The project ownership survey: measuring differences in scientific inquiry experiences

Area of Science:

• STEM Education
• Psychology of Science

Background:

• Undergraduate research experiences positively impact student persistence in science.
• Project ownership is a psychosocial factor linked to student retention in STEM fields.
• Existing methods for measuring project ownership are not scalable for large datasets.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a new instrument for measuring project ownership in undergraduate research.
• To create a scalable tool for assessing project ownership and its relation to student retention.

Main Methods:

• Generated 18 items based on prior research and theory on project ownership.
• Combined these with 30 items measuring emotional responses to an experience.
• Administered the resulting Project Ownership Survey (POS) and analyzed its dimensionality, reliability, and validity.

Main Results:

• The Project Ownership Survey (POS) demonstrated high internal consistency with a coefficient alpha of 0.92.
• Known-groups validity was established by differentiating between students in traditional versus research-based labs.
• Findings aligned with previous research on project ownership characteristics.

Conclusions:

• The Project Ownership Survey (POS) is a reliable and valid instrument for measuring project ownership.
• This new tool is suitable for large-scale data collection, facilitating further research on student retention in science.