’s research topic. Concurrently with this review of the literature, the instructor and students meet during class time to develop and plan the research project. Depending upon the nature of each project, meetings may include discussions of what measurements should be taken to meet the research objectives, how many samples should be taken, what equipment will be necessary to take the measurements, and what will be done with the data after collection. Over the 12 years that the course has been offered many of the research projects

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have been field-based, but other projects have involved students working in the laboratory with samples that had been previously collected. Students work outside of class to collect data, complete lab work, and analyze the data, often side-by-side with the instructor. During the last month of the semester, students receive weekly assignments to write sections of the paper or to create specific tables or figures from their data with the goal of having a completed draft of the manuscript by the end of the semester. The order of student and instructor authorship is ultimately decided by the instructor, but the final weekly class reading focuses on authorship (Galindo-Leal, 1996; Weltzin, Belote, Williams, Keller, & Engel, 2006); and students participate in self-evaluation and peer-evaluation of their co-authors to identify a fair authorship order. Not all manuscripts have been completed within the allotted semester. On a number of occasions, the lab work and data analysis took longer than anticipated, and in these cases the instructor took responsibility for manuscript preparation after the semester had ended. The degree to which students remained involved in the publication process after the end of the class has varied by individual. Some students remain very active and provide extensive comments on drafts of the manuscript. Other students cease involvement in the project after the semester ends. However, based on a verbal agreement made between the instructor and the students at the beginning of the semester, all students remain as co-authors on the final manuscript regardless of how active they have been in the publication process after the class has ended.

Interviews with Student Co-authors We limited interviews to former students who had completed a doctorate or were currently pursuing a doctorate so that we could focus the evaluation on graduate students who opted to pursue careers with a significant research component. The class instructor contacted 21 former students by email to see if they would be willing to be interviewed about their experiences in participating in the class-based research project. We were able to reach and interview 17 out of the 21 students that fit our criteria for participation. Of these 17 individuals 8 were master’s students, and 9 were doctoral students when they took the class. Two former students who are co-authors on this article conducted all interviews for this study. We made the conscious decision to have former students (peers to the interviewees) rather than the instructor of the course conduct all interviews with the idea that this might allow students to provide more forthcoming and honest assessments of their experiences in the class. Furthermore, the interviewers were also able to use their own experiences to probe participants and elicit more in-depth reflections on the course and project experience. After initial contact by the class instructor, the two interviewers contacted each of the participants to establish rapport and trust (Homans, 1958). Semi-structured interviews were conducted over the phone, audio recorded with the interviewees’ permission, and transcribed verbatim. The interviewers followed a pre-determined interview guide containing six questions that had been approved for use with human subjects through the University’s Institutional Review Board (Table 1). Given the interviewers’ own experiences with the class research project, they were able to offer a context in which participants could relate their experiences when sharing responses to interview questions. This connection helped the interviewers relate to the participants, while maintaining a conversational style during the interview (Patton, 2002). Interviews ranged in length from 17 minutes to 49 minutes with an average length of 34 minutes.

Innov High Educ Table 1 Scripted Interview Questions Number Question Q1

What do you remember about your research experience in this graduate class?

Q2

What (if anything) about the experience of engaging in the class research project was meaningful for you professionally for your current position?

Q3

What (if anything) about the experience was meaningful for you personally?

Q4 Q5

How did your participation in the class-based research project change your views of the research process, if at all? If you were to teach a class like this one, what would you change about the experience?

Q6

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Qualitative Analysis of Interview Transcriptions We used a two-stage approach for coding the interview transcriptions. In the first stage, we used Attribute Coding (Saldaña, 2013) to classify participant characteristics by sex, research project, interviewer, current employment, and degree status when they took the class (master’s or doctoral student). Also at this stage, the class instructor employed Structural Coding (Saldaña, 2013) to group interview responses into nine pre-set categories related to our research objectives: ability to work as a team member, career advancement, data analysis, data collection, interactions with professor, manuscript submission, review process, presentation of data, and technical writing. These nine categories were agreed upon by the co-authors before proceeding. After this first stage of coding, each of the three co-authors separately evaluated the Structural Coding dataset using Axial Coding (Saldaña, 2013) to unite common themes that had been separated into different categories during the Structural Coding. This second stage also provided an opportunity to validate the coding by having multiple observers independently evaluate the codes associated with the interview dataset. We also discussed the selection of raw quotes to represent the codes revealed during Axial Coding to ensure trustworthiness of the data through a form of peer review and debriefing (Glesne, 2011). We recognized that we had predisposed beliefs about the class research project because of previous experiences with the class, and we openly engaged in reflection about our subjectivity to help ensure accuracy in data interpretation (Ary, Jacobs, & Razavieh, 2002).

Results Our results show how the direct research experience positively impacted students and how the experience of participating on a research team benefitted them personally and professionally. In addition, the analysis of the interview transcripts provided important insights into the benefits and potential disadvantages of incorporating a research publication into a disciplinebased graduate class.

Experiencing Research Data analysis suggests a difference in how master’s students and doctoral students responded to and benefited from participating in class-based research projects. All students who were

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interviewed had either already earned or were working towards a doctorate; however, at the time they took the class 8 were master’s students, and 9 were doctoral students. Many of the doctoral students had been granted greater autonomy while doing the projects because they had work experience with research prior to returning for their doctoral degrees. This experience provided them with an opportunity to function in a leadership position within their group, and one student commented as follows: [The instructor] trusted me a little bit because I had experience. We were doing a couple types of data gathering, so my little group went off and did ours because … she trusted us and didn’t have to look over our shoulders. All of the doctoral students had completed a master’s thesis, and some had several years of workrelated research experience prior to the class. However, most of their previous research projects had employed traditional, experimental designs to solve scientific questions. In contrast, most of the forest ecology projects in this class were observational studies, and the doctoral students struggled with trying to fit these new research designs and approaches into their previous experience. Another theme that was common to the doctoral students but was not expressed by those students who were working on their master’s degrees at the time of the class was a frustration with the time limitations of completing the project within a semester. To meet the semesterbased deadline, the instructor assigned students weekly tasks that kept the project moving towards publication. However, this structure left little flexibility for the doctoral students who were already struggling to balance schedules that included teaching, dissertation research, other assistantship duties, and sometimes also family responsibilities. While the doctoral students, in general, entered the class with considerable previous experience conducting scientific research, their participation in the project broadened their views of how research can be conducted; and all doctoral students acknowledged the value of being able to list the publication from the class on their vita. In contrast to the experience of the doctoral students, scientific research was a new experience for most of the master’s students. This research project offered them their first opportunity to collect data with a goal of answering a research question. For some it changed their perspective on how science works as one student explained: Before that experience, if you had said to me, Bresearch in a lab,^ I’m picturing somebody with a lab coat with Bunsen burners and beakers and stuff bubbling and different chemicals, and that was my view…. But, I remember going out in the field and laughing with her [the instructor] and with the other students and having fun out there, and we knew what we had to do that day, and we knew that we had these tasks to complete; but, we weren’t worried about getting that done…. I didn’t know that … doing research could be fun, getting together with some friends and some colleagues and going out and laughing and joking a little bit, but still getting the job done. So that was really important. Given that most master’s students took the class during their first year, many reported that the project provided them with an opportunity to learn new skills that they were then able to transfer into their own thesis work and eventually their own doctoral program: It certainly helped me get going on my master’s project. It sort of provided a foundation for the research that I would continue to do over the next several years, even broadened some of the work that I did on my master’s after I finished.

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One situation mentioned by several of the master’s students was that they were concurrently taking the second semester of a graduate survey course in statistics. As students worked on the data for the class research projects, it was Breally cool to get to apply the statistics they were learning in class to an actual project that had some meaning.^ The research project provided the opportunity to bring skills and knowledge that the graduate students were learning in their other classes into their project groups, and through application the students developed a greater comfort with their expertise in this new knowledge.

Joining a Research Team Students offered reflections on distinct aspects of the research team dynamic: student-tostudent (peer), student-to-instructor (faculty member), and as an individual within a team environment (self). Each perspective provided unique challenges and opportunities for personal growth.

Peer relationships The research project required students to partner with each other in order to complete the assignments associated with publication. Typically, the work groups were assigned by the instructor with a goal of partnering students with the complementary skill sets needed to complete a task. As a consequence, these work groups often included students from different disciplines and had the unintended consequence of causing students to confront previously held discipline-related stereotypes as noted in the following comment: Well, actually, the Forestry Department was known as a bunch of tree cutters. At least in Biology, that was the kind of reputation. And I was surprised that that wasn’t the case with the graduate students so much.… So it seems like it [the research project] kind of broke down the stereotype that they all just worry about harvestable timber and things of that nature. Many students began the research project with a preconceived perception of their peers that was a barrier to effective group work. Sometimes these barriers could be overcome through active listening to their fellow students (as described above), but in other situations the individual students had to make a substantial transition in their outlook and shift from viewing their peers as competitors to viewing their peers as collaborators: I was not much of a team player at that point, so having to work with a team was really beneficial. I played sports and I still play sports, but the idea of teamwork and kind of suppressing your ego, the way you think a project should go, easing the process along, was very helpful. Just kind of incorporating my ego, what I know and what I don’t know, into a larger team event, was really helpful. Although most students seemed to learn from peer interactions, several also pointed out that group work could be an impediment to learning. One frustration expressed more commonly by female graduate students than males was that of being partnered with a dominant male student within their group for a specific task and the male student took charge of the assigned task and did not work cooperatively with his partner to arrive at an answer to which both individuals had contributed. This led some of the female students to have a weaker understanding (BI don’t really understand what the point of the research was^) of the content and purpose of the projects. One female described her experience of being partnered with a male graduate student to complete data analysis as follows:

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Looking back, I think it would have been better to have spent a little more time making sure I understood everything we were doing and could replicate it on my own in the future….I worked with somebody who was really good at it, and I just kind of sat back and watched him do the [statistical] test. By the end of the project, however, most students recognized that they and their peers were Ball pulling the same wagon, we were all working towards the same goal, which was a publication.^ Yet the process of reaching that common goal was difficult for most students; and, because the instructor provided no rules or instructions about how to function as a team member, each research group had to develop this skill set on their own. The lack of formal instruction on group work remains an important part of this class, and each group of students identifies a unique system for working as a research team.

Student-faculty relationships In all of the class-based research projects, the instructor was a co-author on the publications. Therefore, throughout the semester, she participated in the same activities as the students. For the students, the experience of partnering with a faculty member as an equal was a powerful demonstration of how they were shifting from the role of student to innovative researcher and colleague: Her bringing me in to her office and chatting with me about sort of how to frame it up, not just the data, but how to frame the paper up, that was really, I felt that was really nice of her and …. I threw out a bunch of ideas and I felt like she …sort of took them to heart, she didn’t just give me space to say it and then ignore me. She was, Boh yeah, that sounds good. Let’s do that^….it felt really good to see the final product and remember that conceptual framework. This experience of Bbeing treated as a peer^ by the instructor was identified as a powerful motivator for all students. Embedding the research project within a formal class setting caused a shift in the traditional power structure of the classroom. Softening the existing faculty-student hierarchy by having students make important decisions about the direction of the project and having an instructor who freely admitted that she did not know all the answers appears to have influenced the students to take ownership of the planned publication: We were working on the data analysis, and we were doing some fairly sophisticated statistics…. I’d be like … I don’t really get this. And she would be humble about her own grasp of it too, and then we’d sit down and dig through some stuff and try to figure out exactly what we should be running and why. We did that together. Most students clearly recognized that producing a publication in the class was beneficial to the instructor’s career goals. However, they also realized that they could benefit by partnering with a faculty member to mentor them through the publication process.

Being an individual on a team In the 12 years that the class has incorporated group projects, there have only been two projects where the instructor removed a student from a research group because of lack of participation. The experience of removing an individual from a group caused the remaining members to closely evaluate their role as an individual on the team. The students realized that in a team structure, the other group members must compensate and take on their assigned tasks if an individual does not meet expectations. Students placed a lot of self-directed pressure on themselves to ensure they were a valuable

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member of their research team, and they held themselves accountable. Several students specified weaknesses, such as time management or perfectionism, which they were able to overcome while working on the project: You want to make sure that you don’t get too far behind, otherwise it’s hard to catch up, so that was kind of one of the big key things, was not only just being able to organize how, what I want to get done on a weekly basis and find time to get that done…. it adds another component to time management when you’re trying to work in a team. Although one individual described an external motivation to do the work, saying, BWe just did what we were told,^ far more of the students described a strong sense of self-motivation. Students wanted to be proud of their contributions to the project and did not want to be perceived as the weakest link on their research team: I wanted to do a really good job, because I didn’t want to be the person who made the paper less good, affected the overall paper quality, so I worked pretty hard at editing my sections to make them come out well.

Potential Disadvantages In the interviews two common themes emerged regarding the potential disadvantages of incorporating research into a discipline-based graduate class: (1) the semester length of the class eliminated opportunities to conduct the project in a reflective and responsive style and (2) students who had anticipated a traditional lecture-style comprehensive survey of forest ecology were disappointed because the research project created a class structure where one or two topics were explored at depth, but the full breadth of the discipline was not included.

Time limitations The students did not experience the exploration of potential topics and questions that generally initiates a research project because of the time limitation of the semester. The instructor always selected the research topic, proposed the questions, and delineated the research approach before the semester started. Most students recognized that their lack of involvement in the development of the research question was a result of the time structure of the class; however, students expressed a desire to be involved in the developmental stages: It might have been interesting to have been involved more or learn more about how she came up with this idea because, as part of my Ph.D., my grant is very open-ended, and it was a real challenge for me to come up with a good research topic that could then turn into a real study. And so it might have been interesting to learn a bit more about how she got this idea, where it came from, and how she figured out exactly what characteristics she wanted to study. The time pressure of completing the project within a semester was experienced by both the students and the instructor. On a number of projects, the end of the semester arrived before the group was able to produce a draft manuscript; and in these situations the instructor completed the projects. Although she kept the student co-authors informed of the progress of the project after the semester ended, these students did not report the same level of ownership of the

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publication (Bwe didn’t do much of the writing, she [the instructor] did most of the writing^). On projects where the students successfully completed a draft by the end of the semester, there was a greater sense of ownership and pride in their involvement in the publication: Obviously the most beneficial thing I think professionally for me was the paper that we worked on ….I think I got quite a bit out of it professionally, especially applying to graduate school [for a doctoral program] the particular content of the paper I don’t think really mattered that much, but the fact that I was … [an] author on a peer-reviewed paper with a reasonable impact factor, that really helped a lot in terms of interviewing for a Ph.D. program.

Sacrificing content for experience The research project required the class structure to balance between discipline-based content delivery and experience-based learning from participation in the project. By including a research project within a discipline-based research class, the instructor made the choice that participating in a research experience was more valuable than covering a broader range of topics. However, this opinion was not always shared by the students: As a Ph.D. student with my background, [I] really wanted to dive into more of the depth of the subject matter. And I wrote that in her evaluation, so just to give the flip side of that … I really appreciated a lot of things she did, but on the other hand, I think sometimes the subject matter took a back seat, and I missed that.

Discussion The class-authored publications attempted to find an educational middle ground between teaching students hard, discipline-based content and practicing professional/soft skills important for later success in the workplace (Terego, 2009). Formal instruction focused on the hard content; and, although the faculty member had not originally developed the project with the intention of teaching professional/soft skills, in practice class time was inevitably, although informally, directed to this area. Most students’ strongest memories came from learning to become a successful research team member – a soft skill. The lack of formal instruction on this topic may have caused the students to develop individual solutions and resulted in more memorable learning experiences (Fuhrman & Ladewig, 2008). Each group of students developed their own rules for community work, and this process resulted in the soft skill of successfully working as a team member being the most powerful lesson learned through participation in the class-authored publication. Participation in successful group projects provides students with a professional and personal network that increases the likelihood of academic success and can be especially valuable for students who are in a transition stage (Felder & Brent, 2007; Jaffee, Carle, Phillips, & Paltoo, 2008). This class had a large number of new master’s students who were shedding their undergraduate identities and doctoral students who were transitioning to professional researchers. For the master’s students, this project appeared to shape their view of scientific research both powerfully and positively, in part because they found the class enjoyable and valued the social network that was created within the scientific team. With some master’s students, the experience impacted their subsequent thesis research and provided the

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encouragement for them to shift to a more research-focused career. In addition, it promoted a classroom environment where the instructor was viewed more as a peer collaborator. One soft skill that did not appear to improve greatly through participation in the research project was writing. It is uniformly recognized that graduate students do not receive adequate training and support in technical writing, and for many students their only exposure to writing is in publishing the chapters of their thesis or dissertation with the assistance of their graduate advisor (Simpson, 2014). When graduate students prepare manuscripts associated with their thesis or dissertation, the writing process occurs largely in solitude with limited feedback from an advisor and minimal feedback from graduate committee members, which can create a frustrating and unproductive environment (Simpson, 2013). We had anticipated that the students would benefit from peer and instructor mentoring by contributing to a groupauthored manuscript and would experience a closer approximation to the collaborative writing process of professional researchers (Myers, 1985). Unfortunately, the time limitation of one semester limited the amount of writing and rewriting that could be completed by the students. For some of the projects, the instructor attempted to increase the amount of time available for involving students in the writing process by selecting class projects with previously collected samples and datasets. Many of these datasets included samples collected for a previous project that the students analyzed to address a different question; however, when students were not involved in the actual data collection, they failed to develop a sense of ownership of the project. During the interviews, several students suggested that trying to fit a research project into a single semester caused too many learning compromises and that it would have been more appropriate for this to be a two-semester class – where the first semester would be devoted to data collection and analysis and the second semester to writing the manuscript. However, this structure would result in a heavier teaching load, and for a variety of reasons this is not a practical solution. One benefit that graduate students gained during this class experience was an improved knowledge of the scientific publication process. Understanding the submission, review, and revision process and what is expected of an author during these different stages can be very confusing for graduate students, especially given that most students attempt their first publication after they graduate and are no longer in the same location as their advisor (Simpson, 2013). The class provided formal content understanding of how the publication process worked and reviewed case studies of the publication process from previous class projects. Students were able to apply this knowledge about the pros and cons of submitting to different journals in their subsequent submission of their thesis research for publication. As a result of this study, the instructor has implemented a number of changes to the format of the class. One change that has been in effect for two years, is that participation in the class research project is no longer required for all students. Students may opt to either participate in the project or take a written mid-term and final exam. Interestingly, in the two years that the project has been offered as an option, all master’s students have opted to participate in the publication project; and all doctoral students have opted to take the series of exams. Another change that will be put into place in the near future is an improvement in how the class is advertised. If students enter the class expecting a skill building, experiential class, it will allow them to more closely match their expectations with the class structure and content. Another pending change that will hopefully increase the instructional efficiency and reduce the stress of fitting the project into a single, 15-week semester is a temporary partnership with another instructor who teaches professional and technical writing classes. We anticipate that the primary instructor will increase her competency in efficiently teaching technical writing during

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this three-year partnership and free up more class time for content delivery. One challenge for the instructor is to remember that less than half of the student authors were interviewed for this study because we had only interviewed students who made career choices that required them to earn a doctorate. Therefore, terminal master’s students may have had very different experiences from students who enjoyed research enough to pursue a career in it.

Conclusion In this article we have reported on successfully publishing student and faculty co-authored class projects as a supplement to thesis and dissertation work and as way of increasing the exposure of graduate students to research and the publication process – with a focus on technical fields. We believe that our data show that the class-based experience provided students the opportunity to experience new areas of research within their discipline, to develop new skills as a member of a successful research team, to gain confidence in communicating with professional researchers, and to achieve a better knowledge of the steps involved with the publication process.

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