GIST Magazine Spring 2018 by Duke SSRI

gist SPRING 2018

THE SOCIAL SCIENCE MAGAZINE OF DUKE UNIVERSITY

OSPRI:

OPEN SOURCE PEDAGOGY, RESEARCH + INNOVATION

SPRING 2018

Content

OSPRI: Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation

Asking the Tough Questions: Bass Connections Team Working to Understand Political Polarization

Profile Q & A: Kim Carpenter

Students working with OSPRI meet up in SSRIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Connection space to discuss their work.

Helping Scholars Fund and Follow Their Passions

Modâ&#x20AC;˘U: Providing Practical Information in a Flexible Format

The Social Science Research Institute at Duke University is a part of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University

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Managing Editor: Courtney P. Orning courtney.orning@duke.edu

Design: B Design Studio, LLC www.bdesign-studio.com

Contributors: Shelbi Fanning Nancy Oates Lea Hart

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P H OTO CO U RT ESY O F L E A H A RT

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N E C H Y B A’ S N I C H E

Tackling “Big Data” Opening new frontiers for the social sciences

ince moving onto campus and into the beautiful space on the second floor of Gross Hall, SSRI has strived to build an integrated research and education infrastructure to support the social sciences and their engagement with others as we tackle societal challenges. This infrastructure includes a superb grants support team (highlighted in this issue of GIST), support for research with sensitive data (from IRB and Data Use Agreements to a Protected Research Data Network), and a collection of educational programming with workshops, in-person help at our Connection Bar, and online modules on our ModU site (also featured in this issue). This is complemented by exciting initiatives on survey methods and network analysis, a Federal Statistical Research Data Center, a behavioral lab for running experiments, as well as in-depth statistical and evaluation expertise. We invite you to come check us out online or in person. This coming fall, we take another major step forward as we launch a team-based Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science (MIDS) together with our partner and neighbor in Gross Hall— the Information Initiative at Duke (iiD). As we develop new capacity in tackling “big data,” we anticipate opening new frontiers for the social sciences. These frontiers involve questions we could not tackle without tapping into the explosion of new data from sources as varied as

satellite imagery, social media postings, electronic health records, brain imaging, and online gaming to name a few. Faculty are already engaged in exciting interdisciplinary work in these areas (for instance, Kim Carpenter who is featured in this issue of GIST), but the potential for new teams and collaborations is endless. Many of these will be supported through our MIDS program, and we invite you to learn more about this on our website. We are also excited to highlight in this issue our collaboration with the Initiative in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) under the banner of OSPRI, which stands for Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation. Funded by Red Hat, OSPRI is centered on bringing open source ideas to new areas most relevant for what we do at Duke—and to the practice of collaboration. We anticipate OSPRI will influence many of our activities, including the MIDS program, and will allow us to advance best practices in fostering the kind of collaboration that true interdisciplinary work requires. And we continue to support the evolving Bass program through our support of the Education and Human Development Theme—highlighting in this issue a team that is tackling political polarization in the most interdisciplinary of ways.

Tom Nechyba Director, SSRI D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P H OTO G RA P H Y

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F E AT U R E

Aria Chernik and OSPRI student Sharon Peng participate in the Red Hat CO.LAB project, which seeks to close the STEM diversity gap and teach middle school girls about the power of collaboration.

OSPRI:

OPEN SOURCE PEDAGOGY, RESEARCH + INNOVATION Harnessing the power of open to transform education for the 21st century

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(Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation) at Duke in 2016. Through funding from Red Hat, OSPRI is upending traditional models of higher education, and working to create a collaborative, student-centered environment where content is shared, and students are empowered to pursue their interests and develop a lifelong love of learning. “Knowledge shouldn’t be locked away or proprietary,” Chernik said. “OSPRI is committed to open knowledge and access to information.” OSPRI’s open source curricular pathway allowed Zenke to pursue his interests thus far, but the program’s initiatives go beyond its curricular pathway. Chernik said OSPRI’s goals include: Making learning personal, relevant, and fun with open source ideals and technology:

Through the development of an applied research lab, she is working to create a mentored environment where students can develop a passion-based

project from an idea that began in a class, or that they simply wish to pursue on their own. This is where ideas like Zenke’s could live and grow after his class concludes for the semester. Making academia more like an open organization: Students will spend time at Red

Hat to understand how open organizational principles, such as collaboration, adaptability, transparency, and meritocracy work in the real world, and translate these lessons to the context of academia, where the structure is traditionally more closed. Placing students at the center of open content creation: Rather than being passive

consumers of educational content, students become active participants—creating, curating, and remixing educational content. With a more personal stake in the process, this approach emphasizes the development of life-long learners

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hen Duke University freshman Carter Zenke observed that computer science students have very few opportunities to gain real-world experience with the concepts they’re learning in the classroom, he decided to do something about it. Through partnerships at Duke and off campus, Zenke, who is now a sophomore, worked to create a program providing real-world learning experiences for computer science students by connecting them with non-profits in need of technical help. While that might seem ambitious enough for a second-year college student, Zenke also plans to create an open source curriculum to expose more children to computer science, especially those students who are underrepresented in the field. Zenke’s goals get to the heart of what Aria Chernik envisioned when she founded OSPRI

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Aria Chernik reviews a student team’s product mockup in OSPRI Lab: Open Source Education Technology

who are passionate and engaged, she said. “It shines a spotlight on the communal nature of knowledge, and teaches important lessons for today’s information age about the legal and ethical issues of reusing information, and how to legally and ethically share it through Creative Commons licensing,” Chernik said. Access as a social justice issue Chernik developed an interest in open access to information during her years teaching academic writing through the Thompson Writing Program at Duke. Exploring open access, and what happens when people don’t have open access to information, led her to conclude that information should be available to everyone. “As I got interconnected in the open knowledge community, I learned how open source really was changing the world,” she said. “It is making education more equitable and egalitarian. I really saw it as a social justice issue.” She reached out to Red Hat, a leader in the open source movement, where her idea was enthusiastically received. “Red Hat believes that open source has value beyond software, and Aria’s vision ties into that very well,” said Tom Callaway, who works in university outreach at Red Hat. “We have been working to identify ways to promote open

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concepts in education for a number of years, and it was refreshing to see her vision towards accomplishing that.” Red Hat provided funding and support, and OSPRI began to take shape. “I’m really trying to create something that is, first and foremost, student-centered,” Chernik said. “That is rethinking education, how students want to be, and should be, educated in a way that prepares them for a 21st century world.” Scalable to other institutions The program is designed to be replicable and scalable to other educational institutions. “I really feel strongly that if this isn’t something that can be shared and remixed, then it won’t be a success,” she said. “Even if it’s successful within Duke, OSPRI is meant to be something that is a model for reuse and remix across colleges, and across K through 12.” “It’s the beginning of what education can look like,” she continued. “It’s not just a single project.” Where a student might once have served as a research assistant to a professor to gain experience, through OSPRI that student would instead focus on an area of study that is important to him or her personally. “Think about it—so many people don’t want to go into their jobs every day, and it’s

deadening,” Chernik said. “I want students to understand how to create that intellectual and joyful pursuit of something while they’re still in college, and hope that it continues after.” What’s more, she recognizes her students will need to be innovators and problem-solvers to fit in the changing landscape of the business world. In his recent keynote speech at Red Hat Summit, Jim Whitehurst talked about innovation strategies of the past, which are no longer successful because they rely on a model of “plan, proscribe, and execute.” He noted that the future is becoming more complex and less knowable, and that “planning as we know it is dead.” With that in mind, Whitehurst said the job of innovation leaders today is to create the context for individuals to act in a collective way to “try, learn, and modify.” This is precisely the job that Chernik sees as the role of a 21st century educator—to be a catalyst for creating such a context within education. As she notes, today’s student can access, free of charge, content from around the world including such as that from world-renown universities like MIT and Stanford, learning platforms like Khan Academy, and a multitude of instructional websites. That makes it challenging for universities to rely on their former status as sole transmitters of expert knowledge as justification for the high price tag. Instead, the time is now for

“ With Tom’s mentorship and SSRI’s varied portfolio of helpful resources—from communications to survey methodology—I began incubating OSPRI in a deeply interdisciplinary and supportive environment. SSRI has provided both logistical support and mentorship. Embodying the innovation of an agile startup combined with the deep expertise of a research university, SSRI is a truly unique asset to the Duke community.” ARIA CHERNIK universities to grow and adapt, Chernik said. “In the coming years, universities will face the enormous challenge of reimagining their role in the lives and careers of students, especially as alternative credentialing, such as professional badges indicating content and skills expertise, become more common,” she said. “My partnership project with Red Hat is an ideal way to demonstrate a new model for learning that emphasizes designing pedagogically scaffolded contexts for authentic, student-driven engagement with complex problem-solving.” How it works Students can come from any study area at Duke to enroll in the classes offered through OSPRI. First year students work alongside graduate students in pursuit of a project that matters to each student as an individual. Think about the work of education scientist, Sugata Mitra, who, in a series of real-life experiments in countries around the world, gave kids free, self-directed access to the internet, and learned that they not only taught themselves, but began teaching others. Then visit Duke, where self-direction is at the core of Chernik’s classes. The semester begins with explicit individual and team learning goals as well as broad thematic content areas to be covered, however, the calendar of assignments in the syllabus is almost entirely blank. In fact, Chernik sits down as an equal with her students on that first day, and together they have a conversation about what interests each individual. The class frequently concludes each week with

Chernik asking the question to each student, “what will be your next step?” “I think about us as a project team,” she said. “On the first day of class, we had a conversation about what students were interested in, not just in terms of content learning, but in doing— skills they hope to develop, concepts they wish to learn.” Anna Engelke, who recently graduated with a master’s degree in Educational Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship from UNC Chapel Hill, has worked with Chernik for over a year. “It’s the difference between active and passive learning,” Engelke said of her experience taking

classes with Chernik. “Even if the teacher was encouraging discussion, you could always slip into this passive role—I can rely on the teacher to figure out where I’m going in this class.” “I don’t think that necessarily prepares you well to being able to function, whether it’s further on in academia, or in a work environment,” she continued. “You want to have the skill of identifying a need, or identifying an interest, and moving forward.” Engelke, too, has taken her interests outside the walls of the university, leading a Scratch-based maker club at an elementary school near Duke. Scratch itself is a free, open source tool and online community that is designed with collaboration in mind. Both she and Zenke agree, course experiences through OSPRI are what they’d like to see more of. “It’s the kind of class I would take every semester if I could,” Zenke said. “And I would make all my classes like this. It offers so much freedom—we had ideas that we could just make happen so easily.

Aria Chernik guides recent Duke alumni through a survey about 21st century learning. The survey was created by students in her OSPRI course Open Knowledge and Education Innovation.

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ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS Bass Connections Team Working to Understand Political Polarization

rom debate over Confederate statues on public grounds to conversations about the NFL and the national anthem, public dialogue has become increasingly politically charged in typically apolitical spaces. These tough conversations now feel almost commonplace, with people sharing their moral, political, and religious views in ways that seem to emphasize and entrench our differences rather than foster meaningful conversation. But the ways we discuss our opinions and positions aren’t set in stone and one Education and Human Development Bass Connections team has decided it’s time for a change.

Questioning How We Communicate In an effort to increase constructive discourse and understand political polarization, the team will examine which questions increase humility and which raise barriers to communication when discussing politically charged topics. For instance, asking why a person holds a certain position tends to increase their commitment to that belief. So these crucial conversations where people are trying to understand one another are sometimes doomed from the start just because of inadvertent wording. By investigating which questions are the kind that open dialogue, the team hopes to develop

To tackle the problem of polarization from the best possible angle, it takes both disciplinary expertise and collaboration across the disciplines.

EHD Bass Team members discuss how to develop questions through which people can learn to engage thoughtfully and critically with different perspectives.

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questions that foster productive dialogue and identify the causes of defensiveness, rationalization, and polarization, so conversations can avoid these dangerous pitfalls. Their hypothesis is straightforward, but profound. If students are trained in a culture that encourages people to regularly ask themselves and others the right kinds of questions, then they’ll become better at understanding different points of view. As a result, they’ll also be better at navigating an ideologically diverse world. A Team of Diverse Perspectives Team leads Jordan Carpenter, David Malone, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Jesse Summers are working with four graduate students and four undergraduate students for the yearlong project. The members of the Education and Human Development Bass Connections team represent a number of different disciplinary approaches. It’s true to their mission of engaging other points of view and strengthens the team dynamic. “As with so many big topics, there are disciplinary ways of addressing it. But it’s not a disciplinary question,” said Jesse Summers, one of the team’s faculty leaders. Summers is also Assistant Academic Dean, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. “Political polarization, in some ways, is a political question,” he said. “But take gun control for example; there are so many other aspects to that polarization like psychological,

social, cultural, etc. There’s so much going on beneath the topic that it really does go beyond one discipline.” To tackle the problem of polarization from the best possible angle, it takes both disciplinary expertise and collaboration across the disciplines. Involving members from Philosophy, Neuroscience, Bioethics and Science Policy, the Program in Education, and the Sanford School of Public Policy to name a few, the team offers a wide range of expertise. Researchers have spent the next year mapping different kinds of questions, drawing on philosophical work on argumentation, and developing surveys and questionnaires to measure people’s confidence and commitment to their views. Their main focus is developing questions through which people can learn to engage thoughtfully and critically with different perspectives. They’re also exploring some related research areas like empathy and openness. An Evolving Project The project initially began as a conversation between Summers and postdoc Aaron Ancell, now a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics, but still an active participant on the Bass Connections team. “We both saw this call for proposals for research having to do with humility and polarization,” Summers said. “[Ancell] had this idea about questions and I had an idea about rationalization, so we started talking about how we could write up a proposal.” Their idea quickly gained steam, evolving into a project with funding and multiple team members from across Duke’s campus. Applying to be a part of Bass Connections seemed like a natural progression. While many projects in the Education and Human Development theme hosted by the Social Science Research Institute at Duke focus on childhood, their work reflects the theme’s goal of achieving positive life outcomes in an interconnected global society. It’s this interconnectedness that demands better understanding of how we communicate our thoughts and positions with one another.

While it’s still early for results, the team is already making good headway. They’ve begun by mapping out the various kinds of questions that they plan to ask, drawing on philosophical work on argumentation, justification, reasoning, and rationalization. Once the team’s developed different sets of questions, they’ll use surveys and questionnaires to examine how asking the different types of questions affect people’s confidence in and commitment to their own views as well as their attitudes toward others who disagree. Finding a large group of respondents who can take the survey will require multiple approaches. They plan to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (also known as MTurk), an online marketplace where businesses and workers share and complete thousands of assignments that don’t require a larger, more permanent workforce. It’s a service that’s ideal for finding a large group of survey respondents online. They’ll also conduct in-person surveys on Duke’s campus as well as in the community. Plans are also in the works for visiting local schools. Other outings will include the Right Question Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts and consulting with the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind.

Anticipated Outcomes While they are still working toward their research goals at the moment, the team anticipates presenting their findings at the different Bass Connections events this year, including the Education and Human Development theme’s annual culminating event EHDx. They also plan on authoring at least two academic papers reporting their findings and the issues those findings raise. The undergraduate team members will help coauthor the papers. The student roles will vary a lot over the project, Summers said, as a way of introducing them to as many sides of conducting research as time will allow. Students will provide insight as the team develops questions, conduct fieldwork, and help write up the findings. This way, students will get to apply their classroom learning about research to the design and implementation of a project from start to finish. “It’s a valuable experience that lets them put into practice classroom lessons on research methods,” Summers said. “Every time I’ve done a project like this with undergraduates, I think that’s one of the things that they get out of it the most.”

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PROFILE

Q A &

KIM CARPENTER

ON AUTISM, ANXIETY, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF COLLABORATION Your research focuses on understanding how to best help individuals with autism or other developmental disabilities reach their full potential. Can you tell us a little about your research and what you hope to achieve?

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Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) is a condition that includes children who are overly sensitive to what they feel and see and hear, but also those who are undersensitive, and still others who have trouble integrating information from multiple senses at once. Studying people who have sensory problems with or without an autism diagnosis could help these children and provide insight into the relationship between sensory problems and the core social and communication problems seen in autism.

Your current project is Sensory Processing and Anxiety in Preschool Age Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder. Can you

Have you always been interested in autism research? What led you to pursue this topic?

explain what sensory processing is and its link with autism?

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P H OTO G RA P H Y

I work with the preschool age range, pretty much anyone under the age of seven. Specifically, I am looking at understanding autism and associated psychiatric and mental health disorders such as anxiety and ADHD. The goal is to learn why kids with autism tend to have higher anxiety. I’m also interested in looking at children in that same age range that don’t have autism, but do have high anxiety. The big question is, are there shared pathways in kids who develop anxiety?

It’s a complex and important question. The research looks exclusively at sensory disorders in children with autism, who seem to have heightened responses to sensory experiences that cause distress: loud noises, tags in t-shirts, etc. Are these pathways to anxiety for kids with autism? A lot of kids with autism also have these types of sensory issues. So what does that mean? Through this work, I hope to increase access to, and provide a solid neurobiological foundation for, evidence-based screening, diagnosis and treatment of autism and associated psychiatric comorbidities in children.

“We can only get answers if we have multiple perspectives so collaboration is essential when looking at the brain, behavior, and interaction. Collaboration is the key to understanding these really difficult questions.” Yes, I’ve always known I wanted to do this type of research. Well, after I gave up on my dreams of being a dolphin trainer. No, seriously. I went to college to be a marine biologist, but during three years at college I also worked with a child that had autism. Whenever he got anxious, his social relatedness would decrease and repetitive behaviors would increase. I was enamored by him and became fascinated with the disorder and wanted to understand more. How does autism affect children differently? How is it treated? How does this affect families? I specifically went to graduate school to study autism. When I became a postdoc I studied preschool anxiety and now as a faculty member, I am researching brain development.

Is autism more prevalent today or just being diagnosed better?

The data shows that the answer is a bit of both. There are more diagnoses but also more knowledge. Evidence suggests that increases are over and above what is to be expected just from better diagnoses and services. There are definitely other factors that are causing the increase of autism and the goal is to better understand what those factors are. There are studies dedicated to just this type of research.

how to support kids in an effort to better deal with their sensory disorders. You work with other researchers from a wide range of disciplines and include faculty in the School of Medicine, Pratt School of Engineering, and the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. What are the benefits of this type of collaboration?

This is my calling. Early childhood mental health, brain development, autism…it’s all so complicated and interesting. We can only get answers if we have multiple perspectives so collaboration is essential when looking at the brain, behavior, and interaction. Collaboration is the key to understanding these really difficult questions. We are working with a multiple level big data question that involves parent reports, observations of the children, brain-based data on large samples, and more. I’m a neurobiologist working with psychiatrists, psychologists, and

experts in computer vision so that we can get quantitative and objective measures of behavior. Machine learning enables us to take the big data and capitalize on the multilevel data. If you simply look at your research in your silo, you’re going to miss the big picture completely. Having people with different expertise allows us to make big gains in our research. How did you hear about SSRI and what are the benefits of working with the Institute?

I got linked up with SSRI once I started working with Guillermo Sapiro in engineering and iiD. SSRI was our hub to bring together this multidisciplinary team to push our work forward. SSRI is the home of the same mindset as me: a multidisciplinary approach to research. Tom has really tried to help foster my career and I have benefited greatly from working with the grants staff and getting help at the Connection Bar. And of course, the coffee is great!

KIM CARPENTER Assistant Research Professor, Social Science Research Institute Medical Instructor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Psychiatry, Child & Family Mental Health and Developmental Neuroscience

What are your hopes for children and families that are dealing with autism?

If we can identify kids that are at risk, we can change their trajectory in life. Parents will better recognize the behaviors and early intervention equals better outcomes. For parents and doctors there is dealing with the disability after diagnoses. What comes next? Hopefully our research will help people understand the risk factors and mechanisms and how to use that information for targeted interventions. Most of all, it’s important to teach parents

Dr. Carpenter is a neurobiologist specializing in translational developmental neuroscience, with expertise in functional and structural neuroimaging in clinical and pediatric populations. Dr. Carpenter’s research focuses on three primary content areas: (A) The neuroscience of early childhood mental health, (B) Risk factors for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders in preschool-age children, and (C) The development of new technologies for evidenced-based screening for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in young children. Through this work, she aims to increase access to, and provide a solid neurobiological foundation for, evidence-based screening, diagnosis and treatment of autism and associated psychiatric comorbidities in children from birth to 5 years of age.

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HELPING SCHOLARS Fund and Follow Their Passions

GRANTS TEAM SUPPORTS RESEARCH ACTIVITY ACROSS DUKE

etting the right funding is crucial to innovative research, but navigating the ins and outs of the process can take valuable time away from the research itself. For scholars at Duke, the Social Science Research Institute is committed to making this process as smooth and efficient as possible so the real focus can be the research. Led by Grants Program Director Heather Tipaldos, the team of eight offers a full menu of support for researchers, from pre-award to post-award services. Heather Tipaldos This includes coordinating preparation of materials for proposal submission, establishing administrative structures for awarded projects, ensuring project requirements like IRB approvals are in place, and providing ongoing support for reporting requirements. It’s a do-it-all shop that helps scholars find, secure, and fulfill funding opportunities and their requirements.

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And Tipaldos, naturally, is thrilled her team can provide this service to researchers across Duke and Duke Health. “The team is really bonded,” she said. “We support each other and go to each other with questions and our needs. We’re constantly sharing and talking about ways to accomplish the work better.” Supporting Research Across Duke True to the interdisciplinary mission of the Institute, faculty from across Duke University and the Duke University Health System have used SSRI as a resource for their social sciencerelated research activities. Scholars at the Sanford School of Public Policy, the Nicholas School of the Environment, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences departments, Oncology, and Epidemiology have worked with SSRI grant specialists to secure funding for their work. And this year has seen a number of new awards for scholars at Duke.

From researching the housing market in the Great Lakes to methods for increasing college access for Appalachian girls, the projects represent a number of different approaches and disciplines tackling important social issues. What Faculty Are Saying: Sociology For nearly twenty years, Mark Chaves has made it his mission to gather data on American religious practices and preferences to locate trends in how Americans Mark Chaves worship. A professor with appointments in sociology, religious studies, and divinity, his interest in religion stems from his childhood in Queens, New York, where his father was a Presbyterian minister. Growing up in the church, Chaves became interested in American religion and worship when teachings at his Lutheran parochial school differed from his Presbyterian church in some key ways. This interest developed into an impressive career investigating American religion.

“I’m trying to focus on the substance of the research,” he said. “So it’s been very helpful having this guidance shepherding [the proposal] through all of Duke’s internal systems and the other approval processes. I’m sure they’ll be as helpful with post-award management too.”

He’s since guided three waves of the National Congregation Study, a survey of nationally representative samples of congregations. Approximately 1,200 leaders of mosques, synagogues, churches, and Hindu temples are interviewed for the study. The fourth wave has received the go-ahead with funding from the Lily Endowment. With the help of the SSRI grants team, Chaves secured that funding and an award from the John Templeton Foundation for a related project entitled the National Study of Religious Leaders. “The idea is to do a follow-up study of the leaders associated with these congregations so that we’ll have a profile of them as well as their congregation,” Chaves said. The researchers will then have a more fleshed out picture of the data with responses from the congregations and their leaders, assistants, and other key figures. For Chaves, the grants team has been a valuable resource. At Duke for 11 years, he’s worked with them regularly to secure grants for his work.

What Faculty Are Saying: SSRI For economist Gale Boyd, working with the grants teams at SSRI just makes sense. After all, as associate research professor at SSRI, he has grants Gale Boyd specialists literally around the corner from his office. But even when that wasn’t the case and his appointment was in economics, Boyd drew on their expertise for his work with federal and sensitive data. In addition to his research, Boyd also serves as director of the Triangle Research Data Center (TRDC) on Duke’s campus. It’s one of 27 secure federal statistical research centers managed by the U.S. Census Bureau. Through the TRDC, he is able to work with specialized data sets that require extra layers of security. When the strict environment of the TRDC isn’t required, Boyd often relies on the Protected Research Data Network (PRDN) at SSRI. The PRDN provides a secure environment for sensitive data from other, non-government sources. Using the TRDC and the PRDN, Boyd conducts research in multiple economic areas, including industrial energy demand, emissions, and productivity. He’s worked specifically on the EPA Energy Star voluntary energy efficiency program for some time now through a series of EPA grants. Recently, he was awarded a grant by National Resources Canada to expand his study of the Energy Star program to industry in both the U.S. and Canada. “We have requirements that aren’t typical of [National Science Foundation] or [National Institutes of Health] types of grants, so I work very closely with the grants team here to meet the requirements,” Boyd said. “They’ve made what would otherwise be a much more complicated life simpler. Having a partner in that process is really important.”

What Faculty Are Saying: Evolutionary Anthropology Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology Jenny Tung studies the role of gene regulation in explaining social environmental effects on Jenny Tung fertility, health, and survival across the life course using mammalian models for human health. These mammalian models have included a population of wild baboons in Kenya through a collaboration with the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, rhesus macaques in captivity, and meerkats through a collaboration with the Kalahari Meerkat Project. Throughout her time at Duke, Tung has worked with the SSRI grants team for her research activities. Together, they’ve secured a number of recent grants for Tung’s work. “[They] are incredibly valuable to us and we love working with them,” Tung said. “They’re organized and responsive and we have great rapport. We submitted a lot of grants last [academic] year and I think we couldn’t have done it without them.” These awards include a National Science Foundation RAPID grant for a project on the Damaraland mole rat in South Africa. This funding mechanism is used for proposals having a severe urgency with regard to availability of, or access to, data. It’s often used for proposals that collect data from recent or ongoing natural disasters. For this research, Tung’s funding supports travel for herself and a postdoc to South Africa to collect samples from an established lab that she’s collaborated with previously and that specializes in the Damaraland mole rat. The initial experiment was ran by another lab and planned to close, so Tung and her researchers needed immediate access to funds to collect what they needed before the colony of mole rats was no longer available to study. “I was in Kenya at the time doing fieldwork on baboons,” Tung said. “I think this is a great example of the kind of work that simply won’t happen if you don’t have excellent grants support.”

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ST U DY

Mod U •

Providing practical information in a flexible format

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o succeed in any new territory, first learn the language. In that sense, Matt Masten’s Mod•U videos on causal inference could be considered the Rosetta Stone series of econometrics. “Every field has its own jargon and methods,” said Masten, an assistant professor in the economics department who researches econometrics. “The first goal of our videos is to help bridge that gap between what’s being done in economics and what students outside that field know.” The Social Science Research Institute created Mod•U as a short, simple, straightforward way for students taking research courses outside of their major to learn the concepts and terminology they need to know to make the most of a class tangential to their field. Unlike traditional MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) such as Coursera and Lynda that try to replicate a traditional lecture online, Mod•U videos aim to explain concepts in bite-size pieces. “You could watch one on the bus or while walking between classes,” Masten said. The videos, at modu.ssri.duke.edu, are grouped by concept category—“Noncompliance,” “Basics of Regression Discontinuity,” “Your Guide to

Instrumental Variables” and more—and each topic has a half dozen to two dozen short videos, most presented lecture style, as if the viewer has a private tutor explaining the concept one-on-one. Rather than take the place of a textbook, the videos are meant to supplement what’s taught in class—a refresher for upper-level students who have not thought about the concepts since their early days at Duke, or for students who need to get up to speed right away while taking an upper-level elective and don’t have time to take an entire prerequisite class. The modules also enable a professor to bring forth new concepts that haven’t yet appeared in classic textbooks. “Part of the idea of the videos was to push some of these ideas that aren’t taught at the undergraduate level and make them accessible to undergrads,” Masten said. Masten put together his videos to support Bass Connections classes, in which undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty come together to conduct multidisciplinary research. Mod•U enables professors to customize learning and squeeze out extra time in a lecture. The videos fill in gaps in a student’s knowledge that the professor won’t cover in class, leaving more time to synthesize and analyze ideas. Will Goldsmith, a doctoral student in history,

Jim Speckart recording Will Goldsmith, graduate student in the Department of History, explaining the invention and impact of annual testing policies in schools.

Mod•U enables professors to customize learning and squeeze out extra time in a lecture. The videos fill in gaps in a student’s knowledge that the professor won’t cover in class, leaving more time to synthesize and analyze ideas. made some of the videos over the course of a year. The modules are not so much a substitution for a classroom lecture as they are an amplification, he said. Each of the topics he chose could have been a 50-minute lecture by itself, but “we were trying to create a condensed understanding,” he said. Goldsmith, working with Jim Speckart, program manager for instructional design at SSRI, recorded lessons pertinent to the history of education and education policy, such as major public policy challenges that school reformers tried to address in creating a public school system. Each video runs from 5 to 15 minutes long. He sees them used in a homework setting, as a way to frame assigned readings so as to be prepared with what questions they want to take up in class. “Videos stick with you more than reading a monograph at 2 in the morning,” he said. Making the videos was far more timeconsuming than preparing a PowerPoint presentation for a lecture. Goldsmith and Speckart looked for creative ways to take the videos beyond a traditional talking head. They interspersed images and pull-quotes, then went back through the recordings to sharpen them with editing.

“It was a lot of work,” Goldsmith admitted, but the videos can be reused for years because the concepts don’t change much over time. Masten, because he had so many topics to cover, opted for a less polished production. Speckart recorded him sitting at a desk, explaining a concept. Writing a script would be too time consuming, Masten said, so his only aid was a computer screen off-camera with slides of his prompts as he would have for any lecture he delivered. But he sometimes did 15 or more takes to make sure he was clear and succinct in the posted video. The resulting modules consisted of a network of ideas that encouraged non-linear learning. “You get the concepts you need right now the fastest, without looking at all the side concepts that you would get in a usual class,” he said. “Once you have the concept, you can go to the examples you care about and skip the ones you don’t.” The grab-and-go format appealed to economics professor Chris Timmins, who wanted to bring some of the undergraduates in his environmental economics class up to speed in basic econometric methods. His class is interdisciplinary, and he doesn’t want to turn students away for lack of an understanding of econometrics. He asked Masten

and Speckart to bundle some videos that would give students a quick sense of what’s happening when they begin implementing data in their work groups. The video content ranges from the most basic concepts through quite advanced material. Students can watch any combination of the videos as they see fit. Timmins doesn’t require students to watch any of the videos, but he lets them know that they will be able to participate better in their group work if they have the tools explicated in the modules. “Students can watch them at their leisure and get themselves up to speed,” he said. The egalitarian nature of the videos appeals to Masten. They are available online without charge—neither Duke nor SSRI makes any profit from them. Anyone anywhere in the world can watch them for free and get a feel for what these modern methods are,” Masten said. “Hopefully, we’re making it as easy as possible to access and consume this material, so people can learn these concepts that are fundamental to making good decisions and good policy.”

(L-R beginning on opposite page) Matt Masten discussing the tricky nuances of studying cause and effect in real world data science; John Jackson talking about the ethics of doing research in your own community, where your job as a researcher changes your social role and power dynamic with your subjects; Amanda Flaim explains when you can tell that you’re done collecting qualitative research data; Will Goldsmith providing a list of key books for learning about inequality in schools and access to education; Amy Bostic teaches the differences between multi-level modeling techniques.

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