Research is not often a solo activity- projects are most successful if they are undertaken with a team. This can include external/community partners or colleagues, research assistants, or other people with the required expertise to complement your own. Perhaps you’re the expert in pedagogy, but you could benefit from having someone on the team with expertise in mental health or statistics, or some other area. Having a team means you don’t need to know everything; it also means you aren’t solely responsible for the project, which can take some of the stress off of you, particularly if at least one of your team members has some research experience. Part of these considerations when forming your team is to consider equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (EDIB), such as ensuring that all students have the opportunity to apply for a research assistant position. In addition to considering EDIB as it relates to your research team, also consider this for your participant recruitment as well! The topic of EDI in research was the focus of a previous post, which you can check out here.
As you consider all of these variables, you should also begin thinking about whether you require ethics approval (Research Ethics Board; REB) for your project. If your project includes human participants or their data (e.g., students), then it likely will! If ethics approval is required, have you and your research team all completed the TCPS2 (2022) core certificate (it will be required of all team members, including student research assistants, when you apply to the REB)? If you have not completed it yet, doing so will help you to consider your project from an ethical lens (and help you to ethically plan how you will recruit participants for your study, for example). In addition, you should start thinking about the documents you might need such as consent forms. The REB has a number of templates and other helpful documents like checklists on their website (scroll down to the bottom of the REB microsite on ICE). A couple of things that aren’t always considered: 1) the possible risk of (perceived) coercion to participate in the research study, particularly if you are recruiting your current students; and 2) how to fairly distribute any possible benefits of the research (e.g., if you’re comparing 2 teaching approaches, one of which you think will lead to higher grades, across two different sections. If one section will have the “improved” teaching approach, it’s not fair to the other group that you’re using a control to compare to. There are easy ways to address this with a tweak to your methodology). Start writing your REB application now (at least in point form) so that you’re sure you’ve thought about all the things you’ll need to think about. I have written a number of posts about completing the REB application (part 1, part 2, part 3) including for secondary use (part 1, part 2), so check those out if they might be relevant. One final ethical consideration is about the data itself (storage, access, etc). You can use the DMP Assistant to help you consider various aspects of research data management (register for a free account and then select either the basic/default Portage Template or the DC-specific (or OnTech) template, which should be available by the time this is published 😊)
