This page contains an archive of the past five years of Directed Research Groups led by Professor Turns. View her currently offered DRGs »
Spring 2025
Advancing communal experiences DRG
Instructors:
- Tyler Fox
- Jennifer Turns
In this Directed Research Group (DRG), we will explore both a hypothesis and a design question:
- Hypothesis: There are currently varied experiences of community in the HCDE BS program, with multiple factors contributing to these experiences.
- Design Question: How might we advance a community orientation in the HCDE BS program?
Our work will unfold in three phases:
Part 1: Research and Exploration (3 weeks)
- Share personal perspectives as a starting point for our investigation
- Conduct research beyond our group by interviewing other BS program students (each participant will speak with approximately five peers)
- Examine the history of the BS program and how it relates to the current state of community
- Explore the concept of community broadly—its possible understandings, contributors, and consequences
- Discuss our own experiences with community—where we've felt connected and what factors contributed to that feeling
- Investigate how community experiences connect with course engagement, participation, attendance, learning outcomes, and professional success
Part 2: Ideation (2 weeks)
- Develop possible design directions based on our research findings
Part 3: Design Implementation (5 weeks)
- Form groups around the most promising design directions
Work toward creating deliverables to share at the end of the term
Projects may range from speculative designs to pragmatic prototypes
Experimenting with using Generative AI to Reflect
Instructors:
- Jennifer Turns, Professor
- Yuli Flores, PhD student
In this research group, we will explore how undergraduate students can engage with generative AI (Claude, ChatGPT, etc) to support educational reflection. Participants will design and conduct personal experiments with reflection, document their experiences, and collaborate to understand the possibilities and insights that emerge from using AI as a reflection partner. We will be asking:
- How might undergraduate students engage with generative AI to support reflecting related to their education?
- What insights about reflection might undergraduates have as a result of sustained intentional experimentation with generative AI?
Typical sessions will include debriefing of recent reflection “experiments,” discussion of readings (presented by rotating participants), real-time reflection exercises, theme identification and analysis, and planning for next experiments.
Each participant will maintain a personal virtual notebook containing: (a) Experiment notes including preparation methods, changes from previous attempts, satisfaction analysis, and future ideas, (a) traces of Ai engagement associated with each experience, and (c) ongoing thoughts about reflection. The group will generate insights across the individual experiences.
From a research perspective, the group will employ a research-through-design methodology, with iterative experimentation, documentation, regular synthesis of findings, collaborative meaning-making, and progressive refinement of research questions and methods.
Final documentation will include a combination of two or more of the following: design cases (aka the different experiments), a morphological chart of reflection techniques across the cases, and a summary of insights about reflection.
Winter 2025
Testing driving the book “How to Write a Journal Article in 12 Weeks"
Instructor: Jennifer Turns
In this group, we will test drive the book “How to Write a Journal Article in 12 Weeks.”
Each member of the DRG will work on a paper they are personally writing, and we will use the book as our guide. We will start with each member overviewing their project and discussing initial reactions to the book. We will then turn to chapter by chapter engagement (that somehow compresses the 12 chapters into our remaining 9 weeks). We will end with a synthesis session. We will collectively decide on the format of the synthesis - this could be a reader’s guide to the book, an HCDE companion document, a synthesis of our experiences and strategies or something else.
Participation will include: weekly discussions of book chapters, sharing of writing progress, discussion of challenges and developed solutions, reflection on interdisciplinary aspects of HCDE, and analysis of book's applicability across different research areas, methods, and epistemologies.
Through the process, we will focus on the following questions:
- How might HCDE PhD students engage with and utilize "How to Write a Journal Article in 12 Weeks"?
- How might doctoral students react to and augment the book's ideas within the HCDE context?
- What might sustained engagement with the book reveal about the experience of writing journal articles in HCDE?
We will additionally explore the hypothesis that working together via this book can concurrently support individual writing progress, cross-cohort collaboration and community building, and emergence of insights about (inter)disciplinary writing.
Winter 2025
Usability Study of Google Classroom in Wapato High School
Instructors:
Jennifer Turns, Yuliana Flores, Srushti Prashant Sardeshmukh
The larger project involves Wapato High School students conducting usability testing of Google Classroom, which has been the district-wide education platform since 2020. Over the course of 12 weeks, these students will participate in a curriculum that covers usability testing, product analysis, and research methods. During Engineers Week, from February 17 to 21, they will apply their skills by conducting formal usability tests with peers, teachers, and/or parents.
Students participating in the DRG will assist in enhancing this learning experience for the high school students. This support will include helping to create presentation slides, providing feedback on usability test protocols, and framing the analysis.
Spring 2023
Identifying signals on platforms that help identify problematic behaviors
Researchers have studied how misinformation propagates on Twitter and identified lessons that can help users mitigate the propagation. Such lessons include examining if the online account has a questionable purpose, or if that account shared any content from uncredible media sources etc. This DRG will take these lessons and explore how they need to be updated to other platforms. How can we generalize the learning objectives for safe discernment of misinformation beyond Twitter — like Tiktok and/or Whatsapp — to help users witness the socio-technical opacity of information on different platforms?
In this DRG, we will be conducting participatory design research to (1) identify how the lessons about identifying different problematic behaviors can be contextualized on platforms like Tiktok and/or Whatsapp; (2) associate platform-specific signals with these behaviors to promote accidental learning on these platforms.
The project will be led by Himanshu Zade and Sukrit Venkatagiri with guidance from Jennifer A. Turns.
Winter 2023
Examining Engineering Student and Faculty Views of Power Dynamics
Power dynamics are normal parts of interpersonal interactions. Kenya Z. Mejia has been researching how students and faculty in engineering conceptualize and make sense of power dynamics as it relates to equity and inclusion in learning spaces. Join us as we do qualitative coding of data from one study.
In this DRG we will:
- Reflect on our positionality as researchers
- Complete training for Human Subjects Research
- Delve into anonymized data from interviews and reflections.
- Qualitative data analysis
- Potential for publishing outside of the DRG time
Autumn 2022
Qualitative Analysis of Design Practice in Wilderness Medicine
DRG led by Alainna Brennan Brown, co-led by Esther Sohn, and advised by Professor Jennifer Turns
This DRG will introduce students to qualitative research in medical spaces. We will go through the process of cleaning and analyzing data from a field site in Southeast Alaska related to wilderness medicine practice and education. In parallel, each contributor will have the opportunity to develop personal frameworks for articulating positionality and for communicating in interdisciplinary spaces about qualitative work. No specific research background is required. This project is open to students from any department who would benefit from exploring qualitative work with pre-existing data. This DRG will meet for approximately 2 hours each week on Zoom and will require 2-4 hours of outside work per week (depending on the week).
Note this DRG is at capacity for Autumn 2022 and no longer accepting applications. Please feel free to send questions to Alainna at alainnab@uw.edu or on the HCDE Slack.
Spring 2022
Researching the Co-Design of Inclusive Practices for Engineering Education Settings
In Researching the Co-Design of Inclusive Practices for Engineering Education Settings, participants will develop and implement a data collection protocol. This study is in the implementation stage, therefore participants will spend the first couple of weeks familiarizing themselves with the project, the next couple of weeks developing a protocol, and the second half of the quarter, helping run the study and using the protocol to collect data.
Study Background:
As researchers, we are exploring how co-design can be used to explore the idea of what makes an inclusive environment, and used as a process intended to create change. The co-design sessions include both students and faculty and is intended to address creating more inclusive STEM, and more specifically, engineering, college level classrooms. The specific phenomena of interest is how power, a neither positive or negative thing, is exercised and challenges or reproduces the status quo. Other important themes we will look at are impact of racial/ethnic identities and impacts of gender identities in the co-design sessions. We will also explore our own positionalities within engineering education.
This will be a 1-credit DRG. We will plan to meet for 1 hour each week and expect approximately 2 additional hours of engagement each week outside of our meeting times. Meeting Times are Fridays from 1-2 p.m.