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1. Web-based authentic inquiry experiences in large introductory classes consistently associated with significant learning gains for all students

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-021-00290-3  

   Wu, X. Ben ; Sandoval, Carolyn ; Knight, Stephanie ; Jaime, Xavier ; Macik, Maria ; Schielack, Jane F. ( April 2021 , International Journal of STEM Education)

   Continuous calls for reform in science education emphasize the need to provide science experiences in lower-division courses to improve the retention of STEM majors and to develop science literacy and STEM skills for all students. Open or authentic inquiry and undergraduate research are effective science experiences leading to multiple gains in student learning and development. Most inquiry-based learning activities, however, are implemented in laboratory classes and the majority of them are guided inquiries. Although course-based undergraduate research experiences have significantly expanded the reach of the traditional apprentice approach, it is still challenging to provide research experiences to nonmajors and in large introductory courses. We examined student learning through a web-based authentic inquiry project implemented in a high-enrollment introductory ecology course for over a decade.

   Results from 10 years of student self-assessment of learning showed that the authentic inquiry experiences were consistently associated with significant gains in self-perception of interest and understanding and skills of the scientific process for all students—both majors and nonmajors, both lower- and upper-division students, both women and men, and both URM and non-URM students. Student performance in evaluating the quality of an inquiry report, before and after the inquiry project, also showed significant learning gains for all students. The authentic inquiry experiences proved highly effective for lower-division students, nonmajors, and women and URM students, whose learning gains were similar to or greater than those of their counterparts. The authentic inquiry experiences were particularly helpful to students who were less prepared with regard to the ability to evaluate a scientific report and narrowed the performance gap.

   These findings suggest that authentic inquiry experiences can serve as an effective approach for engaging students in high-enrollment, introductory science courses. They can facilitate development of science literacy and STEM skills of all students, skills that are critical to students’ personal and professional success and to informed engagement in civic life.

    

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2. Biologically Inspired Design For Engineering Education: Online Teacher Professional Learning (Evaluation)

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36749  

   Alemdar, Meltem ; Ehsan, Hoda ; Cappelli, Christopher ; Kim, Euisun ; Moore, Roxanne ; Helms, Michael ; Rosen, Jeffrey ; Weissburg, Marc ( July 2021 , American Society of Engineering education)

   Biologically inspired design has become increasingly common in graduate and undergraduate engineering programs, consistent with an expanding emphasis by professional engineering societies on cross-disciplinary critical thinking skills and adaptive and sustainable design. However, bio-inspired engineering is less common in K-12 education. In 2019, the NSF funded a K-12 project entitled Biologically Inspired Design for Engineering Education (BIRDEE), to create socially relevant, accessible, and highly contextualized high school engineering curricula focusing on bio-inspired design. Studies have shown that women and underrepresented minorities are drawn to curricula, courses, and instructional strategies that are integrated, emphasize systems thinking, and facilitate connection building across courses or disciplines. The BIRDEE project also seeks to interest high school girls in engineering by providing curricula that incorporate humanistic, bio-inspired engineering with a focus on sustainable and authentic design contexts. BIRDEE curricula integrate bio-inspired design into the engineering design process by leveraging design tools that facilitate the application of biological concepts to design challenges. This provides a conceptual framework enabling students to systematically define a design problem, resulting in better, more well-rounded problem specifications. The professional development (PD) for the participating teachers include six-week-long summer internships in university research laboratories focused on biology and bio-inspired design. The goal of these internships is to improve engineering teachers’ knowledge of bio-inspired design by partnering with cutting-edge engineers and scientists to study animal features and behaviors and their applications to engineering design. However, due to COVID-19 and research lab closures in the summer of 2020, the research team had to transfer the summer PD experience to an online setting. An asynchronous, quasi-facilitated online course was developed and delivered to teachers over six weeks. In this paper, we will discuss online pedagogical approaches to experiential learning, teaching bio-inspired design concepts, and the integration of these approaches in the engineering design process. Central to the online PD design and function of each course was the use of inquiry, experiential and highly-collaborative learning strategies. Preliminary results show that teachers appreciated the aspects of the summer PD that included exploration, such as during the “Found Object” activity, and the process of building a prototype. These activities represented experiential learning opportunities where teachers were able to learn by doing. It was noted throughout the focus group discussions that such opportunities were appreciated by participating teachers. Teachers indicated that the experiential learning components of the PD allowed them to do something outside of their comfort zone, inspired them to do research that they would not have done outside of this experience, and allowed them to “be in the student's seat and get hands-on application”. By participating in these experiential learning opportunities, teachers were also able to better understand how the BIRDEE curriculum may impact students’ learning in their classrooms 

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3. Developing a Comprehensive Online Transfer Engineering Curriculum: Designing an Online Introduction to Engineering Course

   https://doi.org/10.18260/p.26715  

   Langhoff, Nicholas ; Schiorring, Eva ; Dunmire, Erik ; Rebold, Thomas ; Huang, Tracy ( June 2016 , 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Access to lower-division engineering courses in the community college substantially influences whether or not community college students pursue and successfully achieve an engineering degree. With about 60% of students from under-represented minority (URM) groups beginning their post-secondary education in the community colleges, providing this access is critical if the US is to diversify and expand its engineering workforce. Still many community college lack the faculty, equipment, or local expertise to offer a comprehensive transfer engineering program, thus compromising participation in engineering courses for underrepresented groups as well as for students residing in rural and remote areas, where distance is a key barrier to post-secondary enrollment. An additional obstacle to participation is the need for so many community college students to work, many in inflexible positions that compromise their ability to attend traditional face-to-face courses. 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 community college engineering programs to support a comprehensive set of lower-division engineering courses that are delivered either completely online, or with limited face-to-face interactions. This paper focuses on the development and testing of the teaching and learning resources for Introduction to Engineering, a three-unit course (two units of lecture and one unit of lab). The course has special significance as a gateway course for students who without the role models that their middle class peers so often have readily available enter college with very limited awareness of the exciting projects and fulfilling careers the engineering profession offers as well as with apprehension about their ability to succeed in a demanding STEM curriculum. To this end, the course covers academic success skills in engineering including mindset and metacognition, academic pathways, career awareness and job functions in the engineering profession, team building and communications, the engineering design process, and a broad range of fundamental and engaging topics and projects in engineering including electronics, basic test equipment, programming in MATLAB and Arduino, robotics, bridge design, and materials science. The paper presents the results of a pilot implementation of the teaching materials in a regular face-to-face course which will be used to inform subsequent on-line delivery. Additionally, student surveys and interviews are used to assess students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the course resources, along with their sense of self-efficacy and identity as aspiring engineers. 

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4. Building students statistical skills using Passion-Driven Statistics “Boot Camp” Model

   Flaming, K. R. ; Gallagher, K. M. ; Dierker, L. ( January 2021 , A compendium of conference presentations on teaching)

   Scherschel, H. ; Rudmann, D.S. (Ed.)

   The COVID-19 pandemic has gifted us a pivot point, an opportunity, in which we can consider ways to do things differently than we have "always" done them. Traditionally, students view statistics as an obstacle to overcome, rather than an opportunity to pursue their own interests and passions. The Passion-Driven Statistics curriculum challenges this viewpoint by exposing students to a meaningful and powerful data analysis experience during a 3-day "boot camp" or as a short project over a few weeks. This provides major student outcomes (e.g., an empirical poster presentation) with minor faculty investment (e.g., time, technology). Our model can be quickly personalized to meet the needs of you and your students, which is especially important during moments of an unexpected pivot. In addition to face-to-face, the outcomes can be met in a fully online, remote, or hybrid environment, making this model suitable for use in a variety of contexts. The "boot camp" model could serve as a way for your student lab members to gain research experience, skill-building workshop for your psychology club students, or project for a content-based course. This NSF-funded (DUE #1820766) model is a multidisciplinary, project-based curriculum that supports students in conducting original research, asking original questions, and communicating methods and results using the language of statistics. The course attracts higher rates of under-represented minority (URM) students compared to a traditional math statistics course (Dierker et al., 2015) and higher rates of female and URM students compared to an introductory programming course (Cooper & Dierker, 2017). Students reported the course more rewarding, were more likely to accomplish more than expected, found the course more useful than other courses, increased confidence in working with data, increased interest in pursuing advanced statistics courses, and received more individualized support than other courses (Dierker et al., 2018). 

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5. Developing Empathy and Persistence through Professional Development in New to CSA Teachers

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3446871.3469793  

   Broneak, Cassandra ; Rosato, Jennifer ( August 2021 , ICER 2021: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research)

   null (Ed.)

   To meet the rising demand for computer science (CS) courses, K-12 educators need to be prepared to teach introductory concepts and skills in courses such as Computer Science Principles (CSP), which takes a breadth-first approach to CS and includes topics beyond programming such as data, impacts of computing, and networks. Educators are now also being asked to teach more advanced concepts in courses such as the College Board's Advanced Placement Computer Science A (CSA) course, which focuses on advanced programming using Java and includes topics such as objects, inheritance, arrays, and recursion. Traditional CSA curricula have not used content or pedagogy designed to engage a broad range of learners and support their success. Unlike CSP, which is attracting more underrepresented students to computing as it was designed, CSA continues to enroll mostly male, white, and Asian students [College Board 2019, Ericson 2020, Sax 2020]. In order to expand CS education opportunities, it is crucial that students have an engaging experience in CSA similar to CSP. Well-designed differentiated professional development (PD) that focuses on content and pedagogy is necessary to meet individual teacher needs, to successfully build teacher skills and confidence to teach CSA, and to improve engagement with students [Darling-Hammond 2017]. It is critical that as more CS opportunities and courses are developed, teachers remain engaged with their own learning in order to build their content knowledge and refine their teaching practice [CSTA 2020]. CSAwesome, developed and piloted in 2019, offers a College Board endorsed AP CSA curriculum and PD focused on supporting the transition of teachers and students from CSP to CSA. This poster presents preliminary findings aimed at exploring the supports and challenges new-to-CSA high school level educators face when transitioning from teaching an introductory, breadth-first course such as CSP to teaching the more challenging, programming-focused CSA course. Five teachers who completed the online CSAwesome summer 2020 PD completed interviews in spring 2021. The project employed an inductive coding scheme to analyze interview transcriptions and qualitative notes from teachers about their experiences learning, teaching, and implementing CSP and CSA curricula. Initial findings suggest that teachers’ experience in the CSAwesome PD may improve their confidence in teaching CSA, ability to effectively use inclusive teaching practices, ability to empathize with their students, problem-solving skills, and motivation to persist when faced with challenges and difficulties. Teachers noted how the CSAwesome PD provided them with a student perspective and increased feelings of empathy. Participants spoke about the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on their own learning, student learning, and teaching style. Teachers enter the PD with many different backgrounds, CS experience levels, and strengths, however, new-to-CSA teachers require further PD on content and pedagogy to transition between CSP and CSA. Initial results suggest that the CSAwesome PD may have an impact on long-term teacher development as new-to-CSA teachers who participated indicated a positive impact on their teaching practices, ideologies, and pedagogies. 

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