Additional Topics – Research: a Practical Handbook

Research with undergrads

How to manage a research program which primarily involves undergraduates as researchers.

There’s a lot of goldilocksing in building a successful research program with undergrads. On the one hand, you’ll be responsible for a lot of high-level thinking: what big questions to pursue, which methods and theories, how to string together different projects into a coherent program, how your research fits into the larger conversations in the field, etc.

On the other hand, you don’t want to relegate them to menial and boring tasks. Undergraduates thrive when they have enough structure to grow, and enough freedom to develop their own interests and ownership over their projects.

In this advice article, I’ll walk you through some ideas around how to manage a research group of predominately undergraduates.

Iterative design

Why and how to use an iterative design for successful research projects.

Iteration is core feature of successful research project designs. This is true in education research as well as engineering, bench science, product design & testing, and software development. If you want to discover new things or develop new products, you iterate. However, many education researchers struggle with iterative project designs, especially if they are emerging education researchers or if they are stretching their research skills to more complex projects or new contexts and methodologies. In this article, I outline some core features in research project planning to build in iteration and increase research project success.

Design Projects

Sometimes, you just want to fix things.

Research is about generating new knowledge for the scientific community, but sometimes you see a problem and you just want to fix it. Do you need to do research? Probably not. Consider a design project instead. In a design project, you start with noticing a problem that you want to solve, possibly in your course or department, gather information to better understand and articulate the problem, and then build and test an intervention to solve the problem.

Interviews: a primer

How to do interviews in education research: a primer

So you want to design a research study that involves interviews? Here are some major ideas to consider. This is a really short primer; it’s not a thorough exploration of the hows and whys of interview-based research. There are huge literatures on why & how to conduct interviews for research in education.

Reference letters

A practical guide for writing letters, aimed at the faculty who write them.

How should you write reference letters for students? A quick and practical guide.