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1. 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)

   null (Ed.)

   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 the 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. 

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2. Translating and Scaling a Face-to-Face, Video-Based Elementary Science PD Program to an Online Environment

   Kowalski, S. ; Belcastro, A. ; Hvidsten, C. ; Constantine, A. ; Faruqi, F. ; Askinas, K. ; De Vaul, R. ; Roehrig, G. ( April 2021 , Annual Meeting of the NARST International Conference)

   Objective Over the past decade, we developed and studied a face-to-face video-based analysis-of-practice professional development (PD) model. In a cluster randomized trial, we found that the face-to-face model enhanced elementary science teacher knowledge and practice and resulted in important improvements to student science achievement (student treatment effect, d = 0.52; Taylor et al, 2017; Roth et al, 2018). The face-to-face PD model is expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we present the results of a two-year design-based research study to translate the face-to-face PD into a facilitated online PD experience. The purpose is to create an effective, flexible, and cost-efficient PD model that will reach a broader audience of teachers. Perspective/Theoretical Framework The face-to-face PD model is grounded in situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeship frameworks. Teachers engage in learning science content and effective science teaching practices in the context in which they will be teaching. There are scaffolded opportunities for teachers to learn from analysis of model videos by experienced teachers, to try teaching model units, to analyze video of their own teaching efforts, and ultimately to develop their own unit, with guidance. The PD model attends to the key features of effective PD as described by Desimone (2009) and others. We adhered closely to the design principles of the face-to-face model as described by Authors, 2019. Methods We followed a design-based research approach (DBR; Cobb et al., 2003; Shavelson et al., 2003) to examine the online program components and how they promoted or interfered with the development of teachers’ knowledge and reflective practice. Of central interest was the examination of mechanisms for facilitating teacher learning (Confrey, 2006). To accomplish this goal, design researchers engaged in iterative cycles of problem analysis, design, implementation, examination, and redesign (Wang & Hannafin, 2005) in phase one of the project before studying its effect. Data Three small pilot groups of teachers engaged in both synchronous and asynchronous components of the larger online course which began implementation with a 10-week summer course that leads into study groups of participants meeting through one academic year. We iteratively designed, tested, and revised 17 modules across three pilot versions. On average, pilot groups completed one module every two weeks. Pilot 1 began the work in May 2019; Pilot 2 began in August 2019, and Pilot 3 began in October 2019. Pilot teachers responded to surveys and took part in interviews related to the PD. The PD facilitators took extensive notes after each iteration. The development team met weekly to discuss revisions. We revised all modules between each pilot group and used what we learned to inform our development of later modules within each pilot. For example, we applied what we learned from testing Module 3 with Pilot 1 to the development of Module 3 for Pilots 2, and also applied what we learned from Module 3 with Pilot 1 to the development of Module 7 for Pilot 1. Results We found that community building required the same incremental trust-building activities that occur in face-to-face PD. Teachers began with low-risk activities and gradually engaged in activities that required greater vulnerability (sharing a video of themselves teaching a model unit for analysis and critique by the group). We also identified how to contextualize technical tools with instructional prompts to allow teachers to productively interact with one another about science ideas asynchronously. As part of that effort, we crafted crux questions to surface teachers’ confusions or challenges related to content or pedagogy. We called them crux questions because they revealed teachers’ uncertainty and deepened learning during the discussion. Facilitators leveraged asynchronous responses to crux questions in the synchronous sessions to push teacher thinking further than would have otherwise been possible in a 2-hour synchronous video-conference. Significance Supporting teachers with effective, flexible, and cost-efficient PD is difficult under the best of circumstances. In the era of covid-19, online PD has taken on new urgency. NARST members will gain insight into the translation of an effective face-to-face PD model to an online environment. 

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3. Categorizing student interactions with manipulatives in statics

   Rupe, K. M. ; Davishahl, E. ( May 2022 , 2022 ASEE Zone IV Conference)

   This work in progress paper describes ongoing work to understand the ways in which students make use of manipulatives to develop their representational competence and deepen their conceptual understanding of course content. Representational competence refers to the fluency with which a subject expert can move between different representations of a concept (e.g. mathematical, symbolic, graphical, 2D vs. 3D, pictorial) as appropriate for communication, reasoning, and problem solving. Several hands-on activities for engineering statics have been designed and implemented in face-to-face courses since fall 2016. In the transition to online learning in response to the COVID 19 pandemic, modeling kits were sent home to students so they could work on the activities at their own pace and complete the associated worksheets. An assignment following the vector activities required students to create videotaped or written reflections with annotated pictures using the models to explain their thinking around key concepts. Students made connections between abstract symbolic representations and their physical models to explain concepts such as a general 3D unit vector, the difference between spherical coordinate angles and coordinate direction angles, and the meaning of decomposing a vector into components perpendicular and parallel to a line. Thematic analysis of the video and written data was used to develop codes and identify themes in students’ use of the models as it relates to developing representational competence. The student submissions also informed the design of think-aloud exercises in one-on-one semi-structured interviews between researchers and students that are currently in progress. This paper presents initial work analyzing and discussing themes that emerged from the initial video and written analysis and plans for the subsequent think-aloud interviews, all focused on the specific attributes of the models that students use to make sense of course concepts. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop some general guidelines for the design of manipulatives to support student learning in a variety of STEM topics. 

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4. Categorizing student interactions with manipulatives in statics

   Rupe K. ; Davishahl, E. ( May 2022 , 2022 ASEE Zone IV Conference)

   This work in progress paper describes ongoing work to understand the ways in which students make use of manipulatives to develop their representational competence and deepen their conceptual understanding of course content. Representational competence refers to the fluency with which a subject expert can move between different representations of a concept (e.g. mathematical, symbolic, graphical, 2D vs. 3D, pictorial) as appropriate for communication, reasoning, and problem solving. Several hands-on activities for engineering statics have been designed and implemented in face-to-face courses since fall 2016. In the transition to online learning in response to the COVID 19 pandemic, modeling kits were sent home to students so they could work on the activities at their own pace and complete the associated worksheets. An assignment following the vector activities required students to create videotaped or written reflections with annotated pictures using the models to explain their thinking around key concepts. Students made connections between abstract symbolic representations and their physical models to explain concepts such as a general 3D unit vector, the difference between spherical coordinate angles and coordinate direction angles, and the meaning of decomposing a vector into components perpendicular and parallel to a line. Thematic analysis of the video and written data was used to develop codes and identify themes in students’ use of the models as it relates to developing representational competence. The student submissions also informed the design of think-aloud exercises in one-on-one semi-structured interviews between researchers and students that are currently in progress. This paper presents initial work analyzing and discussing themes that emerged from the initial video and written analysis and plans for the subsequent think-aloud interviews, all focused on the specific attributes of the models that students use to make sense of course concepts. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop some general guidelines for the design of manipulatives to support student learning in a variety of STEM topics. 

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5. The Effectiveness of Synchronous vs Asynchronous Modes of Instruction in an Online Flipped Design Thinking Course

   Mohandas, L. ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Motivation: This is a complete paper. There was a sudden shift from traditional learning to online learning in Spring 2020 with the outbreak of COVID-19. Although online learning is not a new topic of discussion, universities, faculty, and students were not prepared for this sudden change in learning. According to a recent article in ‘The Chronicle of Higher Education, “even under the best of circumstances, virtual learning requires a different, carefully crafted approach to engagement”. The Design Thinking course under study is a required freshmen level course offered in a Mid-western University. The Design Thinking course is offered in a flipped format where all the content to be learned is given to students beforehand and the in-class session is used for active discussions and hands-on learning related to the content provided at the small group level. The final learning objective of the course is a group project where student groups are expected to come up with functional prototypes to solve a real-world problem following the Design Thinking process. There were eighteen sections of the Design Thinking course offered in Spring 2020, and with the outbreak of COVID-19, a few instructors decided to offer synchronous online classes (where instructors were present online during class time and provided orientation and guidance just like a normal class) and a few others decided to offer asynchronous online classes (where orientation from the instructor was delivered asynchronous and the instructor was online during officially scheduled class time but interactions were more like office hours). Students were required to be present synchronously at the team level during the class time in a synchronous online class. In an asynchronous online class, students could be synchronous at the team level to complete their assignment any time prior to the deadline such that they could work during class time but they were not required to work at that time. Through this complete paper, we are trying to understand student learning, social presence and learner satisfaction with respect to different modes of instruction in a freshmen level Design Thinking course. Background: According to literature, synchronous online learning has advantages such as interaction, a classroom environment, and better course quality whereas asynchronous online learning has advantages such as self-controlled and self-directed learning. The disadvantages of synchronous online learning include the learning process, technology issues, and distraction. Social isolation, lack of interaction, and technology issue are a few disadvantages related to asynchronous online learning. Problem Being Addressed: There is a limited literature base investigating different modes of online instruction in a Design Thinking course. Through this paper, we are trying to understand and share the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous modes of instruction in an online Flipped Design Thinking Course. The results of the paper could also help in this time of pandemic by shedding light on the more effective way to teach highly active group-based classrooms for better student learning, social presence, and learner satisfaction. Method/Assessment: An end of semester survey was monitored in Spring 2020 to understand student experiences in synchronous and asynchronous Design Thinking course sections. The survey was sent to 720 students enrolled in the course in Spring 2020 and 324 students responded to the survey. Learning was measured using the survey instrument developed by Walker (2003) and the social presence and learner satisfaction was measured by the survey modified by Richardson and Swan (2003). Likert scale was used to measure survey responses. Anticipated Results: Data would be analyzed and the paper would be completed by draft paper submission. As the course under study is a flipped and active course with a significant component of group work, the anticipated results after analysis could be that one mode of instruction has higher student learning, social presence, and learner satisfaction compared to the other. 

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