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1. Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Trends in Cybercrime Research: An Examination

   Payne, Brian ; Hadzhidimova, Lora ( April 2020 , International journal of cyber criminology)

   Jaishankar, K. (Ed.)

   Compared to other topics, cybercrime is a relatively new addition to the criminological literature. interest in the topic has grown over the past decade, with a handful of scholars leading efforts to generate empirical understanding about the topic. Common conclusions reached in these studies are that more research is needed, cybercrime is interdisciplinary in nature, and cybercrime should be addressed as an international problem. In this study, we examine a sample of 593 prior cybercrime scholarly articles to identify the types of research strategies used in them, the patterns guiding those strategies, whether the research is interdisciplinary, and the degree to which scholars engage in international cybercrime studies. Attention is also given to co-authorship as well as citation patterns. Implications for future research are provided. 

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2. Activating social change together: A qualitative synthesis of collaborative change research, evaluation and design literature

   https://doi.org/http:dx.doi.org/10.5130/ijcre.v12i1.6693  

   Busch, Melida D ; Jean-Baptiste, Elizabeth ; Person, Pamela F ; Vaughn, Lisa M. ( December 2019 , Gateways)

   Researchers, evaluators and designers from an array of academic disciplines and industry sectors are turning to participatory approaches as they seek to understand and address complex social problems. We refer to participatory approaches that collaboratively engage/ partner with stakeholders in knowledge creation/problem solving for action/social change outcomes as collaborative change research, evaluation and design (CCRED). We further frame CCRED practitioners by their desire to move beyond knowledge creation for its own sake to implementation of new knowledge as a tool for social change. In March and May of 2018, we conducted a literature search of multiple discipline-specific databases seeking collaborative, change-oriented scholarly publications. The search was limited to include peerreviewed journal articles, with English language abstracts available, published in the last five years. The search resulted in 526 citations, 236 of which met inclusion criteria. Though the search was limited to English abstracts, all major geographic regions (North America, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, APAC, Africa and the Middle East) were represented within the results, although many articles did not state a specific region. Of those identified, most studies were located in North America, with the Middle East having only one identified study. We followed a qualitative thematic synthesis process to examine the abstracts of peer-reviewed articles to identify practices that transcend individual disciplines, sectors and contexts to achieve collaborative change. We surveyed the terminology used to describe CCRED, setting, content/topic of study, type of collaboration, and related benefits/outcomes in order to discern the words used to designate collaboration, the frameworks, tools and methods employed, and the presence of action, evaluation or outcomes. Forty-three percent of the reviewed articles fell broadly within the social sciences, followed by 26 percent in education and 25 percent in health/medicine. In terms of participants and/ or collaborators in the articles reviewed, the vast majority of the 236 articles (86%) described participants, that is, those who the research was about or from whom data was collected. In contrast to participants, partners/collaborators (n=32; 14%) were individuals or groups who participated in the design or implementation of the collaborative change effort described. In terms of the goal for collaboration and/or for doing the work, the most frequently used terminology related to some aspect of engagement and empowerment. Common descriptors for the work itself were ‘social change’ (n=74; 31%), ‘action’ (n=33; 14%), ‘collaborative or participatory research/practice’ (n=13; 6%), ‘transformation’ (n=13; 6%) and ‘community engagement’ (n=10; 4%). Of the 236 articles that mentioned a specific framework or approach, the three most common were some variation of Participatory Action Research (n=30; 50%), Action Research (n=40; 16.9%) or Community-Based Participatory Research (n=17; 7.2%). Approximately a third of the 236 articles did not mention a specific method or tool in the abstract. The most commonly cited method/tool (n=30; 12.7%) was some variation of an arts-based method followed by interviews (n=18; 7.6%), case study (n=16; 6.7%), or an ethnographic-related method (n=14; 5.9%). While some articles implied action or change, only 14 of the 236 articles (6%) stated a specific action or outcome. Most often, the changes described were: the creation or modification of a model, method, process, framework or protocol (n=9; 4%), quality improvement, policy change and social change (n=8; 3%), or modifications to education/training methods and materials (n=5; 2%). The infrequent use of collaboration as a descriptor of partner engagement, coupled with few reported findings of measurable change, raises questions about the nature of CCRED. It appears that conducting CCRED is as complex an undertaking as the problems that the work is attempting to address. 

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3. Developing Best Practices for Teaching Scientific Documentation: Toward a Better Understanding of How Lab Notebooks Contribute to Knowledge-building in Engineering Design and Experimentation

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34426  

   Evans, Rick ; Moses, Jeffrey ; Nathans-Kelly, Traci ( June 2020 , 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   Laboratory notebooks perform important roles in the engineering disciplines. They at once record an engineer’s work, serve as an important reference for future reports and/or articles, and perform as a kind of journal that enables questioning presuppositions, considering new approaches, and generating new ideas. Given the importance of notebooks, there is surprisingly little scholarship on how to teach their use. Stanley and Lewandowski (2016) surveyed students in undergraduate laboratory courses and evaluated how their notebooks were being used. They found that “few [students] … thought that their lab classes successfully taught them the benefit of maintaining a lab notebook.” Moreover, the authors’ later survey of the literature and of college faculty led them to conclude that in undergraduate lab courses “little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered ‘best practice’ for scientific documentation …[or] how researchers come to learn these practices” (Stanley and Lewandowski, 2018). At XXX University, two courses, Interfacing the Digital Domain with the Analog World (AEP 2640) and Engineering Communications (ENGRC 2640) are taught in conjunction. In AEP 2640, students use a computer to control equipment and acquire measurements in an engineering design and experimentation laboratory. Laboratory activities such as the development of a computer interface for an oscilloscope, a set of motors, and a photodiode culminate in the realization of an automated laser scanning microscope system. In ENGRC 2640, students receive instruction and feedback on their lab notebook entries and, in turn, use those notebooks as a resource for preparing a Progress Report and an Instrument Design Report. The instructors encourage peer review in order to facilitate improvement of students’ skills in the art of notebook use while allowing them to develop these skills and personal style through trial and error during the research. The primary learning objectives are: 1) to enable students to engage in real laboratory research; and 2) to develop proficiency with select genres associated with that research. The educational research objectives are: 1) to study students’ developing proficiency in order to generate best practices for teaching and learning scientific documentation; and 2) to better understand the contribution of scientific documentation to the teaching and learning of authentic research. This study is a work-in-progress. We will present the study design. That design involves, first, developing a self-efficacy scale for both conducting laboratory research and performing those genres associated with that research. Self-efficacy or a “person’s awareness of their ability to accomplish a goal” (Kolar et. al, 2013) has proven to be a powerful predictor of achievement. Our intent is to track learner agency. Second, the design also involves conducting a content analysis of students’ laboratory notebooks and reports. Content analysis is a methodology that encourages inferencing "across distinct domains, from particulars of one kind to particulars of another kind" (Krippendorff,, 2019). Our intent is to learn about students' mastery of the engineering design and experimentation process through analyzing their lab notebooks. We will present the results of a preliminary content analysis of a select sample of those notebooks and genres. 

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4. A Text-Analytic Method for Identifying Text Recycling in STEM Research Reports

   Anson, Ian G ; Moskovitz, Cary ; Anson, Chris M ( November 2019 , The journal of writing analytics)

   Background: Text recycling (hereafter TR)—the reuse of one’s own textual materials from one document in a new document—is a common but hotly debated and unsettled practice in many academic disciplines, especially in the context of peer-reviewed journal articles. Although several analytic systems have been used to determine replication of text—for example, for purposes of identifying plagiarism—they do not offer an optimal way to compare documents to determine the nature and extent of TR in order to study and theorize this as a practice in different disciplines. In this article, we first describe TR as a common phenomenon in academic publishing, then explore the challenges associated with trying to study the nature and extent of TR within STEM disciplines. We then describe in detail the complex processes we used to create a system for identifying TR across large corpora of texts, and the sentence-level string-distance lexical methods used to refine and test the system (White & Joy, 2004). The purpose of creating such a system is to identify legitimate cases of TR across large corpora of academic texts in different fields of study, allowing meaningful cross-disciplinary comparisons in future analyses of published work. The findings from such investigations will extend and refine our understanding of discourse practices in academic and scientific settings. Literature Review: Text-analytic methods have been widely developed and implemented to identify reused textual materials for detecting plagiarism, and there is considerable literature on such methods. (Instead of taking up space detailing this literature, we point readers to several recent reviews: Gupta, 2016; Hiremath & Otari, 2014; and Meuschke & Gipp, 2013). Such methods include fingerprinting, term occurrence analysis, citation analysis (identifying similarity in references and citations), and stylometry (statistically comparing authors’ writing styles; see Meuschke & Gipp, 2013). Although TR occurs in a wide range of situations, recent debate has focused on recycling from one published research paper to another—particularly in STEM fields (see, for example, Andreescu, 2013; Bouville, 2008; Bretag & Mahmud, 2009; Roig, 2008; Scanlon, 2007). An important step in better understanding the practice is seeing how authors actually recycle material in their published work. Standard methods for detecting plagiarism are not directly suitable for this task, as the objective is not to determine the presence or absence of reuse itself, but to study the types and patterns of reuse, including materials that are syntactically but not substantively distinct—such as “patchwriting” (Howard, 1999). In the present account of our efforts to create a text-analytic system for determining TR, we take a conventional alphabetic approach to text, in part because we did not aim at this stage of our project to analyze non-discursive text such as images or other media. However, although the project adheres to conventional definitions of text, with a focus on lexical replication, we also subscribe to context-sensitive approaches to text production. The results of applying the system to large corpora of published texts can potentially reveal varieties in the practice of TR as a function of different discourse communities and disciplines. Writers’ decisions within what appear to be canonical genres are contingent, based on adherence to or deviation from existing rules and procedures if and when these actually exist. Our goal is to create a system for analyzing TR in groups of texts produced by the same authors in order to determine the nature and extent of TR, especially across disciplinary areas, without judgment of scholars’ use of the practice. 

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5. Change theory in STEM higher education: a systematic review

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-021-00291-2  

   Reinholz, Daniel L. ; White, Isabel ; Andrews, Tessa ( December 2021 , International Journal of STEM Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract This article systematically reviews how change theory has been used in STEM higher educational change between 1995 and 2019. Researchers are increasingly turning to theory to inform the design, implementation, and investigation of educational improvement efforts. Yet, efforts are often siloed by discipline and relevant change theory comes from diverse fields outside of STEM. Thus, there is a need to bring together work across disciplines to investigate which change theories are used and how they inform change efforts. This review is based on 97 peer-reviewed articles. We provide an overview of change theories used in the sample and describe how theory informed the rationale and assumptions of projects, conceptualizations of context, indicators used to determine if goals were met, and intervention design. This review points toward three main findings. Change research in STEM higher education almost always draws on theory about individual change, rather than theory that also attends to the system in which change takes place. Additionally, research in this domain often draws on theory in a superficial fashion, instead of using theory as a lens or guide to directly inform interventions, research questions, measurement and evaluation, data analysis, and data interpretation. Lastly, change researchers are not often drawing on, nor building upon, theories used in other studies. This review identified 40 distinct change theories in 97 papers. This lack of theoretical coherence in a relatively limited domain substantially limits our ability to build collective knowledge about how to achieve change. These findings call for more synthetic theoretical work; greater focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion; and more formal opportunities for scholars to learn about change and change theory. 

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