A Change of (Research) Scenery

When it comes to routine, I am the best. I absolutely love getting into a daily groove and staying there for a long time. I also love going to the same restaurants on multiple occasions and watching my favorite movies and shows many times over. (Most recent case in point: I have watched the entire available-in-America catalog of The Great British Baking Show more times than I can count. I was on round five last time I checked and that was a while ago.)* There's something delightful about establishing a routine or revisiting something familiar. You know exactly what you'll get and you can look forward to enjoying it.

By best, I also mean worst. Not just because most people find this approach to life terribly dull for lacking in spontaneity. I see the value in changes and I do like to mix it up on occasion. (Mostly when a friend asks that we eat at not-the-same-restaurant-we-always-go-to.) I mean that sometimes routine can be detrimental to a research program. 

Fully immersing ourselves in a research project has plenty of advantages, as does regular/daily writing and setting a model of consistency for mentees. These practices can produce both more efficient and higher-quality work than repeatedly re-orienting to a project whenever opportunity arises. But even this can be taken too far. In my case, I get so engrossed that I don't leave my building for eight or nine hours at a time during winter and summer breaks. I get lots of work done, but my efficiency decreases after several days (or weeks) in a row of this approach. 

To combat my tendency to retread a very deep path, I've embraced two practices:

(1) The writing retreat, and 
(2) The collaborative research trip.

I've tweeted about the writing retreats I organize for our faculty writing group at my university (see below),** and others have written (very eloquently) about the benefits and how-tos of these events. There's something about a change of scenery for the purpose of writing that packs a punch. Faculty offices are associated with plenty of other kinds of work, and it's easy to get distracted or restless. Finding a peaceful location where the goal is to write gives us something extra to look forward to and the perfect justification for putting other work on hold.

Hoppy Tuesday! This makes up for road closures/coffee disasters that it took to get here. My work space for the next 2 days. #Acwri #ECRChat pic.twitter.com/a77qXq0Weu

— Dr. Dani Arigo (@DaniArigo) June 20, 2017

Running on the BFP.

In contrast, the collaborative research trip is new for me. By "collaborative research trip," I mean an extended stay at a university where you have collaborators and intensive collaborative work during that stay. In my case, I've continued to work closely with my postdoc fellowship lab, which is 2+ hours away in Philadelphia. I've been back to visit several times in the past three years, but never for more than a day or two at a time. This summer, the lab set me up with a small office for a week in order to have more face time for papers and grant applications. This is my fourth day on campus - I've made considerable progress on a manuscript I started last month and specific plans for two more manuscripts on related topics, plus tentative plans for grant applications. I've also been able to run in my old haunts, like the Ben Franklin Parkway and Boathouse Row. Quite a productive week so far!

Office space for Philly visit.

But this trip has been great for my research and for me beyond the concrete productivity. It's reconnected me to a type of research (i.e., large clinical trials) that I have yet to implement at my institution, and it's given me the opportunity to spend both work and personal time with people I don't see very often. I've also loved having time to myself to read, focus on marathon training, and avoid any sort of routine. I had already planned to visit again during my Spring 2018 sabbatical, and now I know that I'll visit as often as they'll let me!

This is your life moment of the week: Busting out of a routine helps to establish balance. Looking forward to getting back to my usual, but also to my next break from it :)

*I'm a member of my local public broadcasting affiliate, obviously, so I've even binge-watched all of season 4 many times.
**Please ignore the typo in this one - Twitter really needs an EDIT button!

Teaching Science* at the College Level

This is a revised post from my second blog, Healthy Science, which is now the official site of the Clinical Health Psychology Research Team at the University of Scranton.

It's Spring Break time at my institution, and I have that strange sense that the semester is both flying by and crawling along. This semester is much busier than the last, though I've managed to stay (mostly) afloat as I progress toward the end of my first year. One topic that's been on my mind for a while now (i.e., from before I started here) is how to teach and mentor in the scientific method, in a way that students find engaging?

By "science*," I mean scientific thinking in any discipline. In the physical sciences (biology, chemistry, etc.), it's reasonable to expect that students come to college with at least a rudimentary understanding of what it means to "do science" - run an experiment, write up the results, etc. And those who are majors should be moderately interested in doing this regularly. We wouldn't necessarily have the same expectation of an English or history major, but the methods for these disciplines are more similar than people think. But it seems that psychology is in a unique gap between the perceptions of hard sciences and the perceptions of liberal arts. But unless they had fantastic high school teachers, few students come to psychology with an understanding of what it really MEANS that "psychology is the scientific study of human behavior." And the vast majority haven't a clue that psychology involves biology, chemistry, physics, math, and other subjects they think they want to avoid.

One experience in particular brought this to mind before I started my current job. In my effort to start thinking and acting like a professor, I attended an interesting seminar on the subject of involving more students in research experiences at the undergraduate level. Dr. Jennifer Stanford, a biology professor at Drexel University who researches STEM educational practices, presented evidence that supports the positive relationship between research experiences and graduation rates. (Both student-selected experiences and university outreach programs.) She also noted that these experiences are time- and resource-intensive on the part of faculty, so few are willing to extend their expertise.

More recently, I've spent a lot of time talking with psychology students about what it means to "think like a scientist." I was surprised to realize that even bright students who sign up for research assistantships - who have taken several history, methods, and statistics courses (and some of whom have worked in other research labs) - have a difficult time answering this question. It's clear to me that they recognize the importance of the topic. So why the lack of confidence in their answers? Does this essential, fundamental issue fail to meet the long-term retention threshold? On the contrary, it seems that the answers that make sense to them never are encoded in the first place. My discussions with students continued through Socratic questioning, thought experiments, and examples using topics of individual interest. I'm pleased that these discussions seemed to be productive, and engaging to the students. But why was this the first time they had participated in such a conversation? They're not new to this!

And of course, this brings us back to Dr. Stanford's seminar. One reason that intensive research experiences can be so beneficial is that they allow time for the kind of discussions I had with students, which not all students have access to. Moreover, even students who have access to research positions don't always get the kind of attention they need to facilitate independent thinking. Problem: Being a good teacher and mentor takes time and effort, which many professors don't have. Not putting in the time and effort means we're not doing justice to the mission of higher education. Putting in the time and effort means that something else has to give. Or does it?

For my money, the most helpful aspect of Dr. Stanford's seminar were her suggestions for creative ways to involve large numbers of students in "research" by giving them opportunities to think like scientists. For example, rather than writing a typical research paper at the end of the semester, students at any level write a hypothetical research proposal: an interesting question, a bit about what we know and don't know, and how we would test a hypothesis. This isn't exactly a novel idea, but we tend to reserve it for advanced seminars. Opening it up to introductory courses and allowing students to write about what they find most interesting could have multiple benefits. I planned to use this in my Intro Psych class in the fall, though I switched as the semester approached. In the future, gearing the semester toward this assignment could help to connect the disparate sub-disciplines in psychology, which introductory textbooks (and classes) often fail to do. I did recently use it in my new Health Psychology course, where students did an excellent job of generating original research ideas.

What other ideas are out there? Save me some time by linking to journal articles and other blogs that offer similarly creative suggestions - I know they're out there :)