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1. Transformations in Elementary Teachers' Pedagogical Reasoning: Studying Teacher Learning in an Online Graduate Program in Engineering Education

   Watkins, Jessica ; Portsmore, Merredith ; Swanson, Rebecca ( January 2019 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This research paper describes a study of elementary teacher learning in an online graduate program in engineering education for in-service teachers. While the existing research on teachers in engineering focuses on their disciplinary understandings and beliefs (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2011; Martin, et al., 2015; Nadelson, et al., 2015; Van Haneghan, et al., 2015), there is increasing attention to teachers' pedagogy in engineering (Capobianco, Delisi, & Radloff, 2018). In our work, we study teachers' pedagogical sense-making and reflection, which, we argue, is critical for teaching engineering design. This study takes place in [blinded] program, in which teachers take four graduate courses over fifteen months. The program was designed to help teachers not only learn engineering content, but also shift their thinking and practice to be more responsive to their students. Two courses focus on pedagogy, including what it means to learn engineering and instructional approaches to support this learning. These courses consist of four main elements, in which teachers: 1) Read data-rich engineering education articles to reflect on learning engineering; 2) Participate in online video clubs, looking at classroom videos of students’ engineering and commenting on what they notice; 3) Conduct interviews with learners about the mechanism of a pull-backmore »car; and 4) Plan and teach engineering lessons, collecting and analyzing video from their classrooms. In the context of this program, we ask: what stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? What shifts do we observe in their stances? We interviewed teachers at the start of the program and after each course. In addition to reflecting on their learning and teaching, teachers watched videos of students’ engineering and discussed what they saw as relevant for teaching engineering. We informally compared summaries from previous interviews to get a sense of changes in how participants talked about engineering, how they approached teaching engineering, and what they noticed in classroom videos. Through this process, we identified one teacher to focus on for this paper: Alma is a veteran 3rd-5th grade science teacher in a rural, racially-diverse public school in the southeastern region of the US. We then developed content logs of Alma's interviews and identified emergent themes. To refine these themes, we looked for confirming and disconfirming evidence in the interviews and in her coursework in the program. We coded each interview for these themes and developed analytic memos, highlighting where we saw variability and stability in her stances and comparing across interviews to describe shifts in Alma's reasoning. It was at this stage that we narrowed our focus to her stances toward the engineering design process (EDP). In this paper, we describe and illustrate shifts we observed in Alma's reasoning, arguing that she exhibited dramatic shifts in her stances toward teaching and learning the EDP. At the start of the program, she was stable in treating the EDP as a series of linear steps that students and engineers progress through. After engaging and reflecting on her own engineering in the first course, she started to express a more fluid stance when talking more abstractly about the EDP but continued to take it up as a linear process in her classroom teaching. By the end of the program, Alma exhibited a growing stability across contexts in her stance toward the EDP as a fluid set of overlapping practices that students and engineers could engage in.« less
2. Students’ attentive fidelity for calculus instructional videos.

   Weinberg, A. ( October 2019 , Proceedings of the 41st annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Growing interest in “flipped” classrooms has made video lessons an increasingly prominent component of post-secondary mathematics curricula. However, relatively little is known about how students watch and learn from instructional videos. We describe and use an eye-tracking methodology to investigate attentive fidelity—the degree to which students attend to the visual imagery that is the subject of the video narration at each moment in time. Our preliminary study suggests that students’ attentive fidelity varies widely, but there was no evidence that this fidelity is connected to students’ ability to solve calculus problems.
3. Identifying Students' Attentive Fidelity for Calculus Instructional Videos

   Weinberg, A. ; Tornai, J. ; Thomas, M. ; Martin, J. ; Tallman, M. ; Newman, K. ( January 2019 , Proceedings of the forty-first annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.)

   Growing interest in “flipped” classrooms has made video lessons an increasingly prominent component of post-secondary mathematics curricula. However, relatively little is known about how students watch and learn from instructional videos. We describe and use an eye-tracking methodology to investigate attentive fidelity—the degree to which students attend to the visual imagery that is the subject of the video narration at each moment in time. Our preliminary study suggests that students’ attentive fidelity varies widely, but there was no evidence that this fidelity is connected to students’ ability to solve calculus problems.
4. Identifying students’ attentive fidelity for calculus instructional videos

   Weinberg, A. ; Tornai, J. ; Thomas, M. ; Martin, J. ; Tallman, M. ; Newman, K. ( October 2019 , Proceedings of the 41st annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Growing interest in “flipped” classrooms has made video lessons an increasingly prominent component of post-secondary mathematics curricula. However, relatively little is known about how students watch and learn from instructional videos. We describe and use an eye-tracking methodology to investigate attentive fidelity—the degree to which students attend to the visual imagery that is the subject of the video narration at each moment in time. Our preliminary study suggests that students’ attentive fidelity varies widely, but there was no evidence that this fidelity is connected to students’ ability to solve calculus problems.
5. The Affordance of Computer-Supportive Collaborative Learning in a Dynamics Course

   Lee, Y. ( July 2021 , Zone 1 Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   Over the past two decades, educators have used computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) to integrate technology with pedagogy to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. Researchers have also explored the diverse affordances of CSCL, its contributions to engineering instruction, and its effectiveness in K-12 STEM education. However, the question of how students use CSCL resources in undergraduate engineering classrooms remains largely unexplored. This study examines the affordances of a CSCL environment utilized in a sophomore dynamics course with particular attention given to the undergraduate engineering students’ use of various CSCL resources. The resources include a course lecturebook, instructor office hours, a teaching assistant help room, online discussion board, peer collaboration, and demonstration videos. This qualitative study uses semi-structured interview data collected from nine mechanical engineering students (four women and five men) who were enrolled in a dynamics course at a large public research university in Eastern Canada. The interviews focused on the individual student’s perceptions of the school, faculty, students, engineering courses, and implemented CSCL learning environment. The thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the transcribed interviews using a qualitative data analysis software (Nvivo). The analysis followed a six step process: (1) reading interview transcripts multiple times and preliminary in vivomore »codes; (2) conducting open coding by coding interesting or salient features of the data; (3) collecting codes and searching for themes; (4) reviewing themes and creating a thematic map; (5) finalizing themes and their definitions; and (6) compiling findings. This study found that the students’ use of CSCL resources varied depending on the students’ personal preferences, as well as their perceptions of the given resource’s value and its potential to enhance their learning. For example, the dynamics lecturebook, which had been redesigned to encourage problem solving and note-taking, fostered student collaborative problem solving with their peers. In contrast, the professor’s example video solutions had much more of an influence on students’ independent problem-solving processes. The least frequently used resource was the course’s online discussion forum, which could be used as a means of communication. The findings reveal how computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments enable engineering students to engage in multiple learning opportunities with diverse and flexible resources to both address and to clarify their personal learning needs. This study strongly recommends engineering instructors adapt a CSCL environment for implementation in their own unique classroom context.« less