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1. Investigating the impact of COVID-19 on standardized test scores.

   Bright, D.; Fornaro, C.; Fan, Y.; May, T.; Bostic, J. (October 2021, Psychology of Mathematics Education North American)

   Olanoff, D; Johnson, K.; Spitzer, S (Ed.)

   The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged onward over the last year and has greatly impacted student learning. An average student is predicted to fall behind approximately seven months academically; however, this learning gap predicts Latinx and Black students will fall behind by 9 and 10 months, respectively (Seiden, 2020). Moreover, the shift to online instruction impacted students’ ability to learn as they encountered new stressors, anxiety, illness, and the pandemic’s psychological effects (Middleton, 2020). Despite the unprecedented circumstances that students were precipitously thrust into, state testing and assessments continue. Assessments during the pandemic are likely to produce invalid results due to “test pollution,” which refers to the systemic “increase or decrease in test scores unrelated to the content domain” (Middleton, 2020, p. 2). Considering the global pandemic, test pollution is prominent and worth exploring as it is uncertain whether state testing can identify the impact COVID is having on student learning. 

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2. Impact of COVID-19 Curricular Shifts on Learning Gains on the Microbiology for Health Sciences Concept Inventory

   https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v22i1.2425  

   Seitz, Heather; Rediske, Andrea (April 2021, Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education)

   ABSTRACT As a validated assessment, the Microbiology for Health Sciences Concept Inventory (MHSCI) is a valuable tool to evaluate student progress in health sciences microbiology courses. In this brief analysis, we survey MHSCI faculty users and report student MHSCI scores to determine the impact on student learning gains of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine in spring 2020. Although a majority of students reported moving to a fully online lecture and lab microbiology course in the spring 2020 semester, there was no statistically significant impact on student outcomes reported by the MHSCI, and by some measures, student learning gains increased in the semester students moved to online learning. Further research is necessary to determine the continuing impact of online lecture/lab courses on student outcomes on the MHSCI. Our analysis of data from spring 2020 shows that the MHSCI is still a statistically reliable measure of student misconceptions and overall difficulty scores for each item on the MHSCI was unchanged due to the pandemic. 

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3. Strategies to Address Changes in Social Supports during the COVID-19 Pandemic

   Johnston, A. C.; Douglas, K. A.; Martin, J. P.; Short, T. (June 2021, American Society for Engineering Education 2021 Annual Conference and Exposition)

   The pandemic of COVID-19 is disrupting engineering education globally, at all levels of education.While distance education is nothing new, the pandemic of COVID-19 forced instructors to rapidly move their courses online whether or not they had ever received prior training in online education. In particular, there is very little literature to guide instructors in supporting students in online engineering design or project-based courses. The purpose of this research is to examine engineering students’ report of social support in their project and design-based courses at a large research university during the move to online instruction due to COVID-19in the Spring 2020 semester and to provide recommendations for instructors teaching these types of courses online in the future.Our study is framed by social constructivism and social capital theory.We surveyed undergraduate engineering and engineering technology students(n=235) across undergraduate levels during the final week of the Spring 2019 semester.Survey questions included open-ended prompts about social supports and overall experience with the transition to online learning as well as name and resource generator questions focused on specific people and types of interactions that changed during the pandemic. We used qualitative content analysis of the open-ended responses along with comparisons of the name and resource generator to develop recommendations for instructors.Recommendations to increase students’ social supports include:facilitating informal conversations between students and between students and the instructional team, grouping students located in the same time zones in teams, facilitating co-working sessions for students, establishing weekly structure, and utilizing some synchronous components (e.g., virtual office hours). 

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4. Student Experience with COVID-19 and Online Learning: Impact of Faculty’s Ability to Successfully Navigate Technological Platforms for Remote Instruction

   Shuey, Melissa; Akera, Atsushi; Appelhans, Sarah; Cheville, R. Alan; De Pree, Thomas; Fatehibouroujeni, Soheil (July 2021, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper is based on a series of semi-structured, qualitative interviews that were conducted with students, by an undergraduate student and lead author of this paper, that focused on their experiences with educational technologies and online teaching pedagogy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As U.S. educators scrambled to adapt to online course delivery modes as a result of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring 2020 semester, those in the educational technology and online learning community saw the potential of this movement to vastly accelerate the implementation of online systems in higher education. A shift that may have taken 20 years to accomplish was implemented in two waves, first with the immediate forced shift to online learning in March 2020; and second, a less immediate shift to hybrid and online instruction designed to accommodate the different geographic variation in COVID-19 intensity, along with varied political and institutional ecologies surrounding online versus in-person instruction for the 2020-2021 academic year. With all of the rapid changes that were occurring during the spring of 2020, we wanted to investigate how students experienced and perceived faculty use of technology during this particular moment in time. This study documents this transition through the eyes of undergraduate students, and demonstrates the varied ways in which faculty navigated the transition to online learning. According to our interviewees, some faculty were thoughtful and competent and provided a supportive environment that paid attention to a students’ capacity for online learning, rather than maintaining traditional instructional practices. Others relied on practices from in-person instruction that were familiar, but appeared to be nervous in the new online teaching environment. Then there were those who seemed occupied by other concerns, where a focus on effective undergraduate teaching remained limited to begin with, and their approach to online instruction was driven by convenience. Our qualitative data clearly reveals that the ways in which faculty conducted their online courses directly impacted student learning experiences. In this study, we set out to document both the faculty instructional strategies in a hybrid/online environment and student accounts of those choices and their resulting experiences. While we continue to analyze this unique data set on this moment of transition in engineering education, we hope that this paper will also lead to policy recommendations regarding faculty adaptations to online instruction in general. We include some initial thoughts and recommendations below. 

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5. Student Perceptions of the Complete Online Transition of Two CS Courses in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

   Farghally, M. F. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Student perceptions of the complete online transition of two CS courses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities across the globe switched from traditional Face-to-Face (F2F) course delivery to completely online. Our university declared during our Spring break that students would not return to campus, and that all courses must be delivered fully online starting two weeks later. This was challenging to both students and instructors. In this evidence-based practice paper, we present results of end-of-semester student surveys from two Spring 2020 CS courses: a programming intensive CS2 course, and a senior theory course in Formal Languages and Automata (FLA). Students indicated course components they perceived as most beneficial to their learning, before and then after the online transition, and preferences for each regarding online vs. F2F. By comparing student reactions across courses, we gain insights on which components are easily adapted to online delivery, and which require further innovation. COVID was unfortunate, but gave a rare opportunity to compare students’ reflections on F2F instruction with online instructional materials for half a semester vs. entirely online delivery of the same course during the second half. The circumstances are unique, but we were able to acquire insights for future instruction. Some course components were perceived to be more useful either before or after the transition, and preferences were not the same in the two courses, possibly due to differences in the courses. Students in both courses found prerecorded asynchronous lectures significantly less useful than in-person lectures. For CS2, online office hours were significantly less useful than in-person office hours, but we found no significant difference in FLA. CS2 students felt less supported by their instructor after the online transition, but no significant difference was indicated by FLA students. FLA students found unproctored online exams offered through Canvas more stressful than in-person proctored exams, but the opposite was indicated by CS2 students. CS2 students indicated that visual materials from an eTextbook were more useful to them after going online than before, but FLA students indicated no significant difference. Overall, students in FLA significantly preferred the traditional F2F version of the course, while no significant difference was detected for CS2 students. We did not find significant effects from gender on the preference of one mode over the other. A serendipitous outcome was learning that some changes forced by circumstance should be considered for long term adoption. Offering online lab sessions and online exams where the questions are primarily multiple choice are possible candidates. However, we found that students need to feel the presence of their instructor to feel properly supported. To determine what course components need further improvement before transitioning to fully online mode, we computed a logistic regression model. The dependent variable is the student's preference for F2F or fully online. The independent variables are the course components before and after the online transition. For both courses, in-person lectures were a significant factor negatively affecting students' preferences of the fully online mode. Similarly, for CS2, in-person labs and in-person office hours were significant factors pushing students’ preferences toward F2F mode. 

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