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1. Relevance as perceived by high school students in decontextualized mathematics lessons

   Adil, Aamina; Lee, Kihoon L.; Dietiker, Leslie (January 2022, Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Lischka, A. E.; Dyer, E. B.; Jones, R. S.; Lovett, J. N.; Strayer, J.; Drown, S. (Ed.)

   When mathematics educators work towards making mathematics more relevant, they often think about including more real-world applications into mathematics lessons. But what happens when a lesson is devoid of real-world contexts? In what ways can students find it relevant? This study explores how high school students perceived relevance when they were asked to describe their experiences during decontextualized mathematics lessons. Students highlighted how they found certain characteristics of the lessons to be useful in their learning and how they perceived relevance through different feelings experienced in the lessons. 

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2. A Case Study on When and How Novices Use Code Examples in Open-Ended Programming

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3587102.3588774  

   Wang, Wengran; Rao, Yudong; Kwatra, Archit; Milliken, Alexandra; Dong, Yihuan; Gomes, Neeloy; Martin, Sarah; Catété, Veronica; Isvik, Amy; Barnes, Tiffany; et al (June 2023, Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education)

   Many students rely on examples when learning to program, but they often face barriers when incorporating these examples into their own code and learning the concepts they present. As a step towards designing effective example interfaces that can support student learning, we investigate novices' needs and strategies when using examples to write code. We conducted a study with 12 pairs of high school students working on open-ended game design projects, using a system that allows students to browse examples based on their functionality, and to view and copy the example code. We analyzed interviews, screen recordings, and log data, identifying 5 moments when novices request examples, and 4 strategies that arise when students use examples. We synthesize these findings into principles that can inform the design of future example systems to better support students. 

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3. Positive Intelligence Education for Unleashing Student Potential

   https://doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2019-12032  

   Tyagi, Pawan (November 2019, ASME 2019 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition)

   Abstract Student attitude towards learning is strongly dependent on the hidden traits and habits they develop during the growing up period. Based on circumstances many students live in an individualistic mindset and perceive rather permanent misconceptions about the surrounding and opportunities. This paper focuses on providing positive intelligence training to college student to equip them with the necessary knowledge to not only unleash their talent but also to enable other students to give the highest performance. This paper focuses on an experiment under which 22 students in the senior level design of energy system course were exposed to the fundamental aspects of positive intelligence. Every student was tasked to demonstrate the depth of understanding about the positive intelligence and then apply it to group members to understand the strength and weakness. Most of the students expressed satisfaction that they were able to understand their attitude and behavior that they found as an impediment in their progress. After positive intelligence training, several students exhibited an increased maturity level and many students expressed higher degree of empathy towards their team members. 

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4. Student-created math walks in informal learning spaces

   Walkington, C. (January 2022, .) Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences – ICLS 2022)

   Chinn, C. (Ed.)

   Math walks are a form of inquiry learning where students can observe and create mathematical meaning from their everyday surroundings. Here we report on a study of 5th and 6th graders in an informal learning setting where they create and present their own math walks covering concepts of ratio, scale, and proportion. The students may have developed more positive attitudes towards math and were able to meaningfully engage with powerful math ideas. 

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5. Conceptualizing a Theory of Ethical Behavior in Engineering

   Nguyen, L. M.; Poleacovschi, C.; Faust, K. M.; Padgett Walsh, K.; Feinstein, S. G.; Rutherford, C. (January 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   Traditional engineering courses typically approach teaching and problem solving by focusing on the physical dimensions of those problems without consideration of dynamic social and ethical dimensions. As such, projects can fail to consider community questions and concerns, broader impacts upon society, or otherwise result in inequitable outcomes. And, despite the fact that students in engineering receive training on the Professional Code of Ethics for Engineers, to which they are expected to adhere in practice, many students are unable to recognize and analyze real-life ethical challenges as they arise. Indeed, research has found that students are typically less engaged with ethics—defined as the awareness and judgment of microethics and macroethics, sensitivity to diversity, and interest in promoting organizational ethical culture—at the end of their engineering studies than they were at the beginning. As such, many studies have focused on developing and improving the curriculum surrounding ethics through, for instance, exposing students to ethics case studies. However, such ethics courses often present a narrow and simplified view of ethics that students may struggle to integrate with their broader experience as engineers. Thus, there is a critical need to unpack the complexity of ethical behavior amongst engineering students in order to determine how to better foster ethical judgment and behavior. Promoting ethical behavior among engineering students and developing a culture of ethical behavior within institutions have become goals of many engineering programs. Towards this goal, we present an overview of the current scholarship of engineering ethics and propose a theoretical framework of ethical behavior using a review of articles related to engineering ethics from 1990-2020. These articles were selected based upon their diversity of scope and methods until saturation was reached. A thematic analysis of articles was then performed using Nvivo. The review engages in theories across disciplines including philosophy, education and psychology. Preliminary results identify two major kinds of drivers of ethical behavior, namely individual level ethical behavior drivers (awareness of microethics, awareness of macroethics, implicit understanding, and explicit understanding) and institutional drivers (diversity and institutional ethical culture). In this paper, we present an overview and discussion of two drivers of ethical behavior at the individual level, namely awareness of microethics and awareness of macroethics, based on a review of 50 articles. Our results indicate that an awareness of both microethics and macroethics is essential in promoting ethical behavior amongst students. The review also points to a need to focus on increasing students’ awareness of macroethics. This research thus addresses the need, driven by existing scholarship, to identify a conceptual framework for explaining how ethical judgment and behavior in engineering can be further promoted. 

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