StudyCrafter is an intelligent platform developed by an interdisciplinary team from Northeastern University, University of Houston-Clear Lake, University of California at Santa Cruz, and New York University, designed to empower students to design, conduct, and analyze research studies with the aid of AI. By implementing this platform in undergraduate university courses, we address the logistical, cognitive, and affective barriers inherent in conducting research and preparing the next generation of researchers and critical thinkers. Over the past six years, the NU team has been developing the infrastructure for StudyCrafter, and we are now well-positioned to extend it to deliver an active learning environment in research methods courses across multiple institutions and disciplines.

Current research methods education provides students with limited experiences due to the challenges involved in conducting research. It also suffers from students' anxiety, lack of interest, and poor motivation, as most students find such courses to be irrelevant to their studies and lives. StudyCrafter provides an active learning education where students can easily create simple interactive scenarios or experiments, with the help of AI assistance, and then deploy them online to automatically collect data. The team's prior successful work found promise in this transformation: students were deeply engaged in developing creative scenarios that are also scientifically rigorous studies. In this project, we are building on this work and taking it to the next level to disseminate StudyCrafter and its underlying educational model.

Expand the current architecture to provide tools that can assist students in analyzing data.

Include interactive content to teach specific knowledge and skills (e.g., running a t-test, IRB).

Add AI support for generating synthetic data to alleviate the participant recruitment problem.

Develop automatic prompt and scaffolding methods to allow learning through reflection, encouraging students to critically reflect on their design and analysis in terms of scientific rigor, ethics, and inclusivity.

The aim of this proposed work is to develop and iterate a flexible and scalable educational model for research methods education. This educational model is embodied by and studied with StudyCrafter. Grounded in active learning, our key contributions address the issues in current research methods education (i.e., cognitive, affective, and logistical barriers) while tackling the challenges resulting from the proposed change to this educational model. We achieve this through a deeper understanding of how students learn research methods and how such learning needs to be scaffolded through the design of the learning environment. We will accomplish this by developing a gamified active learning environment in the form of StudyCrafter, collaborating closely with others on an adaptable student-centered curriculum design, incorporating AI-assisted support and learning, and then evaluating the outcomes to see if they help promote scientific rigor and critical reflection. New StudyCrafter versions will be developed based on new design conjectures and by increasing the scope of the intervention after each iteration.

In addition to acquiring research methods skills, designing and analyzing research studies through StudyCrafter leads to students developing and applying computational thinking and data science skills, learning how to work with AI, thinking through the implications and possibilities of harnessing virtual or online environments, and becoming critically reflective of their work—all aspects that are important for the future of work. Our work prepares the next generation of workers who are not only critical consumers of information but also able to leverage new technologies in their work. As research methods are taught across many disciplines, our work can have far-reaching impacts on improving the educational experience of countless students in the USA and worldwide. To facilitate these broader impacts, we will disseminate best practices and instructional resources through the StudyCrafter platform, which is hosted on a website and freely accessible. Finally, given that the platform is fully online, the proposed work will be buoyant, elastic, and resilient for a disruption of the educational system at the scale experienced due to COVID-19.

Demo Video