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Project name: Developing a Computer-Driven Clinical Research Laboratory at an Undergraduate Liberal Arts College and Forging Relationships Across Disciplines and Professionals
Project lead: Cole Barton, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Davidson College
Key collaborators:
Summary: A multidisciplinary team of scholars and Information Technology [IT] professionals will develop a Clinical Psychology research laboratory at Davidson College to forge research mentorships between faculty and students at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. The narrow and specialized research problems require multidisciplinary collaboration by a clinical psychologist from Davidson College, a psychophysiologist from Wake Forest University, and a neurobiologist from Randolph-Macon College. The technical expertise requires IT professionals from Davidson College IT staff, as well as a software expert from Noldus Information Technologies. This laboratory will encourage faculty members and students to collaborate in studying problems in Clinical Psychology with very sophisticated and engaging technology, at the same time that it will tax implementation and support resources for our IT staff. Improvements in computing hardware and software are making it possible to provide student learning experiences at undergraduate institutions heretofore available only at research universities. Computing hardware and software encourage collecting and analyzing behavioral sciences data in user-friendly, compelling, and cost-effective ways. Besides extraordinary opportunities for student learning, these resources offer bountiful faculty development. Technology-driven laboratories foster faculty-IT professional relationships requiring collaborative learning and development. However, faculty support by IT professionals with specialized niche software poses significant challenges to effective implementation and support of specialized labs in an undergraduate liberal arts environment. Other NITLE schools with faculty with similar research interests would benefit from the particulars of our lab technology. Additionally, the process of developing faculty-IT collaborations and building prudent implementation and sustainability features into the lab should be of even broader interest to member institutions. Therefore a program evaluation describing and documenting the time and expense associated with lab development, pedagogical impact, and faculty?IT collaboration issues will be disseminated via Multipoint Interactive Video Conferencing Service for NITLE schools.
Key audience: Scholars and IT professionals. For the scholars on the team, the goal will be to share academic and technical expertise to promote collaboration on research problems and teaching resources of common interest. An additional benefit will be the opportunity to reap the benefits of developing a more shared expertise between the scholars and IT professionals on the project. Dialogue will educate the IT professionals about the research questions at the same time that the IT professionals are informing the scholars about how software tools have potential to capture and analyze empirical data in cost-effective ways.
Intended outcome: The project collaborators are developing laboratory resources to engage students in studying health problems at a biopsychosocial level of analysis.
Project timeline:
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