Discussion: Key Ideas

This thematic synthesis explored the nature, value, and impact of engaging in innovative interdisciplinary exploratory research projects through NSF EXPs. Although each project had unique characteristics driven by the diverse nature of the learning environments, participants, and emerging technologies being studied, taken as a whole, several key ideas became evident:

Exploration and Discovery Across New Frontiers

• Engaging in interdisciplinary, exploratory research creates a space for passion projects in underappreciated and understudied spaces.
• Exploratory research programs, such as NSF EXPs, create opportunities for collaborations across disciplines to support multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work.
• Engaging with data in semistructured and unstructured problem spaces gives PIs the flexibility to focus on unanswered, novel, and reframed research questions to develop something new.
• Engaging in interdisciplinary, exploratory research provides the freedom to re-imagine the future for aspirational technologies in under-researched areas.

Equitable Co-Designed Learning and Practice

• Co-designing for teaching and learning requires the flexibility to change course to meet emergent needs of researchers, partners and participants.
• Developing equitable emerging technologies for learning requires engaging with learner variability and user-directed customization.
• When co-designing with users, it is crucial to take intersectionality into account and use exploratory approaches to seek input from underrepresented voices.
• Equitable, co-designed, interdisciplinary, exploratory research draws on practitioner expertise to support student interactions and knowledge building.

Emerging Impact Through Networked Communities

• PIs often do not know what the future impacts of their exploratory work will be—scaling beyond originally proposed ideas can be seen as a demonstration of impact.
• Participation in networked communities such as CIRCLS promotes PIs’ growth by tapping into a national expert group with diverse, interdisciplinary knowledge and perspectives.
• Researchers who do exploratory projects that don’t fit established research trajectories face barriers to disseminating novel or unprecedented research findings.
• Networked community feedback on the utility of emerging technologies across learning environments elevates the impact and reach of this interdisciplinary, exploratory research.

In preparing this synthesis, we discovered that PIs’ experiences conducting interdisciplinary, exploratory research led to multiple opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned. Insights from NSF-funded exploratory research projects illuminated the flexible and adaptive nature of interdisciplinary, exploratory research and created space for PIs to develop contextually rich and novel understandings of understudied topics in Artificial Intelligence, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Collaborative Learning, Accessibility and Learning, and Simulations.

View Appendix B: Principal Investigator Interviews

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