Abstract:

The collaboration scholarships is a yearly program offered by the Spanish Ministry of Education that provides an excellent opportunity to establish contact between final year undergraduate students and teachers and researchers in the academic and public network of research centers. It offers the possibility to carry out a formative work of introduction to different research fields according the running research lines in departments and laboratories. It can be considered like the different phases of the scientific method, from initial and preparatory stages planning experiments to diffusion and publication of results.
In order to fulfill this scope we have created a seminar for students to show them how to write and publish scientific works and also how to participate and make presentations in scientific meetings as a complementary action to the research work. This course follows a blended-learning methodology consisting in face-to-face practical seminars with the support of a virtual platform containing different educational materials (as tutorials, resources or templates to prepare slides-based presentations and scientific posters).
As a whole, these activities promote the acquisition of abilities and skills through learning from diversity of analytical techniques, the development of communication skills through the presentation and dissemination of research results and also social skills aptitudes thanks to their integration into research groups.
As results for students, the experience was positively valued by them considering that they will have some more chances to access to postgraduate studies or to compete in the labour market thanks to this activity. In this work will present and critically analyze our experience in the last two years, showing the different projects carried out by granted undergraduate students in our Department to illustrate with some real experiences how this kind of scholarships can be implemented.

Keywords:

Collaboration scholarships, research training, undergraduate research.