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1. Setting the stage for co-creation: Using workshops to scaffold interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and community building

   Kershaw, T.C. ; Tripathy, S.T. ; Liu, H. ; Chandra, K. ( June 2023 , Proceedings of the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Co-creation in academe can take multiple forms. In this research, the co-creation focus is on collaboration between faculty and graduate students to develop educational modules. This activity is designed to improve graduate education and prepare students for conducting graduate research. In previous work presented at ASEE 2022, we discussed benefits and challenges of participating in the co-creation process. This current paper focuses on how we took lessons from our first year and transformed them into a structure to better support interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and community building. We will discuss how we supported the process of co-creation by developing a series of workshops to scaffold student learning. Scaffolds are instructional methods and interventions that are designed to foster skill development by allowing for interactions between what students already know and what they have yet to learn. These workshops were designed using the tenets of the gold standard project-based learning (PjBL). The PjBL framework is itself a scaffold that is designed to build research competencies. Specifically, to introduce a challenging problem or question, we created multiple technical overviews of the cyber-physical system theme of interest that would constitute the eventual educational modules. We scaffolded sustained inquiry by developing a workshop using techniques from the Right Question Institute, and also through a workshop about crafting your message for different audiences. To support the PjBL idea of authenticity, we developed a workshop about core values to help students connect personally to their project topics. To further support collaboration and community building, we developed a workshop to introduce ideas of interdisciplinary collaboration, including developing community agreements and recognizing and responding to microaggressions. Periodic reinforcements of these topics were incorporated as students progressed in their co-creation project. We assessed how students applied these topics through student reflections. Scaffolding students’ learning helped to address co-creation challenges that were expressed by our pilot group, including not understanding the goals of the project and not feeling connected to the research. Observational data of the current groups suggests that students have better understanding of the co-creation process and are collaborating more effectively than our pilot group students, and focus group data confirmed these observations. We also collected feedback from students about the workshops to evaluate what is effective about them and what can be improved. Students felt skills taught in the workshops such as how to prioritize research questions, construct messages for specific audiences, and perform literature searches and reviews, were all effective and useful as they worked on their projects. For improvement, they suggested clearer objectives and more workshops that focus on technical aspects of the project work would be helpful. 

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2. Dose-Response in Context: A Backward Design, Inquiry Activity Workshop for College Transfer Students

   https://doi.org/10.58021/S5KW2J  

   Santiago, Nicholas A. ; Glasenapp, Matthew R. ; Howard, Shanna L. ( January 2022 , Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE))

   Seagroves, Scott ; Barnes, Austin ; Metevier, Anne ; Porter, Jason ; Hunter, Lisa (Ed.)

   The Workshops for Engineering and Science Transfers (WEST) program was designed to foster critical-thinking skills and develop a supportive community for new Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) community college transfer students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with the ultimate goal of improving student retention and persistence in STEM. All learners in the program participate in inquiry activities devised to incorporate elements of backward design and equity and inclusion. Here we discuss our 2019 Toxicology WEST workshop activity, an in-depth exploration of dose-response relationships created to provide an overview of the field of toxicology and clarify common misconceptions. To reflect authentic research design, we had learners assume the roles of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists tasked with investigating the effects of environmental toxicants on the model organisms Caenorhabditis elegans and Daphnia magna. Learners were asked to design and conduct experiments to explore the dose-response relationship and report their results in a culminating poster symposium. We assessed learning by evaluating their performance on two tasks: an individual written response and a group poster presentation. Our activity gave learners an opportunity to practice experimental design, data analysis, and science communication before beginning UCSC STEM courses. Practicing these skills early is essential for student retention in STEM, as many students find the experimental process challenging. Here, we describe details of our inquiry workshop activity, reflect on the effectiveness of the activity and our assessment of student learning, and offer suggestions for facilitation and adaptation of our activity to additional educational contexts. 

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3. An Analysis of an Instructional Development Workshop to Promote the Adoption of Active Learning in STEM: Potential Implications for Faculty Developers

   Carroll, L. J. ( November 2022 , International Journal of Engineering Education)

   Wedeveloped an instructional development workshop for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) instructors in higher education to promote their adoption of active learning. Our workshop design was based on a proposed framework for motivating adult learners consisting of five elements: (1) expertise of presenters, (2) relevance of content, (3) choice in application, (4) praxis, and (5) group work. We assessed the participating instructors’ attitudes (i.e., motivation to use active learning and intentions and motivation to use strategies to reduce student resistance to active learning) immediately before and after the workshop and again five to six months later. We also assessed participants’ satisfaction with the workshop. Analyses of our data provided evidence of a change in participants’ motivation to use active learning and both their intentions and motivation to use strategies to reduce student resistance to active learning following the workshop. Our quantitative findings and thematic analysis of survey results support the use of the proposed framework for designing instructional development workshops for STEM faculty. The results also show short-term instructional development workshops can be effective and suggest caution in extrapolating immediate post-workshop assessment to the longer-term. 

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4. Board 418: Understanding Context: Propagation and Effectiveness of the Concept Warehouse in Mechanical Engineering at Five Diverse Institutions and Beyond – Results from Year 4

   Self, B. P. ; Koretsky, M. ; Nolen, S. B. ; Dal Bello, D. J. ; Widmann, J. M. ; Prince, M. J. ; Papadopoulos, C. ( June 2023 , 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Several consensus reports cite a critical need to dramatically increase the number and diversity of STEM graduates over the next decade. They conclude that a change to evidence-based instructional practices, such as concept-based active learning, is needed. Concept-based active learning involves the use of activity-based pedagogies whose primary objectives are to make students value deep conceptual understanding (instead of only factual knowledge) and then to facilitate their development of that understanding. Concept-based active learning has been shown to increase academic engagement and student achievement, to significantly improve student retention in academic programs, and to reduce the performance gap of underrepresented students. Fostering students' mastery of fundamental concepts is central to real world problem solving, including several elements of engineering practice. Unfortunately, simply proving that these instructional practices are more effective than traditional methods for promoting student learning, for increasing retention in academic programs, and for improving ability in professional practice is not enough to ensure widespread pedagogical change. In fact, the biggest challenge to improving STEM education is not the need to develop more effective instructional practices, but to find ways to get faculty to adopt the evidence-based pedagogies that already exist. In this project we seek to propagate the Concept Warehouse, a technological innovation designed to foster concept-based active learning, into Mechanical Engineering (ME) and to study student learning with this tool in five diverse institutional settings. The Concept Warehouse (CW) is a web-based instructional tool that we developed for Chemical Engineering (ChE) faculty. It houses over 3,500 ConcepTests, which are short questions that can rapidly be deployed to engage students in concept-oriented thinking and/or to assess students’ conceptual knowledge, along with more extensive concept-based active learning tools. The CW has grown rapidly during this project and now has over 1,600 faculty accounts and over 37,000 student users. New ConcepTests were created during the current reporting period; the current numbers of questions for Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics of Materials are 342, 410, and 41, respectively. A detailed review process is in progress, and will continue through the no-cost extension year, to refine question clarity and to identify types of new questions to fill gaps in content coverage. There have been 497 new faculty accounts created after June 30, 2018, and 3,035 unique students have answered these mechanics questions in the CW. We continue to analyze instructor interviews, focusing on 11 cases, all of whom participated in the CW Community of Practice (CoP). For six participants, we were able to compare use of the CW both before and after participating in professional development activities (workshops and/or a community or practice). Interview results have been coded and are currently being analyzed. To examine student learning, we recruited faculty to participate in deploying four common questions in both statics and dynamics. In statics, each instructor agreed to deploy the same four questions (one each for Rigid Body Equilibrium, Trusses, Frames, and Friction) among their overall deployments of the CW. In addition to answering the question, students were also asked to provide a written explanation to explain their reasoning, to rate the confidence of their answers, and to rate the degree to which the questions were clear and promoted deep thinking. The analysis to date has resulted in a Work-In-Progress paper presented at ASEE 2022, reporting a cross-case comparison of two instructors and a Work-In-Progress paper to be presented at ASEE 2023 analyzing students’ metacognitive reflections of concept questions. 

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5. Investigating the linkage between professional development and mathematics instructors’ use of teaching practices using the theory of planned behavior

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267097  

   Archie, Tim ; Hayward, Charles N. ; Yoshinobu, Stan ; Laursen, Sandra L. ( April 2022 , PLOS ONE)

   Zou, Di (Ed.)

   Professional development has been identified as an effective way to increase college STEM instructors’ use of research-based instructional strategies (RBIS) known to benefit student learning and persistence in STEM. Yet only a few studies relate professional development experiences to later teaching behaviors of higher education instructors. This study of 361 undergraduate mathematics instructors, all of whom participated in multi-day, discipline-based workshops on teaching held in 2010–2019, examined the relationship between such participation and later use of RBIS. We found that instructors’ RBIS attitudes, knowledge, and skills strengthened after participating in professional development, and their self-reported use of RBIS became more frequent in the first year after the workshop. Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior as a conceptual framework, we used a structural equation model to test whether this theory could explain the roles of workshop participation and other personal, professional and contextual factors in fostering RBIS use. Findings indicated that, along with workshop participation, prior RBIS experience, class size, and course coordination affected RBIS use. That is, both targeted professional development and elements of the local context for implementation were important in supporting instructors’ uptake of RBIS—but, remarkably, both immediate and longer-term outcomes of professional development did not depend on other individual or institutional characteristics. In this study, the large sample size, longitudinal measurement approach, and consistency of the form and quality of professional development make it possible to distinguish the importance of multiple possible influences on instructors’ uptake of RBIS. We discuss implications for professional development and for institutional structures that support instructors as they apply what they learned, and we offer suggestions for the use of theory in future research on this topic. 

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