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This commentary encourages mentors to incorporate two key practices into undergraduate research and creative inquiry: open science and public-facing scholarship. Open science promotes transparency and accessibility in research, and public scholarship focuses on sharing academic work beyond traditional academic audiences. To support faculty as they guide students through these practices, we introduce the design, analysis, perform, action (DAPA) framework, a simple decision-making tool. This approach helps students take an active role in their research experiences. We provide two examples from liberal arts undergraduate institutions to illustrate how faculty have used the model in practice. The commentary ends with four practical lessons for mentors, highlighting the importance of intentionality and collaboration with students.
Abstract
This commentary encourages mentors to incorporate two key practices into undergraduate research and creative inquiry: open science and public-facing scholarship. Open science promotes transparency and accessibility in research, and public scholarship focuses on sharing academic work beyond traditional academic audiences. To support faculty as they guide students through these practices, we introduce the design, analysis, perform, action (DAPA) framework, a simple decision-making tool. This approach helps students take an active role in their research experiences. We provide two examples from liberal arts undergraduate institutions to illustrate how faculty have used the model in practice. The commentary ends with four practical lessons for mentors, highlighting the importance of intentionality and collaboration with students.
Keywords: collaborative, community-based research, high-impact practice, scholarly engagement
We propose that faculty members can increase student agency when they emphasize transparency and scholarly communication in their mentorship of undergraduates, helping them feel more ownership of their work (Strand and Brown 2019). Research shows that students experi-ence a range of benefits from undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative inquiry (URSCI), including improved skills, confidence, and a stronger sense of academic identity (Baker and McCaffrey 2023; Baker, McCaffrey, and Manning 2022; Chamely-Wiik et al. 2023; Haeger et al. 2020). Effective mentoring plays a key role in helping students accrue these benefits (Lunsford et al. 2017; Russell, Hancock, and McCullough 2007). Faculty also gain from mentoring undergraduate research experiences, reporting increased satisfaction, motivation, and sense of purpose in their work (National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine 2019; Potter et al. 2009).
URSCI takes many forms across disciplines- from course-based projects in the humanities to lab research in the sciences and engineering (Ahmad and Al-Thani 2022; Buchanan and Fisher 2022). It advances disciplinary knowledge while supporting student learning and engagement. Nevertheless, students often struggle to see how these experiences relate to the world beyond academia. In this commentary, we invite mentors from all disciplines to consider two practices that can make URSCI more meaningful for students: open science and scholarly communication. These practices help students understand how their work connects to broader conversations and contributes to society. As public trust in academic research declines, helping students share their work clearly and transparently is increasingly important (Mintz 2024).
We highlight the Open Science Framework (OSF) as one tool that supports this goal. Although OSF originated in psychology and related fields, its principles of transparency and accessibility apply widely. Some disciplines, especially those involving private or proprietary research, may face limits on public sharing. But openness is often possible through methods sharing, public summaries, or creative outputs.
Drawing on the work of Kathawalla, Silverstein, and Syed (2021), we developed the design, approach, perform, action (DAPA) framework to help faculty mentors integrate open science and scholarly communication with URSCI. The framework emphasizes student agency, transparency, and real-world relevance as central to effective mentorship.
DAPA Framework
DAPA is not a linear checklist. Rather, it offers four distinct but interconnected domains of practice. Each stage prompts reflection and decision-making by students and mentors, encouraging intentionality from project conception through dissemination (see Figure 1).
Design: Planning with Purpose
Design focuses on co-creating the foundation of a project. Students and mentors collaborate to define research questions or creative goals, identify intended audiences (including public ones), and establish how openness and communication will be embedded from the start. Key questions include:
* Whatis the purpose of the work?
* Who are the intended stakeholders or audiences?
* How will transparency and public sharing be built into the process?
Design is about vision, values, and early structure, not just logistics.
Approach: Building the Process
Approach emphasizes methods, documentation, and reproducibility. Students learn how to make their processes clear enough for others to follow or learn from. This might include writing methods sections, creating protocols, or simply learning how to explain their process to others. Students make choices about:
* How they will document decisions, processes, and revisions.
* What tools or platforms support openness (e.g., shared drives, version control, public documentation platforms).
* How the process will align with ethical, disciplinary, and community-based standards.
Importantly, analysis fits here, as students are guided to make their work traceable, understandable, and trustworthy.
Perform: Doing and Creating
Perform centers on the actual work, whether it is collecting data, making art, writing code, or building models. Students bring the project to life, while continuing to reflect on how the work connects to the goals set during the design phase. Performance includes:
* Developing scholarly or creative outputs that reflect the project goals.
* Applying skills to contribute meaningfully to the larger effort.
* Tteratively checking whether their work is aligned with the communication and transparency goals set earlier.
Students begin thinking about how their work can be shaped for sharing, but dissemination itself belongs in the next phase.
Action: Sharing and Impact
Action is about intentional dissemination. Students consider how their work can be shared beyond the classroom or lab and why that matters. This can include:
* Publishing results, presenting at conferences, or producing public-facing materials.
* Engaging stakeholders in discussion (e.g., policy briefs, community forums).
* Reflecting on how their work contributes to public knowledge, creative discourse, or community problemsolving.
Action is not just about finishing, it is about using and communicating the work to create value beyond the original context.
The DAPA framework enhances open science and scholarly communication by structuring them as part of each phase of a project, not just as final steps. It ensures that students consider transparency, replicability, and accessibility ongoing priorities. By supporting students in both the "how" and the "why" of openness, DAPA turns abstract ideals into teachable practices, building habits of clear communication, ethical collaboration, and critical thinking. In the following sections, we describe how we have applied this model in practice, offering examples that mentors from various fields can adapt to their own URSCI contexts.
Psychology Case Study
At Campbell University, a small liberal arts institution in North Carolina, Laura Lunsford led a research initiative called Leading Workforce Effectiveness. Funded by a two-year grant, the project examined how the COVID19 pandemic affected teacher retention in rural school districts. Ten undergraduate students from psychology and education participated through independent studies or paid assistantships. This case study shows how their experience was shaped by the DAPA framework, making the work more transparent, collaborative, and connected to the world beyond the classroom.
Design: Co-Creating the Research Path
In the first lab meeting, the faculty mentor introduced the students to the values of openness and public communication cation in research. These ideas were unfamiliar to many students, and initially felt intimidating. But with guided discussion, the group explored how they could design a project that not only collected data, but also shared insights with school leaders and policymakers.
Together, the team made two key decisions. First, they chose to organize their work on a public online platform through the Center for Open Science (n.d.) that allowed them to document their progress and share their findings. Each student created an account and was added to the project, making them full participants from the beginning. Second, the students helped plan a website to explain the project in clear language. Four students learned basic web design with support from a senior investigator. Every student submitted a short biography and photograph to be included, giving them a sense of ownership and visibility as contributors. These design choices helped students see themselves not just as helpers, but as co-creators.
Approach: Learning by Doing and Reflecting
As the research progressed, students helped plan their role in the study. Some were drawn to data analysis, others to writing or literature review. The faculty mentor encouraged students to reflect on their interests and goals, then matched them to tasks that developed those skills. For example, one student chose to focus on creating an annotated bibliography of existing research on teacher turnover. Another student worked on early data analysis, learning how to clean and organize information.
Throughout this phase, students were encouraged to think about how their work might be understood and used by others. Why would this matter to a policymaker or a teacher? How can we explain our process so others can trust or even replicate it? These conversations helped students think beyond grades or classroom success and toward broader impact.
Perform: Sharing Work in Real Time
Instead of waiting until the end of the project to produce a final paper, students were encouraged to consider shareable products they could author during their USCRI experience. Some students had one semester in the USCRI experience, whereas others had four semesters. Therefore performance goals reflected the students' interest and available time. In the lab, students and the faculty mentors brainstormed regarding possible products to help students understand that an annotated literature review could be a published output, or that documentation tion of their qualitative coding skills might be a documented outcome. These discussions made research feel more active, real, and valuable.
Action: Sharing for Real-World Impact
The focus on openness led to multiple forms of public engagement. Several students helped write and edit research briefs that were shared directly with school leaders across the state. One student published her annotated bibliography on the study website, thereby also summarizing the work for stakeholders. Student work also was featured in a story in the university's alumni magazine, bringing attention to the project and its relevance for local schools. Another student copresented with a faculty mentor at a local education conference, an experience that helped her build confidence in her communication skills and professional identity.
The public website, codesigned by students, became a platform for sharing findings, summaries, and studentcreated content. It gave students something concrete they could show to future employers or graduate programs. One student remarked that having their name on the project website helped them explain their research experience in job interviews, and made them feel like a professional, not just a student.
Through the DAPA framework, students were not just doing research, they were helping shape it, understand it, and share it. By involving them in decisions early on, supporting learning goals, and creating space for scholarly communication, this approach turned a typical undergraduate research experience into one that fostered agency, confidence, and a clearer sense of purpose.
Student-Led Experiential Research Model
At Albion College, students are not only learning about leadership and management, they are practicing it. This case highlights how community partnerships became a form of research, learning, and real-world contribution, led by students and guided by the DAPA framework. Vicki Baker, a management instructor and faculty project, used a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to launch the Albion College Community Collaborative (AC3). AC3 brought students together with local organizations to solve real-world problems, an experience that merged classroom learning with hands-on consulting. As the project evolved, so did the vision: how could students help shape the future of experiential learning at Albion? Through the DAPA framework, students were not just participants in research; they helped improve systems for learning that benefited the campus and surrounding community.
Design: Co-Creating Mission and Strategy
From the start, students played a central role in shaping the direction of the project. They were not just collecting data; they helped define the research questions, identify key campus and community partners, and propose tools for gathering information. In team planning meetings, students worked alongside faculty to scope goals for the project. They planned to create student surveys and draft interview guides, and contributed to planning infrastructure, such as a public website to showcase experiential learning or an application process for future community partners. Their ideas helped ensure that the systems being built were accessible, student-centered, and responsive to community needs. This early involvement built student ownership and gave students a chance to think critically about how research, learning, and social impact intersect.
Approach: Aligning Learning Goals with Meaningful Contributions
Students were not randomly assigned tasks: they were guided to choose roles aligned with their academic and career goals. Some students focused on qualitative research, whereas others worked on benchmarking strategies used by peer institutions. These personal goals were aligned with the larger project mission, creating a sense of purpose. For example, one student planned a summer project on improving the ways AC3 communicated with local stakeholders. To achieve that goal, she determined that peer institution research was a strong approach to achieving this aim.
The approach that guided the project work was to ask big-picture questions: Who are we trying to serve? What do they need? How can we make the work more transparent and more useful? These discussions helped students develop both research skills and a mindset of service.
Perform: Creating Deliverables That Inform Real Decisions
Students produced deliverables that were actively used by the college and community. These included reports summarizing marizing survey findings, briefs comparing peer programs, and recommendations for how to improve experiential learning on campus. Students presented their findings to institutional leaders and community stakeholders, helping to shape new ideas for improving communication, engagement, and access to experiential opportunities. In these moments - crafting a research brief, speaking to local leaders, or analyzing alumni feedback- students saw that their work had weight, and it mattered.
Action: Driving Change Beyond the Classroom
The emphasis on real-world use of student research led to broad visibility and lasting impact. Students led two community meetings that brought together former clients, potential partners, and local officials. They listened, and they also asked questions, facilitated discussions, and documented insights. Afterward, they helped compile and share reports with attendees, building transparency and trust. Their findings also were shared with the college president, provost, and task forces charged with shaping future strategy. Several student-authored recommendations have already influenced institutional policies around experiential learning.
AC3 is now not only a student experience, it is a student legacy. Because of their work, Albion College has clearer systems, stronger partnerships, and a deeper understanding of how to connect learning with impact. This case illustrates the power of the DAPA framework by showing how undergraduate research and community partnerships can go hand-in-hand. Through DAPA, students helped design systems, carried out research, shared knowledge, and contributed to real change. They gained confidence, built professional skills, and saw the value of their work beyond the classroom by informing meaningful change.
DAPA Framework Value
Through our engagement as mentors, we learned that when students understand how their work connects to broader audiences, their engagement deepens. They move from completing tasks to shaping projects and begin to see themselves as contributors -not just to a class or lab, but to their discipline and community. The design, approach, perform, action (DAPA) framework emerged from this experience, not as a rigid step-by-step process, but as a flexible guide to supporting intentional mentorship grounded in principles of open science and scholarly communication. We offer four lessons that illustrate how this framework supported our work across two disciplines (psychology and management), and how it might support others in mentoring undergraduate researchers with clarity, purpose, and inclusivity.
Lesson 1: Using DAPA to Scaffold Learning and Clarify Mentorship Roles
Each stage of DAPA provides a concrete way for faculty to structure mentorship across a project's lifespan:
* Design is about co-creating the vision. Students shape the project, identifying questions, setting goals, and planning for visibility and impact.
* Approach aligns tasks with learning goals and determines how processes will be documented or shared. It includes decisions about methodology, transparency, and ethics.
* Perform emphasizes execution: what students build, create, or do to contribute. This includes traditional outputs (e.g., annotated bibliographies, data analysis) and public-facing work (e.g., websites, presentations, performances).
* Action focuses on dissemination and use. How is knowledge shared? With whom? What conversations or changes does it spark?
This framing helped us pace learning, whether in a lab or the community, with onboarding to an open science platform woven into the project throughout. Each phase built toward a meaningful outcome students could present and explain.
Lesson 2: Aligning Mentorship to Build Capacity and Autonomy
Both examples emphasized matching student goals with responsibilities, whether managing campus-community partnerships or preparing research summaries in a lab. Experienced students took on mentorship roles, guiding newer team members. DAPA gave structure without micromanaging, using reflective questions at each stage to support skill-building and ownership.
Lesson 3: Adapting across Disciplines and Project Types
A key strength of the DAPA framework is its adaptability. It does not prescribe fixed outputs but prompts mentors and students to make intentional decisions about how knowledge is created and shared-decisions that vary by discipline, method, and audience. In psychology, the focus was on building student capacity in transparent data practices and scholarly communication. In management, it emphasized turning community engagement into institutional change. In both cases, DAPA served as a scaffold, supporting students as they moved from curiosity to contribution.
Lesson 4: Building Student Agency through Real-World Collaboration
By involving students in decision-making from the start, DAPA fosters agency and purpose. In both examples, students were not just assigned work; they contributed to project strategy, design, communication, and dissemination. Lab students helped shape policy briefs and presented findings to real audiences. AC3 fellows contributed to institutional planning at Albion College, presenting to faculty and leadership. These were not hypothetical tasks, they were collaborative, high-stakes activities with visible outcomes.
The DAPA framework made scholarly communication and open science more than abstract values. It gave students a role in deciding what to share, how to share it, and why it mattered, turning transparency and public engagement into active parts of their learning. Testing this model in other URSCI contexts is a next step for future research.
Final Reflections
Rather than a rigid decision tree, DAPA serves as a reflective framework, helping faculty mentors ask key questions at each stage of a project. This approach deepens student engagement, enhances learning, and increases impact. At a time when public trust in research is fragile and students seek real-world relevance, the DAPA model embeds transparency, communication, and collaboration with undergraduate research. Mentorship then becomes a shared journey from design to action.
Institutional Review Board
Not required as the research did not involve human or animal subjects or samples.
Conflict of Interest
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Acknowledgments
The authors contributed equally. We would like to thank Elizabeth Palmer, director of the Foundation for Undergraduate graduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity at Albion College, for her friendly review.
Funding
This material is based upon Laura Lunsford's work supported by US National Science Foundation. All opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
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