It sounds like interesting research. It reminds me of Tony Burgess’ dissertation about how people became leaders in Company Command. He was looking at deep transformation and had an interesting way of conducting 3 interviews with each respondent. There’s a copy of the dissertation in CPsquare along with an AERA paper. He also talked about it in one of the R&D Fests. One difference between your questions is that he was looking at a deep change in role and I hear you looking for more of a cognitive change.

The other angle that occurs to me (this is going to sound like more work, I know) is about self-reporting as a weakness in some research designs. What if you interviewed pairs: faculty AND student? You and the faculty interviewee might be fooled into thinking that they know what the “trouble-spots” are and when the faculty adviser made a difference.

Of course there could be a lot of questions about technologies used, comfort, practices in using them, pairs of technologies, memory practices, etc. Just that might be vast.