Deepika Bansal*, Deepa Chari**, Savita Ladage***
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai, India
deebans.88@gmail.com*, deepa@hbcse.tifr.res.in** , savital@hbcse.tifr.res.in ***
Undergraduate research provides students with opportunities to positively perceive their association with a discipline through agentic experiences, and thereby fostering the disciplinary identity building. This study explores students’ experiences of participating in a 10-day long ‘Exposure cum Enrichment Camp in Chemistry’ organized by the National Initiative for Undergraduate Science (NIUS). The camp is attended by approximately 50 students every year who come from different parts of the country. They participate in extended laboratory sessions which necessitate reflection on their lab projects with a focus on experimental procedures and features of data. Additionally, they are provided guidance on core topics in chemistry. Semi structured interviews were conducted with 15 students to understand how students express their own identification and agential relationship with the subject. In this paper, we discuss their overall perceptions of participation in the camp including their self-reported accounts of emergence of agentic personalities during this camp.