This new role is helping Pitt put its own research into practice

When a Pitt student struggles in their first semester, their success often depends on the institutional support available — whether an advisor notices, whether the right resources are offered at the right time and whether anyone is keeping track of what’s working and what isn’t.

The gap between what institutions know and what they do with that knowledge is what Pitt’s Office of the Provost is now building infrastructure to close.

In January, the University of Pittsburgh appointed its first-ever director of action research, Leo Schumann, a social psychologist with more than a decade of experience studying student persistence and belonging across higher education institutions. His charge is not just to conduct research — it’s to make sure Pitt learns from its own work.

The framework at the center of his role is called action research, an approach to institutional learning developed by social psychologist Kurt Lewin. Rather than separating research from practice, action research treats them as inseparable, running continuously through four stages: plan a theory-informed intervention, act by implementing it in a real context, observe what the evidence shows and reflect on what to change. Then repeat.

“There’s so much great work happening here that the only thing that’s missing is bringing in that ongoing cycle of learning, which is what the action research model is,” Schumann said. “You plan, you act, you observe and you reflect, and then you repeat.

April Belback, associate vice provost for student success and advising, sees Schumann’s role as a bridge, connecting researchers with the advisors, faculty and administrators who work with students day to day and making sure findings from either side actually travel between them.

Additionally, she said, Schumann is positioned to ask practitioners the hard research questions and push researchers toward practical field applications — a rare combination.

“It’s very unique to have somebody be on both sides,” Belback said. “And so being the translator, seeing him work and be that translator, is just magical.”

A key vehicle for this work is the Student Success Action Research Collaborative (SSARC), a new partnership between the Office of the Provost and the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC).

SSARC brings together leading researchers and practitioners to reflect on institutional challenges related to student success, and to collaboratively design, implement and evaluate strategies to address them. The collaborative convenes regularly, ensuring insights from research travel to those who can act on them — and that wisdom from practice informs the research agenda.

Amanda Brodish, assistant provost for institutional research and analytics, is among those leading a parallel effort on survey strategy. She and other researchers are working to optimize the surveys Pitt sends students and make sure the insights from those surveys reach the practitioners who can act on them.

Belback said coordinating that work across units is a core part of what the team is building toward.

“Sometimes people, to their credit, do amazing work, but in one part of the University,” Belback said. “And so we just love to be able to connect the dots for people, get them involved in different things, help them see connections that they might not know.”

One place that connection is already taking shape is in Pitt’s ongoing general education redesign. Belkys Torres, associate vice provost for curricular innovation, is overhauling the curriculum to center experiential learning.

Redesigning a curriculum is one challenge, but measuring whether it’s actually working is another. Torres said she sees action research as the mechanism that makes the second part possible. “I think action research is what’s going to allow us to create the assessment plan for the general education program and for student learning,” Torres said.

Pitt's Student Success Team is leading a phased shift toward a shared advising model, designed to give students a more consistent baseline of support regardless of which school or unit they’re in. Schumann is contributing to one foundational piece of that transformation: enhancing how advisors can see and act on insights from the First-Year Intake Survey, which incoming students complete during orientation.

The work involves refining survey questions, equipping advisors with better tools to interpret and respond to student needs, and building in feedback loops to assess whether changes are working. While this effort sits within the Student Success Team’s broader advising redesign, Schumann plans to bring emerging questions and challenges to SSARC for reflection, helping shape and refine the approach over time.

“We’re tweaking that survey just a little bit this year, so it’s going to look different for our incoming class,” Belback said. Results are expected this fall.

Schumann points to Pitt’s existing cohort scholars programs as working examples for what this kind of sustained, coordinated support can produce. The Provost Academy, Kessler Scholars, Posse Scholarship and McNair Scholars program — which collectively offer mentoring, advising, academic coaching, cohort programming and more — have shown success with above average retention, graduation and academic outcomes.

[Read more about the programs in Pitt’s Student Success Hub.]

“These programs essentially give us a hint of what that sort of holistic student support might look like, so that we can then take that to scale,” Schumann said.

Because SSARC’s reach is only as strong as the community it draws in, Schumann said he hopes researchers, faculty and practitioners across Pitt who are wrestling with student success questions will see the collaborative as a resource and a reason to connect.

To catalyze new collaborations, the Office of the Provost and LRDC are launching a joint seed grant program this fall. The initiative will fund up to three projects annually, each receiving up to $12,000 to support innovative, action-oriented research with the potential to improve student success at Pitt. Projects must demonstrate a clear connection between research and practice, proposing not just to study a problem, but to design and test interventions that address it.

 "The seed grants are an invitation," Schumann said. "We want faculty and staff across Pitt who are wrestling with student success questions to know there's infrastructure to support that work, and a community to learn alongside."

The goal, he added, isn’t a finished product — it’s a university that keeps learning from what it does.

“We make sure that we become a university that doesn’t just teach about learning, but we practice learning as well,” he said.

Photography by Tom Altany; Leo Schumann, Pitt’s inaugural director of action research, works to turn research findings into practical actions that improve student success.