Dear (First name),As part of an NSF-funded Research Coordination Networks grant, the Undergraduate-Field Experiences Research Network (UFERN) seeks to foster effective undergraduate field experiences. As the network gets started, we could use your help characterizing the nature of undergraduate field programs offered at your institution. We ask that you please use the link below to complete our survey, which should take approximately 20 minutes to complete.Please follow this link to take the survey: Take the survey For more information, please visit the UFERN website.

Undergraduate field experiences (UFEs), where students learn and sometimes live together in nature, are critical for the field-based science disciplines. The Undergraduate Field Experiences Research Network (UFERN) brings together UFE educators and researchers to improve and broaden participation in field education. Integrating research on UFEs and general STEM education and the expertise of the UFERN community, we present a model and evidence that describes the impact of intended student outcomes, student context factors, and program design factors on UFE student outcomes. The UFERN model is relevant for a diversity of UFE formats and the diverse students potentially engaged in them, and it supports the field science community to consider a range of ways students can engage with the field. The UFERN model can be applied to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of student-centered UFEs and to guide research on the mechanisms underlying outcomes across UFE formats and disciplines.

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Research on family communication in the leisure context has been limited to retrospective survey reconstructions of perceptions of communication patterns. This study examines the validity of sociometric badges for measuring family communication in real-time. Seven families (married, two-parent families with at least one child ages 4-17 years) wore sociometric badges during a 30-minute leisure activity in a lab setting. We compared mean badge estimates of family communication duration to mean coded video data from the same 30-minute sessions. Intraclass correlation coefficients indicated sociometric badges are not as reliable as video-coded estimates of speech; however, among parents, non-significant mean comparisons partially support the validity of sociometric badges. Deviation scores indicated average differences between the two methods to be less than three minutes. We urge scholars to proceed with cautious optimism if using sociometric badges for real-time communication data collection, and to pair badges with other data collection methods.

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