Agile Research Studios: OrchestratingCommunities of Practice to AdvanceResearch Training

Haoqi ZhangNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USAhq@northwestern.edu

Daniel Rees LewisNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USAdaniel.rees.lewis@u.northwestern.edu

Matthew W. EasterdayNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USAeasterday@northwestern.edu

Leesha MaliakalNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USAlmaliakal@u.northwestern.edu

Elizabeth M. GerberNorthwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USAgerber@northwestern.edu

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).CSCW ’17 Companion, February 25–March 01, 2017, Portland, OR, USA.ACM 978-1-4503-4688-7/17/02.http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3022198.3023265

AbstractUndergraduate research experiences enhance learningand professional development, but providing effective andscalable research training is often limited by practical imple-mentation and orchestration challenges. We demonstrateAgile Research Studios (ARS)—a socio-technical systemthat expands research training opportunities by supportingresearch communities of practice without increasing facultymentoring resources.

Author KeywordsAgile research; community of practice; self-directed learn-ing; regulation skills; socially shared regulation of learning;socio-technical systems

ACM Classification KeywordsK.3.1. [Computer Uses in Education]: Collaborative learn-ing

IntroductionUndergraduate research experiences provide numerouspersonal, professional, and societal benefits including en-hancing student learning and broadening student partici-pation and retention in diverse fields of study. But provid-ing effective mentoring to undergraduate researchers isoften limited by practical implementation and orchestra-tion challenges [4]. 1-on-1 mentoring is effective but time-

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Social Structures

SIG meeting- plan review

Team meeting- sprint plan

PLAN PROGRESS REFLECT

Virtual StudioTools

SPRINT LOG

STUDIO VIEW

FACULTY & HELPERS

PAIR RESEARCH IDP

RESOURCES

AgileProcess Week 1 Week 2

Seek help

Show problems

Show plan Mentoring

Match help seekers / givers

CHAT

Team meetings- work- research log- get help

Team meetings- work- research log- get help

Team meeting- sprint reflect

Studio Meeting- peer help- demo & critique- learning modules

SIG meeting- progress & blockers

Studio Meeting- peer help- demo / critique- learning modules

…

Check-in- learning reflect- project reflect

Self-assess learning

RESEARCH LOG

Capture learning

Figure 1: Agile Research Studios support regulation by adapting agile methodologies to research through 2-week sprint cycles of researchplanning, progress making, and reflection. Social structures help to orchestrate research activities by (a) supporting learning self-directedresearch planning, monitoring, reflection, and replanning; and (b) facilitating help-seeking and collaboration to promote learning andprogress-making. The virtual studio tools extend social structures to more effectively orchestrate learning and support in and out of theclassroom.

intensive [3]. As a research group expands in size, facultyhave less time and attention to mentor each student. With-out significant mentoring, undergraduate students havedifficulty engaging in authentic research consisting of (a)core activities including designing a research plan, collect-ing and analyzing data, and preparing manuscripts, and (b)planning, monitoring and replanning research work.

The following question drives our research: How mightsocio-technical systems train large numbers of stu-dents to conduct authentic research and produce re-search outcomes without increasing the orchestra-tion burden on research mentors? We propose AgileResearch Studios (ARS), a new socio-technical model forresearch training consisting of processes, social struc-tures, and tools for orchestrating research training withinresearch communities of practice in which students col-

laborate to learn and conduct research and develop theirabilities to be more self-directed [1, 11], see Figure 1. ARS(1) adapts agile processes [10] to research training so stu-dents learn to more effectively plan authentic research in-quiry and (2) makes effective use of the expertise and re-sources across the research learning community to supportresearch progress. We argue that by more fully leveragingthe support of the research community, this approach willallow more students to engage in authentic research activi-ties and produce research.

Agile Research StudiosARS consist of: (a) agile methodologies, (b) social struc-tures including team meetings, special interest group meet-ings and studio meetings; and (c) virtual studio tools includ-ing sprint logs, resources, studio views, chat, pair research,

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research logs, and individual development plans. Together,the components of the ARS model address practical socio-technical challenges in orchestrating the development ofregulation skills, i.e., cognitive, motivational, emotional,metacognitive, and strategic behaviors for reaching de-sired goals and outcomes [5, 6]. We describe below howthe ARS model helps students develop regulation skillsneeded for conducting authentic research that demands(1) self-directed research planning, monitoring, reflection,and replanning [1]; and (2) adopting effective help-seekingand collaboration to overcome challenges [8, 6].

Research PlanningARS address the orchestration challenges of learning toplan research in the following ways:

Figure 2: Screenshot of aspreadsheet prototype of a projectteam’s sprint log. The top half ofthe sprint log provides an overviewof commitments, hours spent, andprogress on the current sprint.Students plan their sprints in thebottom half by recording high-leveldeliverables, or stories, and thetasks for accomplishing thosestories. Students use a pointsystem to estimate required effortto avoid committing more time thanthey have available for the sprint.As students make progress theymark tasks as done, backlogged,or in progress and record hoursspent. Students also link to usefulresources next to stories and tasks.

• Doing all research steps. To engage more studentsin authentic research, ARS adapts agile methodolo-gies to slice research work vertically to fit studentcompetencies [2] and promote progress across allphases of research. Students grow their project incomplexity and generalizability over time, as theirskills and the research work matures.

• Doing planning. In an ARS, students take on theresponsibility for planning their work at frequent inter-vals following agile methodologies. Students recordtasks and progress in sprint logs that support stu-dents’ and mentors’ awareness of progress and po-tential needs for replanning (see Figure 2).

• Learning planning. To help students learn to planresearch work on their own, mentors in an ARS pro-vide plan feedback weekly through special interestgroup (SIG) meetings. This meeting facilitates peerreview and feedback by mentors and students to

help student teams develop their planning skills, de-vise strategies to overcome challenges, and connectto resources [5, 6]. To promote reflection, studentteams use research logs to record and reflect on re-search progress throughout a sprint and completeself-assessments in the form of independent develop-ment plans at quarterly intervals.

Getting HelpARS address the orchestration challenges of learning to gethelp in the following ways:

• Distributed help. To better support students whilerespecting the limits on mentor time, in an ARS theresponsibility for providing help is shared across theentire community. Instead of relying on a single men-tor to resolve problems, an ARS seeks to make effec-tive use of the diverse sets of expertise that individualcommunity members have by connecting studentsto those who can best help on a particular problem.This should enable the community to fulfill numeroushelp requests without using mentor time, and lead tostudents feeling more supported.

• Scaffolding help-getting. To help students con-nect to peers who can help them, ARS scaffolds theprocess of getting help by using pair research [7] tomatch students to help one another (see Figure 3),SIG & studio meetings to facilitate students connect-ing to helpful peers and mentors in and out of theirSIG, and chat programs such as Slack to enable stu-dents to seek and receive help on-demand.

• Learning help-seeking. ARS normalizes help-seekingand trains students to seek help effectively. Further,

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as students are connected to help and help them-selves with the support of the above mentioned scaf-folds, we expect the common practice of getting andgiving help to over time lead to broad shifts in stu-dents’ help-seeking dispositions [9].

Figure 3: Screenshot of a GoogleSpreadsheet prototype of the PairResearch tool. Students enter theirneeds for help and how well theycan help others. Based oncollected preferences, the systemautomatically pairs students to helpeach other on diverse researchneeds.

SummaryIn summary, the practices, structures, and technologies inan Agile Research Studio empower undergraduate studentsto plan research work at weekly intervals and overcomechallenges quickly with the support of peers and mentors.This allowed them to conduct independent research alonga faculty member’s core research directions, as would bepossible through dedicated 1-on-1 apprenticeship with fac-ulty members but at just a fraction of the time required tosupport a much larger research learning community thanwould be traditionally feasible.

AcknowledgementsWe thank Rob Miller, Don Norman, Chris Riesbeck, andmembers of the Design, Technology, and Research pro-gram for helpful discussions. This material is based uponwork supported by the National Science Foundation underGrant No. 1623635.

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