A substantial percentage of engineering graduates, especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups, complete their lower-division education at a community college before transferring to a university to earn their degree. However, engineering programs at many community colleges, because of their relatively small scale with often only one permanent faculty member, struggle to offer lower-division engineering courses with the breadth and frequency needed by students for effective and efficient transfer preparation. As a result, engineering education becomes impractical and at times inaccessible for many community college students. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program (NSF IUSE), three community colleges from Northern California collaborated to increase the availability and accessibility of the engineering curriculum by developing resources and teaching strategies to enable small-to-medium sized community college engineering programs to support a comprehensive set of lower-division engineering courses. These resources were developed for use in a variety of delivery formats (e.g., fully online, online/hybrid, flipped face-to-face, etc.), providing flexibility for local community colleges to leverage according to their individual needs. This paper focuses on the development and testing of the resources for an introductory Materials Science course with 3-unit lecture and 1-unit laboratory components. Although most of the course resources were developed to allow online delivery if desired, the laboratory curriculum was designed to require some limited face-to-face interaction with traditional materials testing equipment. In addition to the resources themselves, the paper presents the results of the pilot implementation of the course during the Spring 2015 semester, taught using a flipped delivery format consisting of asynchronous remote viewing of lecture videos and face-to-face student-centered problem-solving and lab exercises. These same resources were then implemented in a flipped format by an instructor who had never previously taught the course, at a community college that did not have its own materials laboratory facilities. Site visits were arranged with a nearby community college to afford students an opportunity to complete certain lab activities using traditional materials testing equipment. In both implementations of the course, student surveys and interviews were used to determine students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the course resources, student use of these resources, and overall satisfaction with the course. Additionally, student performance on assessments was compared with that of traditional lecture delivery of the courses in prior years.
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Correlations between student connectivity and academic performance: a pandemic follow-up
Social network analysis (SNA) has been gaining traction as a technique for quantitatively studying student collaboration. We analyze networks, constructed from student self-reports of collaboration on homework assignments, in two courses from the University of Colorado Boulder and one course from the Colorado School of Mines. All three courses occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allows for a comparison between the course at the Colorado School of Mines (in a fully remote format) with results from a previous pre-pandemic study of student collaboration at the Colorado School of Mines (in a hybrid format). We compute nodal centrality measures and calculate the correlation between student centrality and performance. Results varied widely between each of the courses studied. The course at the Colorado School of Mines had strong correlations between many centrality measures and performance which matched the patterns seen in the pre-pandemic study. The courses at the University of Colorado Boulder showed weaker correlations, and one course showed nearly no correlations at all between students' connectivity to their classmates and their performance. Taken together, the results from the trio of courses indicate that the context and environment in which the course is situated play a more important role in fostering a correlation between student collaboration and course performance than the format (remote, hybrid, in-person) of the course. Additionally, we conducted a short study on the effect that missing nodes may have on the correlations calculated from the measured networks. This investigation showed that missing nodes tend to shift correlations towards zero, providing evidence that the statistically significant correlations measured in our networks are not spurious.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1839232
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10361373
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ArXivorg
- ISSN:
- 2331-8422
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2210.01207
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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