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1. Transferring Institutions in Different Modalities: Lessons from Undergraduates Across Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1177/15210251231179701  

   Stearns, Elizabeth (June 2023, Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice)

   The broad-scale challenges that higher education undertook in response to the COVID-19 pandemic changed a great deal about the student experience. Ongoing throughout several semesters, those changes may have affected the ways that transfer students experienced transition to the 4-year university setting, with implications for student retention. Interviews with students who transferred from community colleges to a large research university at three different pandemic stages—in 2019, 2020, and 2021—reveal that some aspects of the transfer experience remained consistent, while others changed. Notably, students experienced university-level coursework as academically challenging regardless of its mode of delivery and reported finding a diversity of academic and social options at the university. Transferring into online coursework helped reduce the shock associated with large-enrollment classes and navigating a large campus. Students reported fewer issues overall with course delivery when taking solely online coursework. The paper closes with recommendations to increase transfer student retention. 

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2. Supporting the Success of Low-Income Engineering Students through Community-Building (Evaluation)

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--48040  

   Leak, Anne (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   Over the past twelve years, the ESTEEM program, funded by the NSF S-STEM, at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) has supported 161 low-income undergraduate students in engineering. This paper emphasizes the students’ changing needs and what they found supportive over time with a special focus on the shifting needs for community building before, during, and after COVID-19 pandemic remote learning. Without additional support, low-income engineering students, who often reflect additional intersecting minoritized identities and are more likely to be the first in their family to attend college, leave the field at higher rates than their peers. Students who are likely to persist in engineering reported supportive relationships with mentors, positive near peer role models, a strong sense of community, and an intention to complete their engineering major. Yet, accessing these support systems is often challenging for low-income students, who are more likely to work long hours and spend more time off campus and less likely to have adequate opportunities to interact with others in their major and see themselves in role models and as part of that community. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the higher education plans and financial viability of UCSB engineering students, especially those from low-income families. In addition to increased financial hardships, these students lacked access to campus educational resources like tutoring and mentors and were more isolated from their on-campus engineering communities. While research has identified needs and programmatic supports likely to encourage student retention in engineering, little is known about the specific needs of low-income students in engineering and how these needs have changed over time. We examined the needs and financial and educational supports of 161 low-income students using ESTEEM evaluation data from 2011 to 2023 who pursued engineering bachelor’s degrees at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Our findings emphasize the types of programmatic supports that were most helpful for students’ education and career pathways in engineering. These results indicate shifting needs for physical space, social interactions with mentors and peers, and have implications for evolving how engineering departments and programs support low-income students to meet their changing needs for persisting in engineering. 

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3. Best Practices for the Implementation of Home-based, Hands-on Lab Activities to Effectively Engage STEM Students During a Pandemic

   Owolabi, O. A. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   The current COVID-19 pandemic has forced many colleges and universities to remain on a completely online or remote educational learning environment for the 2020 Spring and Fall semesters, however there is a growing concern in STEM fields about how students will be able to achieve one of the major ABET learning outcomes without conducting physical, hands on laboratory exercises as many STEM disciplines are switching to virtual laboratory; an ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering/scientific judgment to draw conclusions. In addition to the limited achievement of the ABET outcomes, roughly half of the population of a historically black university communicated their anxieties during the pandemic to the University President via Change.org. The students’ main anxiety is portrayed in a statement culled from the petition as follows: “Most classes are very hands-on, and we are not able to do those from home because of the limited resources available at home”. This paper highlights the best practices for the implementation of home-based hands-on activities across multiple STEM fields. The paper further elaborates on the impact of remote and virtual labs on students’ attitude, interest, and performance in STEM over the home-based hands-on experimentation. Home-based hands-on laboratory activities were performed in biology, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, transportation system, and civil engineering. The results of a Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaires (MLSQ) survey that was administered to about 100 STEM students revealed better gains in key constructs associated with student success, such as motivation, critical thinking, and metacognition. 

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4. A Comparison of the Academic Performance of Rising Scholars with Other Student Demographic Groupings before and during the COVID Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.13031/aim.202200205  

   Baldwin, Grace L.; Womack, Virginia Booth; LaRose, Sarah E.; Stwalley, Carol S.; Stwalley, Robert M. (July 2022, 2022 ASABE Annual International Meeting)

   The Purdue University Rising Scholars program was established in 2016 by a NSF grant designed to examine the effect of adult mentor support networks on student performance. The first students began classes in the fall of 2017, and their performance and many aspects of the program have been reported in the literature. Unfortunately, during this same time period, the COVID-19 pandemic moved across the globe and dramatically changed collegiate education. The effects of the pandemic in education will be felt for some time following the eventual demise of the virus. Because of this NSF grant period, the research team was uniquely positioned with matched pair sets of matriculating students from the Rising Scholars program, engineering, and exploratory studies. This paper will compare the performance of these students and the general student population for GPA and retention between the pre-COVID period (< spring of 2020) and the COVID period (spring 2020 onward). It is commonly perceived among collegiate instructors that student performance has suffered during the pandemic. The Rising Scholar demographic has the potential to have increased adverse effects from the pandemic disruption, but they also have an established adult mentor support network. The researchers have looked at differential performance outcomes between the various groups and exposed a tendency toward diminished performance with thinner networked students. Sample sizes were too small for the evaluation of any meaningful statistical tests. 

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5. Innovative Use of Technologies to Teach Chemical Engineering Core Classes and Laboratories During the Covid-19 Pandemic at an HBCU

   Dua, Rupak (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   Most chemical engineering core classes are best taught when students are exposed to a face-to-face learning/teaching environment. With the arrival of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the whole education system and the setting were disrupted at Hampton University (HU). Traditional in-person face-to-face classes were forced to move to remote instructions to maintain a healthy and safe campus environment and minimize the spread of COVID-19 on campus and in the community. As an instructor teaching core courses and unit operations laboratory in the Department of Chemical Engineering, it was challenging to move completely virtual and deliver instructions remotely without affecting students' learning outcomes. However, with the appropriate modern technologies and adapting to the students' change and needs, online teaching can be done efficiently and can still have efficient learning outcomes. Various activities were introduced to make the online/virtual class environment engaging in developing technical and professional skills and inducing learning for students. Using the latest educational tools and online resources, formative assessments were conducted throughout the course in an effort to improve student learning and instructor teaching. In addition to that, innovative ways of technology were also used to evaluate student learning and understanding of the material for grading and reporting purposes. Many of the modern educational tools, including Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Ka-hoot, linoit, surveys, polls, and chemical engineering processes’ simulations and videos were in-troduced to make the synchronous sessions interactive. Likert-like surveys conducted were anal-yses to gauge the effectiveness of incorporation of technology during remote learning. This paper describes the innovative use of technologies to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Chemical Engineering Classes. It will also explain the strategies to assess the mode of delivery efficacy and how to change the course of teaching to adapt to the students' changing needs. 

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