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1. A Model for the Classroom Environment

   https://doi.org/10.52041/iase.icots11.T8A3  

   Bond, Marjorie; Batakci, Leyla; Whitaker, Douglas; Bolon, Wendine; Kerby-Helm, April; Unfried, Alana; Posner, Michael (October 2022, Bridging the Gap: Empowering & Educating Today’s Learners in Statistics. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS11 2022), Rosario, Argentina.)

   Peters, S. A.; Zapata-Cardona, L.; Bonafini, F.; Fan, A. (Ed.)

   The Motivational Attitudes in Statistics and Data Science Education Research group is developing a family of validated instruments: two instruments assessing students’ attitudes toward statistics or data science, two instruments assessing instructors’ attitudes toward teaching statistics or data science, and two sets of inventories to measure the learning environment in which the students and instructor interact. The Environment Inventories measure the institutional structures, course characteristics, and enacted classroom behaviors of both the students and instructors, all of which interact with the student and instructor background. This paper will discuss our proposed theoretical framework for the learning environment and its development. 

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2. Interpersonal Interactions that Foster Inclusion: Building Supports for Diversity in Engineering Teams

   Rodríguez-Simmonds, Héctor E.; Jackson, Benjamin P.; Pearson, Nelson S.; Langus, Tara C.; Major, Justin C.; Kirn, Adam; Godwin, Allison (January 2018, ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   Teaming is a core part of engineering education, especially in the first and last years of engineering when project work is a prevalent focus. The literature on the effects of working in diverse teams is mixed. Negative findings include decreased affect, increased frustration, and sustained conflict in teams. Positive findings include increased productivity, production of high quality products, and divergent-thinking and idea generation. Given these mixed findings, it becomes important to not only understand the practical outputs of working in diverse teams, but also how the experience of working in diverse teams influences whether students see themselves as engineers and whether or not they feel they belong in engineering. Our project, Building Supports for Diversity through Engineering Teams, investigates how students’ attitudes towards diversity influence how students experience work in diverse teams through addressing two main research questions: 1) What changes occur in students’ diversity sensitivity, multicultural effectiveness, and engineering practices as a result of working in diverse teams? 2) How do students’ perceptions of diversity, affect, and engineering practices change because of working on diverse teams? Using a multi-method approach, we deployed survey instruments to determine changes in student’s attitudes about teaming, diversity sensitivity, and openness attitudes. We also observed students working in teams and interviewed these students about their perceptions of diversity and experiences in their teams. Preliminary results of the quantitative phase show that variance in students’ attitudes about diversity significantly increase over the semester, further reflecting the mixed results that have been seen previously in the literature. Additionally, Social Network Analysis was used to characterize the social structure practices of a multi-section, large-enrollment first-year engineering course. This reveals the underlying social structure of the environment, its inclusiveness, and how diverse students work with others on engineering. Initial results indicate that students are included in social networks regardless of gender and race. Preliminary results of the qualitative phase, using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, have yielded relationships between student’s definitions, valuation, and enactment of diversity in engineering spaces. Individual student’s incoming attitudes of diversity and previous experiences interact with practical needs in first-year engineering classrooms to create different microclimates within each team. These microclimates depict tensions between what instructors emphasize about diversity, stereotypes of engineering as focused on technical instead of social skills, and pragmatic forces of “getting the job done.” This knowledge can help explain some of the complexity behind the conflicting literature on diversity in teams. Ultimately, this research can help us understand how to build inclusive and diverse environments that guide students to learn how to understand their own complex relationship, understanding, and enactment of diversity in engineering. By understanding how students make sense of diversity in engineering spaces, educators and researchers can figure out how to introduce these concepts in relevant ways so that students can inclusively meet the grand challenges in engineering. This curriculum integration, in turn, can improve team interactions and the climate of engineering for underrepresented groups. 

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3. Flipped Classroom and its Impact on Student Engagement

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--32850  

   Aji, Chadia; Khan, M. Javed (July 2019, ASEE annual conference)

   This paper will provide the first-year results of the impact of implementing the flipped approach in lower level math and aerospace engineering courses. A quasi-experimental between-groups research design was used for assessing the effectiveness of this methodology. The control group consisted of students who were in the same course but in sections with traditional teaching delivery while the intervention group consisted of students who were registered in the sections with the flipped approach. All students were from underrepresented groups. A positive impact on the students’ attitudes and learning strategies was observed as a result of the flipped classroom with active learning. Data pertaining to the effectiveness of the flipped classroom pedagogy is shared in this paper. Analysis of students’ cognitive engagement and their attitudes towards flipped classroom is discussed. The paper also includes best practices, their impact on student performance, and challenges in implementing a flipped classroom pedagogy. 

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4. Successes and Challenges in Supporting Undergraduate Peer Educators to Notice and Respond to Equity Considerations within Design Teams

   Turpen, Chandra; Gupta, Ayush; Radoff, Jennifer; Elby, Andrew; Sabo, Hannah; Quan, Gina (June 2018, ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   We describe and analyze our efforts to support Learning Assistants (LAs)—undergraduate peer educators who simultaneously take a 3-credit pedagogy course—in fostering equitable team dynamics and collaboration within a project-based engineering design course. Tonso and others have shown that (a) inequities can “live” in mundane interactions such as those among students within design teams and (b) those inequities both reflect and (re)produce broader cultural patterns and narratives (e.g. Wolfe & Powell, 2009; Tonso, 1996, 2006a, 2006b; McLoughlin, 2005). LAs could be well-positioned to notice and potentially disrupt inequitable patterns of participation within design teams. In this paper, we explore (1) How do LAs notice, diagnose, and consider responding to teamwork troubles within design teams, and (2) What ideological assumptions plausibly contribute to LAs’ sensemaking around their students’ teamwork troubles? To do so, we analyze how the LAs notice and consider responding to issues of equitable teamwork and participation, as exhibited in three related activities: (i) an in-class roleplay, (ii) observing and diagnosing teamwork troubles (TTs) in the engineering design teams, and (iii) imagining possible instructional responses to those troubles, and students’ possible reactions. We articulate three modes of thinking that roughly capture patterns in LAs’ descriptions and diagnoses of, and imagined responses to, the teamwork troubles: individual accountability, where the trouble is seen as caused by individual(s) described as “off task” or “checked out” or demonstrating some level of incompetence; delegation of work, where the trouble was located in the team leader’s inability to delegate tasks effectively to team members, or in the group’s general lack of communication about what tasks need to be completed, who should execute the tasks, and what work other groups in the team were doing; and emergent systems, where trouble was described as a group-level phenomenon emerging from the patterns of interaction amongst group members, contextual features, and larger structural forces. We find that LAs drew on individual accountability and delegation of work to evaluate TTs. Much rarer were ascriptions of TTs to interactional dynamics between teammates. We connected these modes to the underlying ideological assumptions that have consequences for how meritocracy and technocracy (Slaton, 2015; Cech, 2014) play out in an engineering design classroom and serve to ameliorate or reify engineering mindsets (Riley, 2008). The modes are asymmetric, in that emergent systems based interpretations hold more potential for elucidating ongoing social processes, for challenging meritocracy and socio-technical duality, and for seeing power differentials within interpersonal and institutional contexts. We argue for the need to better understand the ideological assumptions underlying how peer-educators—and other instructors—interpret classroom events. 

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5. Who are My Peers? Learner-Controlled Social Comparison in a Programming Course

   Kamil Akhuseyinoglu; Aleksandra Klasnja Milicevic; Brusilovsky, Peter (September 2022, European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2022))

   Hilliger, Isabel; Muñoz-Merino, Pedro J.; De Laet, Tinne; Ortega-Arranz, Alejandro; Farrell, Tracie (Ed.)

   Studies of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments indicated that learner behavior could be affected (positively or negatively) by presenting information about their peer groups, such as peer in-system performance or course grades. Researchers explained these findings by the social comparison theory, competition, or by categorizing them as an impact of gamification features. Although the choice of individual peers is explored considerably in recent TEL research, the effect of learner control on peer-group selection received little attention. This paper attempts to extend prior work on learner-controlled social comparison by studying a novel fine-grained peer group selection interface in a TEL environment for learning Python programming. To achieve this goal, we analyzed system usage logs and questionnaire responses collected from multiple rounds of classroom studies. By observing student actions in selecting and refining their peer comparison cohort, we understand better whom the student perceives as their peers and how this perception changes during the course. We also explored the connection between their peer group choices and their engagement with learning content. Finally, we attempted to associate student choices in peer selection with several dimensions of individual differences. 

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