Skip to main content
Research

Jennifer Turns' Research Group Archive

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

Winter 2025

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:

  1. How might undergraduate students engage with generative AI to support reflecting related to their education?
  2. 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:

  1. How might HCDE PhD students engage with and utilize "How to Write a Journal Article in 12 Weeks"?
  2. How might doctoral students react to and augment the book's ideas within the HCDE context?
  3. 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.

Autumn 2021

Supporting critical capacities in data science through online interactions

In today's increasingly data-driven world, the ability to ask and answer questions with data is incredibly important. Effectively working with data requires both technical skills like programming and statistical knowledge as well as non-technical skills like the ability to ask good questions and form arguments. However, formal training programs and resources often emphasize technical skills but only rarely support the development of non-technical capacities. How can we design to help people learn these skills via informal, participatory, and creative online interactions? 

In this directed research group (DRG), we will study the practices and challenges in online data science hobbyist communities and explore design solutions to support question-asking, exploration, and communication with data. Over the course of the autumn quarter, we will: (1) conduct research interviews with members of online data science hobbyist communities, (2) analyze interview data and contribute our findings to HCI and learning science literatures, and (3) brainstorm design solutions. Although plans are not firm, we plan to continue the group in winter and spring quarters for those that are interested in continuing.

This DRG will be led by PhD student Regina Cheng with guidance from Dr. Jennifer Turns in HCDE and Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill in Communication. The group will be run for 3-6 dedicated masters or advanced undergraduate students. The course will provide UW 400 or 500-level course credit in either COM or HCDE. Participation in the group will provide 2-5 credits with the expectation that students will spend approximately 3 hours per week on the course per credit. We will meet at a time that is convenient for all the participants. This DRG will be completely virtual and the meeting link will be sent prior to the first meeting. Please contact Regina Cheng at rcheng6@uw.edu if you have any questions. 

Spring 2021

Research through Design for Educators and Clinicians

Research through design (RtD) offers designers a way to learn from the process of conducting their own work. However, practitioners in fields not as directly associated with design may also undertake design-like activity. Recognition of and valuation of design-like activity may vary between fields. A lack of recognition of practitioners’ design-like work may contribute to missed opportunities to move fields forward through knowledge and governance; it also may invisiblize these practitioners’ work and hinder practitioners from advancing individually within their fields. Enhancing recognition of such activity, especially accounting for the knowledge of field and opportunity practitioners hold, may address these tensions. 

In this DRG, we aim to study two such practitioner populations, educators and clinicians, and explore how the lens of RtD may frame and potentially inform these practitioners’ work. Questions could include: 

Can we articulate RtD as a method for practitioners to create knowledge of design activity in their own fields using their own practice as RtD content?
Is practice within a field intrinsically RtD? Are humans intrinsically designers? How might we come to see practice within a field as RtD? 
Could RtD serve as a bridge between wicked problems and reflective practice?
Who advances self and field, and how does recognition of practice as RtD influence these types of politics?

This 2-credit DRG will be led by Alainna Brennan Brown with guidance from Dr. Jennifer Turns.

Spring 2021

Exploring Power Dynamics in Co-Design for Engineering Education Research Part II

In Exploring Power Dynamics in Co-Designing Engineering Education Part II, participants will use data from the previous quarter to develop a more refined research agenda.  Informed by readings that explore co-design as an inclusive process intended to create change and address power dynamics, participants will be involved in different parts of the research project, including data analysis, knowledge dissemination, and more study design and piloting. 

Participants are not required to have participated in the Winter DRG.

As researchers, we are exploring how power relations between college level educators, students, and researchers can be addressed when co-designing for more inclusive STEM, and more specifically, engineering, college level classrooms. 

We will think about questions such as:

How do power relations affect the co-design process?
How is power enacted?
How might we mediate power relations to produce more inclusive co-design sessions?

Spring 2021

Noticing Enactments of Equity 

There is no shortage of people who care about issues of equity in design, education, and HCI. As equity conversations permeate our lives, as human centered designers we might ask: 

How do conversations about equity translate to commitments in action? 
How do we notice equity in our moment-to-moment interactions? 
How might we document, reflect on, and analyze moments when we enact a commitment to equity?

In this DRG, we will collectively explore these questions to develop a praxis for engaging in equity oriented design approaches. Over the course of DRG, we will: (1) Create a shared understanding of equity through reading related work and reflecting on lived experience, (2) Analyze existing analytical memos of a researcher’s attempt to document her equity commitment across projects, and (3) Translate the process of documenting and noticing equity enactments to your own practice. 

This 2-credit DRG will be led by Wendy Roldan with guidance from Dr. Jennifer Turns. We will meet on Tuesdays from 2:30 - 4 p.m. PST on Zoom. 

We invite all levels of academic standing and background. To apply, please fill out this interest form by March 26. The google form will close on March 26th and decisions will be emailed by March 28. Decisions on participation will take into account the order in which applicants express interest and a desire to have diverse perspectives in the group.

Winter 2021

Exploring Power Dynamics in Co-Design for Engineering Education Research

In Exploring Power Dynamics in Co-Designing Engineering Education, participants will dig into readings that explore co-design as an inclusive process intended to create change. As researchers, we are exploring how power relations between college-level educators, students, and researchers can be addressed when co-designing for more inclusive STEM, and more specifically, engineering, college level classrooms. We will also explore our own understanding of power through reflection activities. In the second half of the quarter, we will put our learning into action by imagining different co-design scenarios between faculty and students. The final project includes piloting a co-design session between students and educators.

We will think about questions such as:

  • How do power relations affect the co-design process?
  • How is power enacted?
  • Are power relations different between students and faculty in STEM settings, compared to Arts and Humanities settings?
  • How might we mediate power relations to produce more inclusive co-design sessions?

This will be a 2-credit DRG. We will plan to meet for 1.5 hours each week via zoom and expect approximately 3-4 additional hours of engagement each week outside of our meeting times. Meeting Times are Wednesdays from 3:00-4:30 pm PST.

If interested, please fill out this google form. We are planning on having up to 4 DRG participants to facilitate virtual conversations. Decisions will be made by January 2. Decisions on participation will take into account the order in which applicants express interest and a desire to have diverse perspectives in the group.