  Background: Qualitative interviewing is a common tool that has been utilized
by Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education
researchers to explore and describe the experiences of students, educators, or
other educational stakeholders. Some interviewing techniques use co-creation of
an artifact, such as a personal timeline, as a unique way to elicit a detailed
narrative from a respondent. The purpose of this commentary is to describe an
interview artifact called a life grid. First used and validated in medical
sociology to conduct life course research, we adapted the life grid for use in
research on undergraduate STEM education. We applied the life grid interview
technique to two contexts: 1) students in an advance degree program reflecting
on their entire undergraduate career as a biology major, and 2) students in an
undergraduate physics program reflecting on a multi-week lab project.
  Results: We found that the life grid supported four important attributes of
an interview: facilitation of the respondents' agency, establishment of rapport
between interviewers and respondents, enhanced depth of the respondents'
narratives, and the construction of more accurate accounts of events. We
situate our experiences with respect to those attributes and compare them with
the experiences detailed in literature.
  Conclusions: We conclude with recommendations for future use of the life grid
technique in undergraduate STEM education research. Overall, we find the life
grid to be a valuable tool to use when conducting interviews about phenomena
with a chronological component.
