Introduction: Involving African American Students in Interdisciplinary Research

Dr. Turley was interested in attaining more African American students into interdisciplinary Research here at Indiana-University-Purdue-University-Indianapolis. Our team of four professional writing students have assembled a concise and cohesive recommendation report for your Olaniyan Scholars Program. Our recommendations focus on getting African American students interested in interdisciplinary research, and keeping them engaged in research fields long term. We investigated the prospective issue extensively for three months, and have prepared information we believe valuable to the Olaniyan Scholars Program. With help from various databases and search engines provided by the IUPUI library portal, this report contains a literature review, explanation of methodology, a survey, recommendations and our final analysis.

Olaniyan Scholars Program challenged the team with the scope of getting African American Students interested in interdisciplinary research at IUPUI. The team explored multiple databases to track previous African American involvement in research at institutions of higher learning. Some of the databases and search engines the team used are:

EBSCO
ProQuest
Google Scholar
Google

Client Meeting: Having a framework for the recommendation Report

The team met with Dr. Patricia Turley, the Associate director of the Olaniyan Scholars Program and Clinical Assistant faculty at IUPUI on Wednesday February, 23 2022 to confirm the scope of the project. This meeting was fundamental in clarifying the needs of the Olaniyan Scholars Program and understanding what is possible for the program to implement in terms of budgeting and resource allocation.

Digital Research Process: Terms used in on online databases and search engines

At the beginning of the research process, the team collectively researched the databases to explore as many resources as possible on the scope of the project. Some of the search phrases that we used across different databases were:

“Interdisciplinary research”
“Interdisciplinary research” + “Black students”
“Statistics on African Americans and Research”
“African Americans in Research”

The team assembled a sixteen-source annotated bibliography in the first three weeks of the project. On top of the annotated sources, other sources were utilized to round out the review of literature, support the analysis section, and back up the recommendations made in the project. Findings were shared by the team in a Google Drive folder, where all team members had access to the research other members were examining.

In addition to our scholarly research, our team wanted to hear from African American students at IUPUI directly, so we designed a local study that was helpful in collecting local data about IUPUI students.

Local Study: Hearing from IUPUI students through a seven-question survey

To collect information from IUPUI African American students, our team designed a seven question survey with Google Forms. Google Forms was chosen for making the survey because it was free, and because it afforded the most ease and efficiency to both us and our participants. The aim of the survey was twofold: first, to learn about the research standing of African American students at IUPUI, and second, to inform African American students about the presence of research opportunities on campus. The survey demographic was African American undergraduate students at IUPUI. The survey was distributed through email to different African American clubs and organizations on the IUPUI campus.

Methodology

The survey was designed in a multiple form format so that the responses would be easily quantifiable. The survey had slow traction at the beginning due to issues with the link; the data was received very slowly over 5 weeks with a total of [blank] responses. Respondents had the opportunity to tell the team:

If they were currently involved in research,
Whether they were interested in research and if they knew proper action steps to take if they wanted to get started.
What would motivate them to do research

The questions were formed to meet the goals of the survey of knowing the IUPUI African American research involvement and informing them about the availability of paid research opportunities at IUPUI.

The survey questions are in appendix A. The results of the survey were vital in shaping the recommendations to the Olaniyan Scholars Program on how to get African American students at IUPUI interested in interdisciplinary research.

Challenges faced while exploring digital research and collecting survey information

While the research conducted by the team has been fundamental in shaping the recommendations in this report, it came with many challenges. Very early on in our digital exploration, the team found out that there is very little literature about African Americans doing research at institutions of higher education. Most of the research collected had to be taken from work done in other areas of academia surrounding this demographic.

For example, some research was conducted on attracting African American students in STEM programs, and another resource explored organizations that promote African American retention in college. Some of the information used in articles like these was used to inform some of the recommendations made in the report.

The team also reached out to specific people in academia that work with African American college students in hope that they had other resources the team could use. One of the experts the team reached out to was Tia Brown McNair, the Vice President in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and the Executive director for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC. The response from Dr. McNair read, “I am not sure if I have access to any additional research that you don't already have access to as part of your literature review. The field is quite narrow on these topics. So glad you are taking the lead” (McNair, 2022, March, 23). [Personal Email].

The team also reached out to Tonya Shelton, the Program Director at the Center for Research and Learning at IUPUI. Just like Tia Brown McNair, she did not have a lot of resources the team could exploit. So the team searched different research based web pages at different universities and national conferences to see if there has been any work submitted that could assist the team, but those resources did not provide scholarly evidence to further explore the scope of the project. The other webpages explored include:

National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR)
DS-UROP
DSRP
Center for Research and Learning showcases

The strategies disclosed in this section helped the team maximize their productivity on the project by collectively investing approximately 120 hours of research time over the 10-week period of the project.