Research | Iryna Ashby, Instructional Design Consultant

Research & Scholarship

My Research Interests

Competencies and competency-based education (design and assessment on individual competency level and competency-based programs);
Interdisciplinary education (design, implementation, and assessment);
Lifelong learning (design and evaluation).

While my research interests seem to be broad and diverse, they are fueled by several common factors:

Personalization of learning based on the individual needs, interests, and preferences through competencies
Learning should not be limited to a single niche or specialization
Learning is ongoing, but lifelong learning skills need to be acquired
Traditional formal education may not be flexible enough to address individual needs and strengths

It is key to understand how to create an environment and strategies to employ to allow for the development of diverse interdisciplinary and lifelong learning skills, particularly, in a competency-based programs.

Developing My Researcher Identity

Research is a creative process to discover new knowledge either through novel endeavors or the use of existing knowledge in an innovative way to further expand the current boundaries. Yet, I often see research being represented as an unimaginative series of procedures: scholarship (or review of existing literature), hypothesis, methodology, data-gathering and analysis, and replicability of results. And this is far from how I have experienced research throughout my doctoral journey, which shaped my researcher identity.

Indeed, these components are an important part of research to minimize errors or chance results. But there is much more to it than that! Research is also about art and curiosity - the art of seeing beyond the routine of everyday life; attempting to comprehend how what we try to study interacts within and outside its system; innate curiosity; questioning of axioms; and looking for gaps and inconsistencies; design of protocols that can actually elicit information from participants; seeing the obtained results within the system; and how they can explain to take us further from our current location.

It is also about being humble. The words of Mervin Gordon, a friend of Alexander Fleming, really ring true to me, “No research is ever quite complete. It is the glory of a good bit of work that it opens the way for something still better, and thus rapidly leads to its own eclipse. The object of research is the advancement, not of the investigator, but of knowledge." Indeed, our goal it to better understand the world around us, and not to justify our own existence as researchers.

Research is about breaking down the complexity to simple explanations that could be clear to our readers and help them understand. Use of jargon to explain a phenomenon helps no one. On the contrary, it creates a specific bias through the lack of or singular understanding of the terminology. Paraphrasing Richard Feynman, an outstanding physicist, failure to understand something in simple terms reflects the lack of own clarity. We do research to help others, as such, it should be at the level, when readers can form their own opinions.

Finally, I think that research is also about collaboration and benefiting from knowledge, skills, and mode of thinking of peers. Campbell (1969 as cited in Sprunger, 2017), an eminent social psychologist and thinker, argued that to make science effective, it should be rooted in the collaborative work of professionals with expertise in various domains, while working on a joint endeavor. This allows for overlap, but also for diversity to move us forward.

Of course, this realization did not happen overnight. This “artistry in the professions” or the development of tacit knowledge and skills (as described by Schon, 1987) is the result of engagement and work with faculty and peers. While in the program, I have participated in eight collaborative research projects, of which one was also on an interdisciplinary team. This work has expanded my understanding of the process of qualitative and mixed methods research; taught how to collaborate with faculty and peers from different programs and departments; helped me gain skills in qualitative data collection (e.g., protocol design, field work, and interviews), and data analysis. But most of all, it taught me that even the best laid plans can go awry, and that we do not always get what we expected to get, or that our participants indeed have a different way of thinking from us, who are steeped in literature. This is where the idea of curiosity, art, but also humbleness come into the light. As researchers, we need to take it in strides, think on our feet, quickly regroup not to lose the audience, but also learn from our mistakes in the future (while being ready that the next group may be quite different, and we can encounter the same problems).

Research Experience

Since day one in my program, I wanted to make sure I gain a well-rounded research experience that included all aspects of research implementation: from brainstorming research design to working on presentations and publications. I have been actively involved in eight research projects of varying scope that helped me gain research and scholarship skills, as well as develop my own researcher identity. Some of the research experiences evolved into new ones that also impact design and teaching. I will outline several examples.

Research and Evaluation of the Competency-Based Program Transdisciplinary Studies in Technology (TST)

Purdue Polytechnic

Concurrent Mixed Methods Study

2014-2019

PI: M. Exter, PhD

It was the involvement in the TST project that helped me gain experience in working on an interdisciplinary team, as well as to form my research and teaching interests and identity. I also learned to address my subjective viewpoints as a researcher (i.e., “theorized subjectivity”). Letherby et al (2012) described this process as a “reflexive approach that acknowledges the significance of both intellectual and personal auto/biography of researchers and of respondents” (p.90).

Throughout the duration, I was actively engaged in:

Research brainstorming and design
Support of submission of IRB amendments, including study description, information sheets, etc.
Design of survey and interview protocols (click to view)
Field work (in-situ observations and collection of qualitative data)
Interviewing of faculty, teaching assistants, and students
Data curation
Data analysis (qualitative and quantitative, e.g., click to view a poster presentation I led at the 2015 AECT conference)
Dissemination (peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, proceedings, and paper presentations at national and international conferences)

The engagement in the field work, interviews, and data analysis helped me embrace the complexity of opinions and components that play in designing competencies, competency-based program within a transdisciplinary environments. I have also seen the challenges of trying to build a disruptive program in a traditional environment that made me question the values of traditional vs. other types of education, what competencies actually mean, and how we design and teach in a personalized learning environment.

I am interested in these topics in both a macro- and micro-levels.

For example, going through the interview data, I observed faculty talking about some challenges they have experienced, so I decided to explore this topic in more detail. I engaged Dr. Secil Caskurlu (then my peer student) and my advisor Marisa Exter to be second coders on the first-year interview data that would help shed light on the topic based on the research questions I created based on my review of the literature (click to view the peer-reviewed publication). My interest in exploring the design and use of badges to engage students in the TST resulted in presentation and book chapter publication (click to view the book chapter).

Another aspect of this research study was the design of interdisciplinary competencies that were proposed to the TST program. Our team expanded the Bloom's Taxonomy to incorporate transdsicplinary language ways to develop transdisciplinary skills overtime.

Transdisciplinary Blooms Taxonomy_FINAL.

Much of this work was based on the review of literature and competency-based model I did. I was also heavily engaged in the competency design. Our experience is shared in the book chapter I led for the AECT Summer Research Symposium (click to view draft submission)

On a micro-level, I am interested in the characteristics of student engagement within a transdisciplinary education. I have completed a research proposal that would utilize the existing interview data to explore students’ perceptions of their engagement and underlying motivation using Self-Determination and Expectancy-Value theories as a theoretical lens (click to view).

Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education

Multi-phase Mixed Methods Study

2017-current

PI: M. Exter, PhD

This research strand started from the presentation and proceedings publication on integration of liberal arts in a transdisciplinary design studio environment, where I went through the literature review, worked on data analysis and write-up (click to view the proceedings publication).

This project inspired me to conduct an in-depth literature review on the topic of interdisciplinary education and implications for instructional designers that was also published in a peer-reviewed journal (click to view).

Interdisciplinary Integration Research a

The implications of the paper also impacted the course redesign completed in summer 2019 (see Teaching section for examples of course materials).

As the next stage, Dr. Exter as a PI and I as a collaborator received a PRF grant to further explore the topic in academic “Big 10” universities as a qualitative study, and are working on a pilot survey with a larger representation from “Big 10” that will be the basis for another grant re-submission to study interdisciplinarity across other public and private universities. This phase of the research project is currently underway.

Research and Evaluation of Competency Development for e-Learning in Instructional Designers

Concurrent Mixed Methods Study

2015-2017

PI: V. Lowell, PhD

I have participated in the research study and course redesign (EDCI 569) with Dr. Lowell. My involvement included:

Development of measures (click to view a sample identification of measures)
Development of an interview protocol
Data collection (survey and interview)
Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data
Dissemination of results (click to view the peer-reviewed mixed-methods publication)

As part of the larger research study, I also initiated a sub-theme for to study acculturation of professionals into an online environment and collaborated with the PI Dr. Lowell in the publication design (click to view proceedings publication). This paper received two awards in 2015 at the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT):

2015 McJulien Scholar Best Paper Award (click to view)
2015 Cross-Cultural Research Award, sponsored by the Korean Society for Educational Technology (click to view)

Case Studies in Formation of Instructional Designers

Quantitative study

2016-current

PI: M Exter, PhD

I have also designed and implemented my own research project to explore the use of case studies in the formation of performance-improvement skills, including

IRB submission (click to view)
Instrument design (click to view)

As shown in the figure above, the research project started with my intent to help augment experiences of students enrolled in Human Performance Technology Course (EDCI 528) by creating an environment for students to explore a case study, evaluate gaps by asking additional questions, and come up with potential solutions.

The original research compared students perceptions of skill acquisition based on whether they engaged in a full case study and partial case study, where they would have to develop questions and I would send out the memo with aggregated responses. Based on this research, I collaborated with the PI to develop a grant, where I focused on the literature review, explanation of methodology and procedures, and timeline development (click to view).

The findings of the research helped improve the experience of students in EDCI 528 class, and also gave the grounds to further develop case studies into a two-week authentic simulations that allowed students to acquire new skills related to performance improvement (see Teaching and Learning section for an overview).

Additionally, I have developed an abbreviated research proposal for the AERA conference on viewing engagement in an authentic simulation through the lens of human-computer interaction to further explore the interdisciplinarity of instructional design (click to view)