Fostering a Community of Inquiry for Engaging Undergraduate Students in Research: A Systematic Literature Review

This systematic literature review explores strategies and best practices for fostering a community of inquiry to engage undergraduate students in research in higher education environments. The review adheres to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) criteria to conduct a thorough analysis of academic publications and 15 articles were analysed. The study adopted a framework developed by Healy and Jenkins in 2009 which articulated different types of research-based learning. The findings shed insight into effective treatments, difficulties encountered by lecturers, and the positive benefits of community-based research activities on students' personal and academic growth. Our discussion is centred around three key concepts arising from the theoretical underpinnings and these are: research-based, tutor-based, and research-oriented. In addition, our findings suggest that fostering a community of inquiry in undergraduate research strengthens undergraduate education by providing additional outlets for faculty to teach, research, and serve, and by fostering the creation of a community of scholars that is essential to the intellectual health of the university. This study's practical contribution is that universities should develop a subunit devoted to undergraduate research rather than embedding student research into the curriculum. Our findings would have been more insightful if we had employed case studies of universities with undergraduate research-intensive communities of inquiry. Nonetheless, the study provided illuminating conclusions from building a community of inquiry to involve undergraduate students in research.