URSA News
Save the date! The next Research Day will be April 26, 2016!
Biomedical Learning and Student Training (BLaST) funding opportunities
The Biomedical Learning and Student Training (BLaST) program will enhance capacity for undergraduate biomedical research training and efficacy for engaging students from diverse, especially rural Alaskan, backgrounds in education and training for biomedical research careers. The BLaST programs offers scholarships and funding opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students and mentors involved in undergraduate research at any UAF or UAS campus, or Ilisagvik College. Visit the BLaST website to see funding opportunities currently available.
Assistant Professor Carie Green, Ph.D, of the UAF School of Education Graduate Program,
is conducting research this summer to explore participatory methods for engaging young
children as active researchers in human social science research. This participatory
action research project, occurring at the Bunnell House Early Learning Lab School
at UAF, seeks to involve young children (3-5 years-old) in all aspects of the research
process, including proposing research questions, choosing data collection methods,
collecting and analyzing data, and disseminating findings. Although childhood researchers
have come to recognize young children as agents of change and many are using child-friendly
methods, to date none have fully embraced what it means to engage young children as
active researchers in all aspects of a research project.
The research team (Dr. Green and undergraduate student research assistants) will use
innovative technology purchased through an URSA ITE Award to explore a methodology
for engaging young children as active researchers. Using video-recorded sequences
of children’s play and activities in the forest, the researchers will stimulate children’s
curiosity in posing researchable questions. During the second phase of the project,
children will select from an array of data collection methods, including children
interviewing other children using Go-pros, taking pictures with mini i-Pads, and participating
in other artistic activities (i.e. painting, drawing, building, or molding) to represent
their experiences and perspectives. Next, children will analyze their data quantitatively
by counting and quantifying elements in photos and other artwork and creating graphs
and charts to demonstrate their findings. The researchers will also use child-friendly
books that include some of the visual and verbal data (children’s conversations with
each other) to invite children to draw qualitative meaning from their conversations
with each other, posing questions such as the following: How did you feel about what
the children were saying? What do you think they meant? Finally, children will select
ways to creatively present their findings and choose when, where, and how they would
like to present their research to parents and other communities members. Findings
from this project will contribute to understanding community-oriented and collaborative
research methods with young children, and will be of significance to researchers and
practitioners working with young children at UAF and beyond. This study is supported
and funded through the Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Activity program (URSA)
at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and by Alaska’s Experimental Program to Stimulate
Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
UAF undergraduate and URSA award recipient Matthew Vanagel adapts Stanford research method to make transparent brains. Read about it in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner article May 19, 2015.