Development of Undergraduate Research Projects That Also Incorporate the Service-Learning Experience

Undergraduate research in academia can be funded and executed by a number of traditional means. This chapter concentrates its interest on the use of Academic Service-Learning (AS-L) as a venue to staff, execute, complete, and possibly fund undergraduate research projects. Some current definitions of AS-L are offered for the reader's consideration; the definition used by the authors involves 1) meeting an identified community need, 2) helping students meet course objectives, and 3) incorporating a reflection into the students' coursework. Suggestions concerning replacing standard "cookbook" laboratory experiments with actual research protocols, data, results, and laboratory reports, while still preserving the original learning outcomes, are also discussed. Recent research completed at The University of Findlay in this manner by the authors is presented herein to model the execution of undergraduate research using AS-L.