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1. How Scientific Is Cognitive Load Theory Research Compared to the Rest of Educational Psychology?

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14080920  

   Martella, Amedee Marchand; Lawson, Alyssa P; Robinson, Daniel H (August 2024, Education Sciences)

   Cognitive load theory (CLT) has driven numerous empirical studies for over 30 years and is a major theme in many of the most cited articles published between 1988 and 2023. However, CLT articles have not been compared to other educational psychology research in terms of the research designs used and the extent to which recommendations for practice are justified. As Brady and colleagues found, a large percentage of the educational psychology articles reviewed were not experimental and yet frequently made specific recommendations from observational/correlational data. Therefore, in this review, CLT articles were examined with regard to the types of research methodology employed and whether recommendations for practice were justified. Across several educational psychology journals in 2020 and 2023, 16 articles were determined to directly test CLT. In contrast to other articles, which employed mostly observational methods, all but two of the CLT articles employed experimental or intervention designs. For the two CLT articles that were observational, recommendations for practice were not made. Reasons for the importance of experimental work are discussed. 

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2. This Paper Was Written with the Help of ChatGPT: Exploring the Consequences of AI-Driven Academic Writing on Scholarly Practices

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12729880  

   Li, Hongming; Lee, Seiyon; Botelho, Anthony F (July 2024, International Educational Data Mining Society)

   Benjamin, Paaßen; Carrie, Demmans Epp (Ed.)

   This paper was written with the help of ChatGPT. Recent advancements in the development and deployment of large generative language models to power generative AI tools, including OpenAIż˝fs ChatGPT, have led to their broad usage across virtually all fields of study. While the tools have been trained to generate human-like-dialogue in response to questions or prompts, they are similarly used to compose larger, more complex artifacts, including social media posts, essays, and even research articles. Although this abstract has been written entirely by a human without any input, consultation, or revision from a generative language model, it would likely be difficult to discern any difference as a reader. In light of this, there is growing debate and concern regarding using these models to aid the writing process, particularly concerning publication. Aside from some notable risks, including the unintentional generation of false information, citation of non-existing research articles, or plagiarism by generating text that is sampled from another source without proper citation, there are additional questions pertaining to the originality of ideas expressed in a work has been partially-written or revised by a generative language model. We present this paper as both a case study into the usage of generative models to aid in the writing of academic research articles but also as an example of how transparency and open science practices may help in addressing several issues that have been raised in other contexts and communities. While this paper neither attempts to promote nor contest the use of these language models in any writing task, it is the goal of this work to provide insight and potential guidance into the ethical and effective usage of these models within this domain. 

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3. 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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4. Daubert and the Effect on Biological Profile Research

   https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2023.0012  

   Lesciotto, Kate M. (August 2023, Forensic Anthropology)

   As a core component of casework, methods for estimating the biological profile must meet current legal standards to be admissible as part of a forensic anthropologist’s expert witness testimony. Since the 1993 US Supreme Court Daubert decision, forensic anthropologists have voiced concern that methods relying on subjective or qualitative data might now be at risk of judicial exclusion. This research used a bibliometric approach to assess whether current forensic anthropology research has shifted toward the use of more objective and/or quantitative data. Forensic anthropology articles published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences between 1972 and 2020 were reviewed (n = 1,142), with data collected on each article’s topic, use of different data types, and inclusion of observer error studies. A subset of articles focusing on methods for estimating the four main parameters of the biological profile (age, sex, ancestry/population affinity, stature) was analyzed using chi-square tests for trend in proportions. Age and sex estimation articles showed a significant shift toward more quantitative data (p < 0.001), although no biological profile subtopic showed a significant shift toward more objective data. While this may seem to be a surprising result, a deeper review of current legal standards and standards of practice suggests that Daubert does not require significant changes to how forensic anthropologists approach research design and method development. So long as the principles of good science are followed, the continued reliance on qualitative data should not be a concern from the standpoint of evidentiary admissibility. 

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5. On the use of arXiv as a dataset

   Clement, Colin B.; Bierbaum, Matthew; O'Keeffe, Kevin; Alemi, Alexander A. (January 2019, On the use of the arXiv as a dataset)

   The arXiv has collected 1.5 million pre-print articles over 28 years, hosting literature from scientific fields including Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. Each pre-print features text, figures, authors, citations, categories, and other metadata. These rich, multi-modal features, combined with the natural graph structure—created by citation, affiliation, and co-authorship—makes the arXiv an exciting candidate for benchmarking next-generation models. Here we take the first necessary steps toward this goal, by providing a pipeline which standardizes and simplifies access to the arXiv’s publicly available data. We use this pipeline to extract and analyze a 6.7 million edge citation graph, with an 11 billion word cor- pus of full-text research articles. We present some baseline classification results, and motivate application of more exciting generative graph models. 

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