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1. Classroom Practices that Support Minoritized Engineering Students’ Sense of Belonging

   Rainey, Arielle ; Verdín, Dina ; Smith, Jessica ( January 2021 , Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   Establishing and sustaining a sense of belonging is a necessary human motivation with particular implications for student learning, including in engineering. Students who experience a sense of belonging are more likely to display intrinsic motivation and establish a stronger sense of identity and persistence. It is important, however, to distinguish different domains of belonging, such as belonging to one’s university, belonging to a major, and belonging in the classroom setting. Our study examines if and how faculty support efforts contribute to diverse students’ sense of belonging in the classroom setting. Specifically, we sought to answer the following research questions: Which faculty support efforts promote a sense of classroom belongingness? Do faculty support efforts differentially promote a sense of classroom belongingness for students based on their demographic characteristics? Data for this study was collected in the Fall of 2018, across ten institutions, n = 819. We used the Faculty Support items from the STEM Student Perspectives of Support Instrument developed from Lee’s model of co-curricular support to answer our research questions. Demographic categories were created to understand if and how faculty support efforts differentially promote a sense of belonging for minoritized students compared to their counterparts. Multiple regression analysis was conductedmore »to examine the faculty support efforts that fostered a sense of belonging in the classroom. Interaction effects were included to understand how faculty support efforts affected classroom belongingness for the students in the demographic groups we identified. Minoritized women were less likely to feel a sense of belonging in the classroom when compared to majoritized men. Neither groups of women believed that their instructors wanted them to succeed, thus negatively impacting their classroom belongingness. There were, however, faculty support efforts that positively contributed to a sense of belonging in the classroom for minoritized women, including instructors’ availability, knowing that they could ask instructors for help in course-related material, and when instructors fostered an atmosphere of mutual respect. Additionally, minoritized women felt a sense of classroom belonging when they could capitalize on their previous experiences to scaffold their learning. Our findings highlight classroom practices and strategies faculty can use in the classroom to support minoritized women’s sense of belonging. These practices and strategies will be a crucial resource for engineering educators and administrators who seek to improve the field’s retention of minoritized and women students. Whereas efforts have been made to recruit minoritized students into engineering, our study points to a clear and crucial role for faculty to play: they can support minoritized students by fostering a sense of belonging in engineering classrooms.« less
2. Impact of a Sketch-based Tutoring System at Multiple Universities

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34750  

   Viswanathan, Vimal Kumar ; Hurt, Josh Taylor ; Hammond, Tracy Anne ; Caldwell, Benjamin W. ; Talley, Kimberly Grau ; Linsey, Julie S. ( June 2020 , 2020 ASEE Annual Conference)

   Introductory engineering courses at large universities often number over a hundred students, while online classes can have even larger enrollments, significantly constraining instructors’ ability to provide feedback on homework, including the free-body diagrams (FBDs). Most online homework systems do not provide feedback on FBDs if the systems even allow the submission, and instructors often lack time or resources to provide this. A few systems have been developed that use a menu-based system allowing students to creative FBDs. There is a growing concern amongst engineering educators that student lacks critical sketching skills and the ability to idealize a real-world system as a free body diagram (FBD). A sketch-recognition based tutoring system, Mechanix, allows learners to hand-draw solutions just as they would with pencil and paper, while also providing iterative real-time personalized feedback. Sketch recognition algorithms use artificial intelligence to identify the shapes, their relationships, and other features of the sketched student drawing. Other AI algorithms then determine if and why a student’s work is incorrect, enabling the tutoring system to return immediate and iterative personalized feedback facilitating student learning that is otherwise not possible in large classes. Preliminary results using Mechanix, a sketch-based statics tutoring system built at Texas A&M Universitymore »suggest that a sketch-based tutoring system increases homework motivation in struggling students and is as effective as paper-and-pencil-based homework for teaching method of joints truss analysis. The current project implements Mechanix at five different universities obtaining Pre/Post Concept Inventory, homework, and exam scores. It is compared against either the university's current online system or paper-based homework. Focus groups provide further insight into the students’ perceptions about the impact of Mechanix on their learning.« less
3. Convergence of Social Marketing and Engineering: A Lead Mitigation Study in Madagascar

   https://doi.org/10.1177/15245004231153951  

   Buerck, Adaline M. ; Khaliq, Mahmooda ; Rakotondrazaka, Rinah ; Rakotoarisoa, Lova ; Paul Barrett, Luke John ; Sommariva, Silvia ; Mihelcic, James R. ( January 2023 , Social Marketing Quarterly)

   The importance of Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) projects for the protection of health is embedded in the sustainable development goals. However, within the development and humanitarian fields sustainability of WASH projects is still a challenge with 30–50% of projects failing within two to five years of implementation. Though failure is not linked to any one source, a common theme speaks to a greater need for community engagement and integration of the wants and needs of the end-user in the design process. Social marketing, with its focus on the consumer and use of commercial marketing strategies to achieve behavior change is a promising approach that can be integrated into ongoing WASH initiatives to meet program outcomes and to achieve long-term sustainability.

   Primary audience includes technicians who manufacture and repair pitcher pumps. Secondary audience includes community members in Toamasina, Madagascar, who will experience a decrease in exposure to lead through their water supply.

   Decrease exposure to lead (Pb) introduced through the use of a decentralized, self-supply water system, the pitcher pump. Specifically, decrease use of leaded components in the manufacturing and repair of pitcher-pumps

   Development of the intervention followed the social marketing process including conducting a situationalmore »analysis, identification and selection of a behavioral focus and priority population, formative research, development of an integrated marketing strategy, pretesting the strategy, followed by campaign implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. An intervention focused on building a sense of community and introducing the element of professionalism for the pump manufacturers was developed, consisting of personalized one-on-one outreach to raise awareness of the health topic, followed by skill building trainings on how to make the switch to non-leaded components. This was coupled with tangible products that created a new professional network, documentation of work, and backing of work by trusted government entities.

   Using the theory of planned behavior, a pre/post-test summative evaluation was developed. Preliminary results indicate that pump technicians no longer use lead in pumps unless specifically requested by the pump owners. These results indicate a positive shift towards the use of lead-free components with project follow-up and analysis ongoing.

   Use of social marketing within the WASH sector is lacking. This paper demonstrates the integration of social marketing in an ongoing WASH project. Through a description of each step of the process, our experiences in implementing it and the lessons learned, we hope to guide future integration. Additionally, this paper demonstrates the convergence of engineers and social marketers working collaboratively on an interdisciplinary team and how this served to enhance project understanding, aid in building local partnerships and help with long-term sustainability.

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4. WIP: Hands-On Statics in the Online “Classroom”

   Davishahl, Eric ; Self, Brian P. ; Fuentes, Mathew Parsons ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   Engineering instructors often use physical manipulatives such as foam beams, rolling cylinders, and large representations of axis systems to demonstrate mechanics concepts and help students visualize systems. Additional benefits are possible when manipulatives are in the hands of individual students or small teams of students who can explore concepts at their own pace and focus on their specific points of confusion. Online learning modalities require new strategies to promote spatial visualization and kinesthetic learning. Potential solutions include creating videos of the activities, using CAD models to demonstrate the principles, programming computer simulations, and providing hands-on manipulatives to students for at-home use. This Work-in-Progress paper discusses our experiences with this last strategy in statics courses two western community colleges and a western four-year university where we supplied students with their own hands-on kits. We have previously reported on the successful implementation of a hands-on statics kit consisting of 3D printed components and standard hardware. The kit was originally designed for use by teams of students during class to engage with topics such as vectors, moments, and rigid body equilibrium. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and shift to online instruction, the first author developed a scaled down version of themore »kit for at-home use by individual students and modified the associated activity worksheets accordingly. For the community college courses, local students picked up their models at the campus bookstore. We also shipped some of the kits to students who were unable to come to campus, including some in other countries. Due to problems with printing and availability of materials, only 18 kits were available for the class of 34 students at the university implementation. Due to this circumstance, students were placed in teams and asked to work together virtually, one student showing the kit to the other student as they worked through the worksheet prompts. One community college instructor took this approach as well for a limited number of international students who did not receive their kits in a timely manner due to shipping problems. Two instructors assigned the hands-on kits as asynchronous learning activities in their respective online courses, with limited guidance on their use. The third used the kits primarily in synchronous online class meetings. We found that students’ reaction to the models varied by pilot site and presume that implementation differences contributed to this variation. In all cases, student feedback was less positive than it has been for face-to-face courses that used the models from which the take home kit was adapted. Our main conclusion is that implementation matters. Doing hands-on learning in an online course requires some fundamental rethinking about how the learning is structured and scaffolded.« less
5. Developing a Faculty Community of Practice to Support a Healthy Educational Ecosystem

   Warter-Perez, N. ; Galvan, D. ; Mijares, J. ; Bowen, C. ; Menezes, G. ; Thompson, L. ( September 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.)

   We STEM educators often hear that so many of our students fail because they are not college ready. But interventions at various levels, despite the hard work of implementation, have not resulted in dramatic improvements. What if, instead, the problem is that the institutional system – including instructional approaches and policies – is not student ready? The goal of our NSF supported project, called “Eco-STEM,” is to establish a healthy STEM educational ecosystem that allows all individuals within the ecosystem to thrive. The context for our work on STEM educational ecosystems is a Very High Hispanic Enrolling Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) at California State University, Los Angeles, where the majority of our students are also low-income and first-generation college students. Guided by an ecosystem paradigm, the project aims to: 1) create a supportive and culturally responsive learning/working environment for both students and faculty; 2) make teaching and learning rewarding and fulfilling experiences; and 3) emphasize the assets of our community to enhance motivation, excellence, and success. Currently, many STEM educators have a mental model of the education system as a pipeline or pathway, and this factory-like model requires standard inputs, expecting students to come prepared with certain knowledge and skills [4].more »When the educational system is viewed as a factory assembly line (as shown in Figure 1), interventions are focused on fixing the inputs by trying to increase students’ preparedness, which contributes to a prevailing deficit-focused mindset. This not only hinders student growth but also makes educational institutions less inclusive and teaching less rewarding for faculty. Increasingly, equity-minded educators and researchers employing the framework of community cultural wealth suggest that we need an asset-based mindset if we are to help all students achieve success in STEM. Research on ecosystem models offers a new way of thinking. In contrast to pipelines or pathways, which focus on student outcomes, an ecosystem model is centered on the learning environment, communities, and the experiences that diverse students, faculty, and staff have in the system as active agents. The Eco-STEM project proposes to: 1) shift the mental models of STEM faculty from factory- based to ecosystem-based so that they will intentionally establish healthy classroom ecosystems that facilitate learning for all students regardless of their backgrounds; 2) change the mental models and develop the capacity of department chairs and program coordinators so they can lead the cultural changes needed to create a healthy ecosystem at the department level; and 3) revise the teaching evaluation system to promote faculty development and enhance the student experience, which will help to create a healthy ecosystem at the institution. One fundamental aspect of this project is the Eco-STEM Faculty Fellows Community of Practice (CoP), which is designed to help foster these changes. As a work-in-progress paper, this paper presents the design and structure of the Eco-STEM Faculty Fellows CoP and seeks input from the faculty development community on our approach to fostering a healthy educational ecosystem for the majority marginalized student population we serve.« less