Scott Rixner is the kind of professor who’s always tinkering with his teaching. A professor of computer science at Rice University, he has run several experiments to test improvements he’s made in “Computational Thinking,” the introductory course he teaches. Conducting such research can help a professor discern whether classroom innovations are working as planned, and publishing it spreads this knowledge to other instructors. It can also be a hassle: Because they involve human subjects, the studies used to require Rixner to go through an institutional-review-board process that he describes as “onerous.” But they don’t anymore.
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That’s because Rice created a more streamlined process under its umbrella protocol for such research, part of a broader effort to raise the profile of teaching on the campus. Under the system, which took effect last year, professors essentially apply to join a study that’s already in progress. The application is only two pages long, and decisions come back in three to five days. That means professors could get an idea several weeks after classes begin and still gain permission in time to run a study that semester, says Josh Eyler, director of the university’s Center for Teaching Excellence, who conceived of the project. Eyler was inspired by umbrella protocols tied to grant programs at several other universities. What sets Rice’s apart, he says, is that any professor can participate.
And professors from a broad cross-section of the university are doing so. Marcia Brennan, a professor of art history and religious studies, is examining whether a method used by some medical schools, in which students study artworks to hone their observational skills, is similarly effective among undergraduates. Beth Beason-Abmayr, a teaching professor of biosciences, is doing two studies, one of them testing whether the project-based approach she takes in her laboratory courses is fostering independent research skills as intended. Rixner, too, is working on two studies — one that tests a new kind of quiz designed to help students visualize the way code changes the state of a computer program, and one examining how to scale up sections of an introductory course while maintaining its quality. He expects to have results on the first within months, and the second in about a year.
Eyler expects the umbrella protocol to bring several benefits. It will ease the burden on instructors who, like Rixner, were already examining their teaching. It will help raise the profile of teaching-related scholarship on the campus. And, he hopes, it will offer an incentive to professors who have never done this kind of work before — even if their disciplines don’t usually engage in scholarship that involves human subjects. Taken together, that will help Eyler in his larger aim: drawing attention to “the really creative, important work that happens in the classroom.”
Higher ed is often disparaged for its bureaucracy, but not all red tape is bad. Most people would probably agree that there should be checks in place for research conducted on human beings. Still, the ethical concerns around studies of the classroom are narrower than those involved in, say, a drug trial, centering mostly on protecting student privacy. And the umbrella protocol, Eyler says, has been “designed to minimize even those ethical concerns that are raised by the scholarship of teaching and learning.”
Eyler and his collaborator, Sandra Parsons, an assistant teaching professor and director of pedagogy in the psychology department, worked with administrators to set up the program and ensure that it fit Rice’s broader research goals.
At least one professor working on each study must be teaching the course in question, and the researchers can’t do anything outside the bounds of what they normally might do to instruct students or assess their learning. The umbrella study has been designed to protect student data, Eyler says. And because simply asking students demographic questions can alter their academic performance by introducing stereotype threat — the risk of confirming a negative group stereotype — studies that collect such data must go through an additional review.
The umbrella protocol was introduced to faculty members at the start of academic 2017-18, not long before Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. The storm, which shut down the Rice campus for a week, slowed the program’s rollout. Even so, 14 principal investigators and six other professors undertook 16 studies that first year. The principal investigators came from a mix of disciplines: seven in STEM, four in the social sciences, and three in the humanities. They come from both on and off the tenure track and also include a graduate student and a postdoc.
“I do feel like there is becoming an increasing culture at Rice around studying our teaching,” Rixner says. “I’m not going to say the umbrella protocol created that, but I think the umbrella protocol facilitates that.”
This past spring, participating faculty members attended a symposium to share their progress with one another, and in September a handful of them spoke at a well-attended event open to the whole university. So even though none of the studies has published results quite yet, they’re already helping raise the profile of teaching scholarship at the university, just as Eyler hoped.
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
