I am seeking undergraduate research partners for two First Year Research Experience (FYRE) projects during Spring 2026. Please visit the S&T FYRE website to apply!
Deadline to apply: October 24, 2025
FYRE Project #1: Beyond the Red Flag: Faculty Heuristics for Spotting AI Writing
This project explores how faculty decide whether a text was written by a student or generated by AI. The student researcher will work with me to examine faculty comments from a survey, identifying patterns in the strategies and cues they describe. The FYRE researcher will help code and organize these responses, group them into themes, and collaborate in interpreting what these patterns reveal about how writing is judged in academic settings. The FYRE researcher will also contribute to preparing a research report and a poster presentation to share our findings with a broader audience.
Timeline:
Weeks 1–4: Analyze accuracy and confidence data; run statistical comparisons
Weeks 4–8: Write up results and interpretations
Weeks 9–12: Prepare research poster for student conference submission
Skills Acquired:
Quantitative data analysis and statistics (Excel)
Critical thinking about AI and authorship in higher education
Scholarly writing for presentation
Research project management and collaboration
FYRE Project #2: When Faculty Disagree: Confidence, Accuracy, and AI Detection in Student Writing
Faculty survey respondents were asked not only to decide if writing was student- or AI-generated, but also to rate their confidence in those choices. This project investigates how confident faculty felt in their judgments and how accurate those judgments were. The FYRE researcher will assist in analyzing survey data to measure faculty accuracy rates, compare confidence across different groups of instructors (by discipline, experience, or institution type), and identify where patterns of disagreement emerge. The FYRE researcher will play an active role in running analyses, interpreting results, and drafting a research poster aimed at presentation in an undergraduate research conference.
Timeline:
Weeks 1–4: Analyze accuracy and confidence data; run statistical comparisons
Weeks 4–8: Write up results and interpretations
Weeks 9–12: Prepare research poster for student conference submission
Skills Acquired:
Quantitative data analysis and statistics (Excel)
Critical thinking about AI and authorship in higher education
Scholarly writing for presentation
Research project management and collaboration
Digital Representations of Research
Because so much research is presented digitally, my assistants are often asked to help me develop interactive visual representations of my work. The timeline below, for example, was co-developed with ETC major, Victoria Busse; it maps occasions of “nunsploitation” films along with major feminist movements and milestones.