This week marked the start of my involvement as a research assistant in the study conducted by one of the education professors at Lasell, and I’m going to take you along with me as I embark on this journey through an educational study that is one of the first of its kind. You’ll hear the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I hope it can inspire some of you to seek out things like this at your own colleges and universities, because I can already tell you it’s pretty cool..
I am very much a newbie to the professional research world, but I was stoked when my professor brought up the opportunity to be her assistant, as it’s something that not a lot of people know about at my college, and those that do are usually graduate students, not sophomores. As the time for me to meet with my professor drew closer, and I had to psych myself up for it, I was getting pretty nervous as to if I would be helpful in the research, if it would be over my head, or if I would feel like I made a difference.
The subject matter was something I was familiar with, an educational theory called the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), that centers around considering the abilities and learning preferences of all students and accommodating them through multiple means of engagement of the content, multiple means of representation of the content, and multiple means of expression of knowledge. But what is cool is that what we’re studying is the actual implementation of it in schools and how successful it is, which there is very little research on. To get to do innovative research on something that I totally believe in as a future educator is what really drew me to this position, and is a lot of what’s keeping me interested.
My professor had been working on this study for several years now, mostly collecting data, and I’m coming into the research at the time that she needs help organizing it and to hopefully pull out common themes and make conclusions about UDL. Most of what I’ve been doing this week is getting to know the data and trying to understand it better, and while a lot of what the future holds is relatively boring data input, I’m very interested in the whole process and can’t wait to see what we can find.