2020 WisCUR Workshop “Mentoring Undergraduate Research Remotely During COVID-19”

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2020 WisCUR Workshop: Mentoring Undergraduate Research Remotely During COVID-19 and Beyond

Co-leaders Scott Cooper, UW La Crosse & Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, UW River Falls

August 18th, 2020

Panel 1 Training/Mentoring Underrepresented Students
Moderator: Catherine Chan – UW Eau Claire

Kyla Esguerra – UW-Milwaukee, Deputy Director of Office of Undergraduate Research
Students Exploring Equity at UWM: 1 credit course that meets weekly for one hour, designed for entering freshman students of color or from underrepresented backgrounds to get them ready for research. The course aims to help student find their own community, assist students with navigating in a predominantly white institution, and find networks of support. Guest speakers, some being faculty of color, are invited to share experiences/resources, including high-impact practices. At the end of the semester, each student leaves with an individualized professional development timeline (i.e., what activities and when) for implementation the next semester. David Payne was suggested as a speaker.

Catherine Nasara – UW-River Falls, Director of Honors Program
Catching Them Early: Broadening Participation and Ensuring the success of Under-represented Groups’ Research projects: Using the classroom space to facilitate guided/scaffolded individual and group discussions to allow students to formulate their own research questions. The emphasis is on starting this process early. Demystifying what constitutes research for students and allowing research topics to form organically is important. This creates a sense of ownership and control. Students decide how much time/effort to invest into the project and the program director facilitates, for example, by finding appropriate resources/technology and creating a structure for project refinement. Students craft a timeline for activities that is further refined through discussion, emphasizing the importance of flexibility and plans can be adjusted.

Roger Haro – UW-La Crosse, Associate Dean and Director of McNair Scholars Program
The Role of Program Alumni as Mentors to Underrepresented Students: About 70% of student alumni go onto graduate programs. McNair Program alumni are great peer mentors who can share their own experiences in the program as well as their professional development trajectory when they move onto different programs/institutions, especially those in larger, more research-intensive campuses. Having social mixers such as lunch get-togethers help current students connect with program alumni. Program alumni are eager to give back and they help keep the community cohesive.

Panel 1 Q & A and Chat

  • Panelists’ presentations emphasize the importance of the students’ sense of ownership, control over their professional development and the role of peer role models to assist with peer-based learning and building a sense of community.
  • Giving students the voice and the language to share their ideas is important. In the early stages of conceptualization, when students are uncertain, it is best to share in small groups or one-on-one settings with people the students trust.
  • Social media such as Facebook groups as well as virtual game nights with alumni can be useful in building/maintaining such communities. One attendee suggested that Perusall maybe a good tool to consider. While technology can clearly be helpful, sometimes it is a barrier, especially when access to such technology or WiFi bandwidth is not equitable. In some cases, audio-only meetings or text-based chat rooms maybe preferable. Some students have home environments or cultures that make sharing through video-conferencing inappropriate and/or insensitive.

Panel 1 Breakout Discussion
The relative importance of students’ own ownership vs scaffolded support, flexibility vs structure. Students definitely value their own voices in designing research projects hat are relevant to their lives. The idea of apprenticeship as a way to build the foundational skill set and confidence to allow more independent research later. The importance of programmatic and institutional resources to support faculty/staff mentors, including their professional development as mentors.

Panel 2. Mentoring/Training Students doing Field or Bench Research
Moderator: Scott Cooper – UW La Cross & Cheri Barta – UW Madison

Valeria Stepanova, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UW-La Crosse
E-noteboks as means of mentoring a large undergraduate research group: Notetaking is an important skill in chemistry. Stepanova started using handwritten notes, but switched to OneNote because of all the features. OneNote streamlines the training, allows collaboration, it is instantaneous, and she can intervene if students are running into trouble. OneNote is very helpful for collaboration outside and it allows for a very quick transfer of data. Students can also can do recordings using e-notebooks, such as OneNote. She is now using this in both her research and teaching labs.

Jennifer Grant, Professor of Biology, UW-Stout
How to motivate students to progress their biochemistry research using the literature to improve their experimental procedure or by critiquing videos made as other students performed research: Grant recently received a new grant and has found that Microsoft Teams allows for good collaboration. However, Grant has found it difficult to teach and record videos at the same time, so she has asked student team members to record the video and asks students to use their IPhones for recordings. GoPro is a good option. Other students then provide peer comments on the videos.

Laurie Waters, Associate Professor of Chemistry, UW-Oshkosh
Mentoring bench research remotely: lessons learned from maternity leave and bioinformatics analysis: During her maternity leave Waters could not have students conduct bench research. She found that implementing a strong plan with a timeline – worked with students in the lab. She encourages independence and ownership, allowing students to choose what research they wanted to do, which lent itself to critical thinking. She scheduled meetings with students and physically met with them once per week. Waters thinks that e-notebooks would have been easier. She provided students with guidelines as to what was important. However, encouraged them to problem-solve on their own. As it concerns your specific professional society, Waters recommends that faculty reach out to them because they have a lot of information and resources.

Harry Jol, Professor of Geography and Anthropology, UW-Eau Claire
Video conferencing to move the field-based research datasets to dissemination: Jol’s focus is on international field research such as holocaust research and coastal research in places such as Israel. His research projects were cancelled this spring so he has been working with students on existing data sets that their team had collected previously. Jol also noted that some software companies allow students to access the data from home. Jol uses Collaborate Ultra on Canvas and holds weekly synchronous meetings to meet with students to help them problem solve. Jol also has students perform literature reviews. Most of the conferences they were interested in are virtual so students are presenting their work virtually. These virtual conferences have been very helpful as students are able to talk to experts in the field.

Yoana Newman, Associate Professor of Plant and Earth Science, UW-River Falls
Applied field research in forages and student collaboration: When online issues started, the tips on conducting applied research in plant science were to keep it simple. She offered three suggestions: 1. Take advantage of ongoing research – keep it simple. When working with students, choose one or two topics. 2. Search databases for existing resources. This allows students to create their own graphs, etc. Also, take advantage of ongoing resources. 3. Give students freedom to do their own presentations.

Earl Blodgett, Director of URSCA, UW-River Falls
Remember, it is not about YOU: The focus should be on the students, not on the professor’s independent research. When he had to start teaching virtually, he wondering how can field research happen in a virtual format? Blogget found creative uses of resources so students can be involved. For example, in Physics – one has to get very creative. For this particular demonstration, students only needed a recorder, such as the one on their phone, and they were asked to create a mathematical model using a butter dish and a phone. It was a good experience for the students.

Gargi Chaudhuri, Associate Professor of Geography and Earth Science, UW-La Crosse
Mentoring geography undergraduate students on data analysis and mapping: Chaudhuri uses field data that was collected previously and relies on open-source tools. She said that structure is important so she made weekly plans with her students. She mentioned that it is ok if students do not have a research question right away. It takes the pressure off the students. Chaudhuri uses Microsoft Office Planner to help students plan out what should be achieved each week. She asks students to plan for ‘struggles’ and asks them to create a 3-5 minute video presentations. She has found the time for struggle to be helpful as it allows for trouble shooting. She also puts more of the research towards the first half of the class in case we have to end the semester early.

Panel 3 Mentoring/Training Students working with Literature, Databases, Surveys
Moderator: Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, UW River Falls

Julio Rivera, Professor of Business Analytics, School of Business, Carroll University
Using Online Secondary Data Sets and Tutorials for Research Projects and Scaffolding Research Skills: His work involves dealing with external clients using student researchers. One challenge is to prepare students to do research early in their career. Method: Engaging students in authentic research projects helps students be prepared to work with external clients. Useful tools that relate to data, statistical tools, geospatial tools have gone online in the last five years, making these essential tools more available than ever in an online setting. Its possible to shift most of the course work to preparing students for research in real settings, and to do it all online. Overall, a lot of resources available that allow you to spend more time teaching students using technology online, and less time in the classroom. General resources widely available outside and inside the university setting:

  • data.gov: Economics, census, environmental, employment. Highly recommended as a first stop
  • Pop.umn.edu: Minnesota Population Center
  • IPUMS.org: Census, health, behavioral (time use), environmental, and international data
  • Icpsr.umich.edu: University of Michigan, ICPSR. Multiple data repository sets, many of which have unanalyzed data•
  • Esri.com: ESRI Site License. The Living Atlas: curated and authoritative data from a range of sources. Available from an ArcGIS Online interface; contact your campus GIS person
  • Tableau.com: Tableau another resource with fully functional software and tutorials for data management
  • Doc.arcgis.com: Community Analyst Online, Business Analyst Online, geospatial tools. ArcGIS StoryMaps, Dashboards, and Hubs

Logan Kelly, Professor of Economics, College of Business, UW River Falls
Managing Group Projects with Microsoft Teams: Time management crucial when teaching research-intensive courses during COVID 19. Microsoft teams helps to manage time, bringing together all essentials into one place for team collaborations. Teams for class, private channels for groups; meetings for the class, weekly meeting rooms with 2x/week meetings: one where they meet by themselves and one where they meet with professor. Class sizes between 25-40, six groups/per class. Students sort out their own Teams calendar. Additional resource: RStudio Cloud <https://rstudio.cloud/> for using R with students

Matt Richie, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Criminal Justice, UW-Oshkosh
Managing that First Student Meeting Using Remote Technologies: First meeting: the most important conversation: discuss and ascertain available student resources. He uses RStudio Cloud too (like Logan Kelly) for statistics as well as qualitative data. Google docs, sheets, and forms. He has students make their own study sheets together, and he uses that to create their exams. Makes his student collect their own data and uses sheets to allow them to collate it. Qualtrix survey loaded on a tablet or pad also helpful. Finally: do not underestimate the value of a phone, especially for students with lower bandwith issues in rural areas: get the student on the phone while looking at resources for virtual office hours.

Sanchita Hati, Professor of Chemistry, UWEC
Mentoring/training students doing computational work: When working remotely, she focuses students on computational work. The challenge: it requires training, extensive planning, and ability to keep students motivated. Seven main points: i) Projects: Important to have well defined project and to give students benchmarks and goals. ii) Groups: Each group has various levels of expertise. Students learn easier. Each group has different levels of computational experience. iii) Flexible working hours: Also important. iv) Texting: In the beginning I made myself available 24/7 through texting v) Webex Teams: For sharing data, files, make weekly plans and groups meetings; and plan for the next week. vi) Subgroup Meetings: each week, for individual problems. vii) Finally, do not present all information to students at once. Encourage them to present their research online to other students.

Panel 4. Mentoring/Training Students in the Arts and Performances
Moderator: Nigel Rothfels –UW Milwaukee

Nathaniel Stern, Art and Engineering, UW Milwaukee
Empathy, energy, structure, and materiality. Working on an ongoing sculpture and installation series around electronic waste, a new battery design with a physicist, and a zoom-bound documentary about Black Lives Matter. Most succinctly, there are the four things my students, on a team of 5 need, regardless of – but amplified by – the fact that we now meet exclusively online. That’s the strategy… Tactically, these translate into check-ins, stokes, schedules, and visual and material engagement.

In terms of empathy, every meeting begins with a share. The best part of my week was… I feel up about, feel down about, am looking forward to… Sometimes I have them arrange what the empathy check in will be. I participate, too, and we all respond to each other. I spend a little extra time with each student on rotation. Here the goal is to make them feel heard, and seen.

For energy, we do as stokes. We have silent dance parties, play Simon says, throw invisible knives and balls to each other, set up poses that make drawings on our screens. We want to get out of our seats and excited about what we are doing. Often, we tie this to where we are in the project, to aesthetics or brainstorming for new ideas, or the like.

Regarding structure: we meet weekly, we have schedules and timelines, we have core to do lists and assignments, we use Gantt charts and google sheets and mural with sticky notes, and more. We work on these together, and my one or two senior most students take charge. This is all about investment in the whole project, and then accountability for the smaller parts.

And finally, materiality. We address this somewhat in the energy stoke. We want to remember we have bodies, we are bodies, and use them. But this also means visual materials and well, things. We use mural for brainstorming a lot, to mimic a white board and post its. We send materials to each other to play with, we sketch and write during our time together, as well as on our own, and share out. In the fine arts, remember, we often confuse medium and discipline, and so matter really does matter here, and I am clear about this with them.

One thing that also helps is that I actually make all of this transparent to my students. I let them in on what I am doing, and why, and ask them for feedback on what they need. This mirrors how we make decisions about what directions to take the research together, and how we decide who works on what. They, in fact, helped me decide what to share with you all today.

Julie Gard, Professor of Writing, UW Superior
Personalized Mentoring of Creative Writers: Kinesthetic action helpful. Importance of connection with students, together with structure. Her project is to work with students who complete creative writing manuscripts in an online summer research program. Good mentoring is supported by having students who are passionate and motivated; have an advanced background in their field so they can customize their experience and follow an original line of inquiry. How to put together a creative writing manuscript, breaking down the process into manageable pieces, a road map, that she co-creates with the students, followed up with weekly check-ins on zoom. Both students she has worked with on this project she has never met in person: yet she felt the closest to them, got to know them the best—so remote mentorship really works.

Erin Aldridge, Professor of Violin and Director of Orchestra, UW Superior
Allowing Anticipated Technological Barriers to Work for You when Choosing Topics for Undergraduate Research in Music: Project: student interested in jazz and improvisation – working on how in classical period cadenzas would be improvised by the composers of the day. Historical research, recordings, and current day commentary were available online. Performance based side: including taking the historical research that students did and formulating plans for their own improvised cadenza, and then changing it to an online format. Focused topic. Utilizing different technical resources. Zoom (used for weekly and biweekly lessons and research meetings where the actual research is discussed); Recording: important in improv where the student would play, the student and teacher would listen to the playback and then analyze the structure of what they improvised, look at the harmonic components, compare and contrast to what others had done. No technology to allow for simultaneous playing: so part of this was using piano or orchestral accompaniment. App called Cadenza plays the accompaniment and the student can follow with them.