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1. Sustaining Student Engagement and Equity in Computing Departments During the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432381  

   Thiry, Heather ; Hug, Sarah T. ( March 2021 , SIGCSE '21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   null (Ed.)

   In spring of 2020, almost all campuses across the United States abruptly closed and shifted to remote instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and faculty rapidly adjusted how they engaged in learning in a time of great social and economic upheaval. In this paper, we use the lens of equity-oriented student engagement to examine how computing departments facilitated student participation in educationally engaging activities during the campus closures. The National Science Foundation-funded INCLUDES Alliance, the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), is a network of computing departments dedicated to increasing the representation of Hispanics in computing education and careers. We present results from a survey administered in spring 2020 to over 900 CAHSI students in 14 computing departments at Hispanic-Serving Institutions and interviews with 30 faculty, department chairs, and leaders. Though students reported increased financial and mental health struggles, they reflected on the myriad ways that faculty and peers supported their learning and sustained their engagement in coursework and co-curricular opportunities. In response to the pandemic, faculty and student leaders structured supports, such as peer-led team learning sessions and student clubs, to operate effectively in remote environments to promote student engagement. 

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2. Supporting collaborative classroom networks through technology: An actor network theory approach to understanding social behaviours and design

   https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13274  

   Kumar, Vishesh ; Tissenbaum, Mike ( September 2022 , British Journal of Educational Technology)

   This paper presents an implementation of Connected Spaces (CxS)—an ambient help seeking interface designed and developed for a project‐based computing classroom. We use actor network theory (ANT) to provide an underutilized posthumanist lens to understand the creation of collaborative connections in this Computational Action‐based implementation. Posthumanism offers an emerging and critical extension to sociocultural perspectives on understanding learning, by pushing us to decenter the human, and consider the active roles that human and non‐human entities play in learning environments by actively shaping each other. We analyse how students in this class adjusted their help‐seeking and collaborative habits following the introduction of CxS, a tool designed to foster (more inter‐group) collaboration. ANT proposes generalized symmetry—a principle of considering human, non‐human and more than human entities with equivalent and comparable agency, leading to describing phenomena as networks of actors in different evolving relationships with each other. Analysing collaborative interactions as fostered by CxS using an ANT approach supports design‐based research—an iterative design revision process highlighting understandings about design as well as learning—by providing a temporal and informative lens into the relationship between actors and tools within the environment. Our key findings include a framing of technologies in classrooms as bridgingagentic gapsbetween students and becoming actors engaging in different behaviours; learners enacting new agencies through technologies (for instance a more comfortable non‐intrusive help seeker), and the need for voicing and teachers to connect help networks in CxS equipped classrooms.

   What is already known about this topic

   Collaborative learning is a valuable skill and practice; opportunities to mentor others are critical in empowering minoritized learners, especially in STEM and computing disciplines.

   School norms solidify a power and expertise hierarchy between teachers and learners and fail to productively support learners in learning from each other.

   Additionally, lack of awareness about peers' knowledge is a common hindrance in students knowing who to ask for help and how.

   What this paper adds

   An example of a designed interface called Connected Spaces with potential to foster more inter‐student collaboration, especially outside of mandated within‐group collaboration—in the form of cross‐group help seeking and help giving.

   A design based research study using actor network theory highlighting the limitations of Connected Spaces in sparking notable behaviour change among students by itself but being retooled as a teacher support tool in enabling cross‐group collaborations.

   Presenting conceptions of collaboration through technologies as bridging agentic gaps and acting with new agencies in performing help‐seeking related actions.

   Provoking the idea of testing emerging technologies in classrooms along with sharing our analyses and reflections with the classroom as a key idea in computing education—surfacing the gap between designed intentions and the different kinds of extra social work needed in the on‐ground success of different technologies.

   Implications for practice and/or policy

   Designers and researchers should create and test more interfaces alongside teachers across different classrooms and contexts aimed at supporting different kinds of voluntary collaborative interactions.

   Curricula, standards and school practices should further center providing students with opportunities to engage as mentors and build communities of learning across disciplines to empower minoritized students.

   Researchers engaging in design based research should consider using more posthumanist lenses to examine educational technologies and how they affect change in learning environments.

    

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3. Noticing, Understanding, and Encouraging Positive Engagement with Collaborative History Learning

   Humburg, Megan ; Craig, Kalani ; Szostalo, Maksymilian ; Danish, Joshua ; Hmelo-Silver, Cindy ; Mccranie, Ann ( January 2021 , Reflecting the Past and Embracing the Future: ISLS Annual Meeting 2021 (Online Event))

   de Vries, Erica ; Hod, Yotam ; Ahn, June (Ed.)

   This study analyzes the implementation of Net.Create, a collaborative network analysis tool (Craig & Danish, 2018), in the context of a digital humanities classroom. Undergraduate students used network analysis to investigate historical objects gathered from the local community in a History Harvest. This paper focuses on the collaborative engagement of groups as they co-constructed conceptual frameworks in Net.Create to explain the individual, social, and cultural histories attached to these objects. Findings suggest that positive social engagement and metacognitive behaviors can support students’ sustained engagement with historical and network analysis ideas. Interwoven personal-oriented and class-oriented social engagement in the data suggest that these forms of engagement can productively sustain engagement with cognitively demanding activities. Having built a supportive environment for collaboration amongst themselves, students were able to smoothly and effectively build on each other’s ideas to generate an understanding of historical and network analysis patterns. 

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4. Scaffolding Spatial Abilities in Integral Calculus

   Davishahl, E. ; Singleton, L. ; Haskell, T. ; Rupe, K. ; Glen, L. ( June 2022 , Proceedings ASEE annual conference)

   This NSF-IUSE exploration and design project began in fall 2018 and features cross-disciplinary collaboration between engineering, math, and psychology faculty to develop learning activities with hands-on models and manipulatives. We are exploring how best to design these activities to support learners’ development of conceptual understanding and representational competence in integral calculus and engineering statics, two foundational courses for most engineering majors. A second goal is to leverage the model-based activities to scaffold spatial skills development in the context of traditional course content. As widely reported in the literature, well-developed spatial abilities correlate with student success and persistence in many STEM majors. We provided calculus students in selected intervention sections taught by four instructors at three different community colleges with take-home model kits that they could reference for a series of asynchronous learning activities. Students in these sections completed the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R) in the first and last weeks of their course. We also administered the assessment in multiple control sections (no manipulatives) taught by the same faculty. This paper analyzes results from fall 2020 through fall 2021 to see if there is any difference between control and intervention sections for the courses as a whole and for demographic subgroups including female-identifying students and historically-underserved students of color. All courses were asynchronous online modality in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that students in intervention sections of calculus made slightly larger gains on the PSVT:R, but this result is not statistically significant as a whole or for any of the demographic subgroups considered. We also analyzed final course grades for differences between control and intervention sections and found no differences. We found no significant effect of the presence of the model-based activities leading to increased PSVT:R gains or improved course grades. We would not extend this conclusion to face-to-face implementation, however, due primarily to the compromises made to adapt the curriculum from in-person group learning to asynchronous individual work and inconsistent engagement of the online students with the modeling activities. 

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5. Scaffolding Spatial Abilities in Integral Calculus

   Davishahl, E. ; Singleton, L. ; Haskell, T. ; Rupe, K. ; Glen, L. ( June 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   This NSF-IUSE exploration and design project began in fall 2018 and features cross-disciplinary collaboration between engineering, math, and psychology faculty to develop learning activities with hands-on models and manipulatives. We are exploring how best to design these activities to support learners’ development of conceptual understanding and representational competence in integral calculus and engineering statics, two foundational courses for most engineering majors. A second goal is to leverage the model-based activities to scaffold spatial skills development in the context of traditional course content. As widely reported in the literature, well-developed spatial abilities correlate with student success and persistence in many STEM majors. We provided calculus students in selected intervention sections taught by four instructors at three different community colleges with take-home model kits that they could reference for a series of asynchronous learning activities. Students in these sections completed the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R) in the first and last weeks of their course. We also administered the assessment in multiple control sections (no manipulatives) taught by the same faculty. This paper analyzes results from fall 2020 through fall 2021 to see if there is any difference between control and intervention sections for the courses as a whole and for demographic subgroups including female-identifying students and historically-underserved students of color. All courses were asynchronous online modality in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that students in intervention sections of calculus made slightly larger gains on the PSVT:R, but this result is not statistically significant as a whole or for any of the demographic subgroups considered. We also analyzed final course grades for differences between control and intervention sections and found no differences. We found no significant effect of the presence of the model-based activities leading to increased PSVT:R gains or improved course grades. We would not extend this conclusion to face-to-face implementation, however, due primarily to the compromises made to adapt the curriculum from in-person group learning to asynchronous individual work and inconsistent engagement of the online students with the modeling activities. 

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