Students can experience varying degrees of authenticity within apprenticeship experiences even within the same program. One way to conceptualize authenticity is in terms of the epistemic involvement experienced by the student. Various components make up our conception of epistemic involvement including the degree to which the apprenticeship participant engages in the formulation of research questions, the selection and/or design of procedures, and the processes of data analysis and interpretation. For example, a student may be involved with his or her laboratory group in the formulation of research questions, the selection and/or design of procedures to be used to investigate those questions, and the analysis and interpretation of the resulting data; whereas, another student working with a different mentor in the same program may be handed a pre-existing research question, given a set of procedures to follow in a step-by-step manner, and have very limited involvement in making meaning of the results of the research. These examples showcase opposing ends of a continuum of epistemic involvement. In most cases, the epistemic involvement experienced by student participants in a research apprenticeship falls somewhere between these two extreme situations. Another way of looking at authenticity is in terms of the nature of the research question itself. Is this question ill-defined and uncertain, or does it have a predetermined and known answer? In cases where the answer may be known, is further supporting evidence of use to the research group? In other words, are the students working on research that has some sort of value to the scientific community? If the answer to this last question is yes, then we believe that students are experiencing an authentic form of scientific practice. From this perspective it would be possible for a student to have very low levels of epistemic involvement (i.e., not being involved with the generation of research questions or methods) yet still be experiencing authentic science. Even with this broad notion of authenticity with respect to apprenticeship experiences, it is possible for students to be engaged in an apprenticeship(-like) program and not have a very authentic scientific experience. For example, a student whose primary responsibility within a laboratory group is to clean glassware does not experience much in the way of authentic science. Unfortunately, we know of students who have had these limited experiences in the context of a research apprenticeship, but in our investigations these very impoverished experiences within apprenticeship programs are exceptions rather than the norms (Burgin, Sadler & Koroly, in review; Sadler et al., 2010).