[Coehd] Please Discontinue IRB Submissions as Learning Exercises

Dear Colleagues, Reviewing IRB protocols from students in COEHD has come to occupy a disproportionate amount of IRB staff’s time, relative to other colleges. This affects the speed at which the two IRB staff can review and process IRB proposals from faculty and students in all colleges. To lessen the load we (COEHD) are putting on IRB staff, please do not require, ask, or encourage students to submit IRB protocols in your classes as learning activities. Review of Human Subject protocol by IRB staff should be restricted to activities in which data is collected for the purpose of generating new knowledge, with the intention to communicate, disseminate, and/or publish research findings. There are sections of the IRB Human Subject protocol forms that COEHD students seem to have particular difficulty completing correctly. In January I will work with Dr. Stevenson and the IRB staff to identify those sections and report them back to you so that you can communicate needed information to students in research classes and whose theses and dissertations you supervise to reduce the frequency of these errors in your students’ IRB protocol submissions. I have been asked to think “outside the box” to identify ways that COEHD faculty can prepare students to submit IRB protocols with fewer errors (again, obviously, to reduce the administrative burden in IRB staff). Please share with me your ideas. My first thought is that those faculty who supervise students’ research efforts should be responsible for reviewing students’ protocols before the students submit protocols for review and then after receiving the IRB reviews faculty should assist their students with needed corrections. But I would like some more creative ideas, so please help me problem-solve this issue. Thank you, Michael Michael J. Karcher, Ed.D., Ph.D. Associate Dean for Research Professor of Educational Psychology College of Education and Human Development, University of Texas at San Antonio 501 Cesar Chavez Blvd., Suite DB 4.337 (DT); MB 3.476 (Main Campus) San Antonio, TX 78207 (210) 458-2032; 458-2650 (department) michael.karcher(a)utsa.edu