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1. A Semester-long Holistic Growth-Mindset Experience for First-Year Computing Students: Emerging Intersections

   Mason, S; Fluet, K (October 2024, IEEE Frontiers in Education)

   This innovative practice full paper examines mindset understandings of three cohorts of first-year student scholars in a College of Computing at a private technical Carnegie-classified Doctoral University in the northeastern United States. Grounded in theories of intelligence, a growth mindset posits that intelligence and skills can be developed through continued practice and learning, while a fixed mindset situates one with the skills they have at birth, never to evolve or grow. Thirty-two undergraduate students across three years (10 students in year one, cohort one; 10 students in year two, cohort two; and 12 students in year three, cohort three) participated in a holistic growth mindset program that included three pillars: (a) faculty-student mentoring infused with growth mindset, (b) growth-mindset augmentations to the introductory programming course and (c) a growth mindset-scholar seminar - a series of meetings where each cohort met as a group to discuss and practice activating a growth mindset. Previous work with students has focused on more limited growth mindset interventions rather than a holistic approach. Prior to the scholars arriving on campus, the faculty involved in each of the pillars were part of a Community of Practice to learn about and activate their own growth mindset. At the end of their first semester in the project, each of the student cohorts participated in a focus group to learn about their understanding and application of growth and fixed mindset. We report findings from the student scholar data after one semester of participating in the three programmatic pillars in the context of growth mindset: mentoring, programming instruction, and the scholar seminar. Summary findings from the student perspectives are described including the use of illustrative quotes, in the students' own words, serving as a powerful reminder of the importance of growth mindset and relationship building. This has implications for addressing mindset in the future by considering how the innovative practice of embedding a growth mindset holistically into mentoring, instruction and a student seminar can provide support for students that standalone interventions cannot. 

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2. Inclusivity Meter: Tracing How it Worked and What Was Learned

   Mejia, K.Z.; Han, Y-L; Turns, J.A. (July 2021, ASEE annual conference)

   Finding tangible ways to incorporate inclusion into classroom environments remains a daunting task for many educators. The engineering education literature provides examples of activities to try and practices to incorporate, but applying the literature in a manner appropriately nuanced to an educator’s specific situated context takes time and effort. There are also many unknown factors educators cannot prepare for. In this narrative study, we present the story of an instructor who takes incremental steps to build an inclusive environment in a senior capstone course in order to promote her student’s understanding of the importance of having an inclusive environment. This paper highlights how one new tool, the Inclusivity Meter (IM), produces insights for the department as it continues its Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant. Despite various changes incorporated in the senior design and the department as a whole, students continued to bring up feelings of exclusion in departmental and college wide surveys, which warranted further attention. This study documents one quarter, Fall of 2020, as the school continues with virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tool, the “Inclusivity Meter,” is a weekly reflection activity that asks students to answer two questions: “How included did you feel?” and “Are there any additional comments you would like to add?”. Each senior design team was required to formulate team norms and a team agreement to scaffold the conversations of inclusion. The instructor herself then reflected on these weekly enactments of the tool and becomes more aware of inclusion in her classroom and what conversations seem to bubble up around the Inclusivity Meter.She also reflects on how this practice communicates to her students her commitment to inclusion and how it has helped her encourage students to speak up about issues around inclusion. Here, we monitor this practice through a series of reflective conversations between the educator and the other two authors and present a narrative based on themes from these conversations. This study provides new engineering educators an insight into what it looks like to incorporate a specific inclusive practice, how we might start thinking differently about what works and for whom in enacting inclusive practices, and how educators can continue to develop their “integrity of practice” around inclusion. 

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3. Conversing with a devil’s advocate: Interpersonal coordination in deception and disagreement

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178140  

   Duran, N.; Fusaroli, R. (June 2017, PloS one)

   This study investigates the presence of dynamical patterns of interpersonal coordination in extended deceptive conversations across multimodal channels of behavior. Using a novel "devil’s advocate" paradigm, we experimentally elicited deception and truth across topics in which conversational partners either agreed or disagreed, and where one partner was surreptitiously asked to argue an opinion opposite of what he or she really believed. We focus on interpersonal coordination as an emergent behavioral signal that captures interdependencies between conversational partners, both as the coupling of head movements over the span of milliseconds, measured via a windowed lagged cross correlation (WLCC) technique, and more global temporal dependencies across speech rate, using cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Moreover, we considered how interpersonal coordination might be shaped by strategic, adaptive conversational goals associated with deception. We found that deceptive conversations displayed more structured speech rate and higher head movement coordination, the latter with a peak in deceptive disagreement conversations. Together the results allow us to posit an adaptive account, whereby interpersonal coordination is not beholden to any single functional explanation, but can strategically adapt to diverse conversational demands. 

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4. There and Back Again: Lessons Learned from Facilitated Faculty Discussions on the Move Online and then Back Face to Face

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--41357  

   Thomas, Shawna; Hammond, Tracy; Shryock, Kristi; Brooks, Randy; Jaison, Donna; White, Lance; Lightfoot, Robert (August 2022, 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   In this Lessons Learned paper, we explore the themes uncovered from a series of facilitated faculty discussions on moving their course back to face to face teaching after the switch to online. The Institute at Anonymous University administrates over 100 faculty whose primary department appointments and teaching assignments are in either engineering or education. Over the last two years, the Institute hosted numerous conversations for faculty members to share experiences, research, and assessments of teaching successes and concerns as they changed instructional modalities, both with the initial move online and the subsequent move back face to face. From these conversations, faculty agree that some things during the move to online instruction, such as office hours, video archives of lectures, and some activities in break-out rooms appear to enhance student learning. Yet data showed that students believed the online experience was less desirable than face to face courses. Now that we have had a near complete semester where most classes were required to be held in the face to face mode, we are hosting conversations with faculty to understand the changes they are now making to their teaching because of the experiences from online instruction. 

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5. Mentoring Low-SES Students and Developing Professional Support Networks

   Stwalley, Robert; Baldwin, Grace; Booth-Womack, Virginia; Larose, Sarah; Stwalley, Carol (July 2022, ASEE 2022 Annual Conference)

   The National Science Foundation has funded this S-STEM program to collect support network information about low socioeconomic status (SES) students and to provide scholarships to assist those students in their quest to obtain a degree in a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics discipline. The Rising Scholar program studied the methods of improving recruitment, retention, and graduation for these students. This paper will discuss a Web of Support characterization model which has shown success at a public, R1, Midwestern university. A prior paper on how these students were selected was presented in 2020. This paper will discuss the methodology of measuring and the intentional building of support networks that was used in the program to record the changing dynamics of these students’ support networks as they advanced at the university. The Web of Support methodology used in the Rising Scholar Program was developed to support the Indigenous People of Alaska, who had the highest rate of teenage pregnancy and suicide in the country at the time. It was found that youth who had five adult anchors could withstand peer pressure and succeed in bettering their lives. This successful program demonstrating the bettering of lives was the basis for developing this collegiate curriculum to assist low-SES students in earning the STEM degree that they desired. These students typically had no collegiate-based experiences within their preliminary support networks and were discouraged when they were not accepted directly into their major of choice. The Rising Scholar proscribed pathway through the university was designed to give these students opportunities to meet and get to know professional and staff members of the university community that could join their professional support networks. During their journey through the program, data were collected to quantify the strength of the students’ network. This paper will discuss the emergence and quantification of the students’ professional web of support as they worked in university laboratories, got to know various professors and graduate students, and learned to intentionally keep these individuals as support mentors. Both number and strength of their support networks were collected annually and sometimes twice a year. Each supporter had several potential ways to support their student. These students were encouraged to add professional mentors, while keeping their original pre-college network. Examples of these support anchors mentors assisting students will be provided. 

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