The goal of this project was to advance undergraduate and graduate research training in STEM by designing organizational processes and cyberlearning technologies that support self-directed learning within a community of undergraduate and graduate STEM researchers. Research experiences greatly enhance student learning and development, broaden student participation, and retention in STEM fields, and provide numerous intellectual, personal, and professional benefits. Despite these benefits, the efficacy and scale of research training provided by an institution or research mentor is often limited by practical implementation and orchestration challenges. As research groups expand in size, faculty have less time and attention to mentor each student. Without sufficient mentoring and support, novice researchers can struggle to engage in core research activities such as creating research plans, forming research arguments, designing studies, and preparing manuscripts, and are often relegated to rote tasks. This can lead students to discount the value of research experiences and their own self-efficacy, resulting in fewer students participating in research and few receiving the promised benefits of research programs.

To overcome these challenges, the PIs and team advanced a socio-technical cyberlearning model and system capable of training many novice researchers by reducing the orchestration burden on research mentors. Specifically, the project led to the development of Agile Research Studios (ARS), a new model for research training consisting of an integrated set of social structures, practices, and tools for planning research inquiry, seeking help, and practicing reflection that facilitate students learning to self-direct complex work within a community of researchers. ARS supports students developing regulation skills, i.e., cognitive, motivational, emotional, metacognitive, and strategic behaviors for reaching desired goals and outcomes. These skills are necessary for students to conduct authentic research that demands (1) self-directed research planning, monitoring, reflection, and replanning; and (2) adopting effective help-seeking and collaboration to overcome challenges. To support 20+ students developing such skills within a research learning community, ARS: (1) adapts agile work processes to research through 2-week sprints that cycle through the process of planning, progress making, and reflection to permit student researchers continual access to authentically situated learning opportunities; (2) provides venues for accessing mentors and peers across the studio who provide coaching and support across structured and unstructured interactions, both in-person and online; and (3) adopts and advances modern work and collaboration tools that facilitate learning in a networked learning community.  

Our evaluation showed that the ARS model enables a single faculty researcher to mentor 20 or more students in independent research, while improving the quality of learning, producing research outcomes, and lowering the barrier to participation while increasing the number of students who receive authentic research training. In an deployment through the Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) program at Northwestern which implements ARS to train undergraduate and graduate students in independent research. 108 students won 42 undergraduate research awards from the university, published 17 papers and extended abstracts at the top HCI/Design conferences, and won 6 major ACM national and international student research competitions. 40% of DTR students were women, far surpassing the national average of about 20% as reported in the latest CRA Taulbee Survey.

To impact teaching and education broadly through this project, we created Agile Research University (http://agileresearch.io), which provides tools, tutorials, resources, workshops, and site visits to help faculty adopt the ARS model for research training, and to broadly provide training and support for faculty to become more effective mentors and to develop their models for research training in their labs and studios. To date, 11 faculty have attended site visits and 70+ faculty have downloaded our starter kit or participated in workshops. Our developed tools, such as Pair Research (http://pairresearch.io) and yellkey (http://yellkey.com), are widely used by the public to support collaboration and teamwork.

We also produced a documentary short film called Forward (http://forward.movie) that shares the practices and culture of an Agile Research Studio. Despite slowdowns due to COVID, we have already disseminated our film through screenings and workshops organized through UC San Diego, Stanford, San Francisco State, and Northwestern.

Broadly, this project filled an urgent need for scalable learning environments that educate students to tackle complex, ill-structured problems in the world. Foreseeable impacts on society include increased numbers of students motivated and capable of approaching such challenges, improved education, curricular changes, and support for future cyberlearning interventions. In focusing on self-directed learning skills, this project also contributed a model for how we might foster self-direction across communities and settings. By looking both within and outside of the research training setting, we contribute a broad understanding of how we might support people learning to self-direct complex work within learning communities to broadly support people discovering and achieving a myriad of goals.

Last Modified: 12/21/2021
Modified by: Haoqi Zhang