PurposeThe National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs are traditionally delivered in-person and full-time (40 h per week) for 10 weeks during the summer. However, this type of format has the potential to limit broader student participation. This study aims to compare learning assessment data between a traditional NSF REU (10 weeks of summer, full-time, in-person) to an alternative NSF REU delivered virtually, part-time and over 10 months as a result of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Design/methodology/approachA retrospective pre-then-post survey was completed to assess perceived learning gains for each REU program. Three learning gains categories were assessed: entrepreneurial competencies, career goals and research skill development.T-tests were used to evaluate a difference in means between pre and post. FindingsFindings show the greatest quantity of learning gains within the alternative program delivery. Moreover, a larger quantity of learning gains was perceived within the first semester of the alternative program delivery compared to the second semester. Practical implicationsThe authors propose the NSF should be intentional about trying new approaches to REU programs delivery, including duration and format, as a way to broaden participation in engineering. Originality/valueThis study is original in that it is the first of its kind to assess an alternative REU program delivery (allowed only because of the COVID-19 pandemic) in comparison to traditional REU program delivery.
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Construction and evaluation of a domain-specific knowledge graph for knowledge discovery
PurposeThis study aims to evaluate a method of building a biomedical knowledge graph (KG). Design/methodology/approachThis research first constructs a COVID-19 KG on the COVID-19 Open Research Data Set, covering information over six categories (i.e. disease, drug, gene, species, therapy and symptom). The construction used open-source tools to extract entities, relations and triples. Then, the COVID-19 KG is evaluated on three data-quality dimensions: correctness, relatedness and comprehensiveness, using a semiautomatic approach. Finally, this study assesses the application of the KG by building a question answering (Q&A) system. Five queries regarding COVID-19 genomes, symptoms, transmissions and therapeutics were submitted to the system and the results were analyzed. FindingsWith current extraction tools, the quality of the KG is moderate and difficult to improve, unless more efforts are made to improve the tools for entity extraction, relation extraction and others. This study finds that comprehensiveness and relatedness positively correlate with the data size. Furthermore, the results indicate the performances of the Q&A systems built on the larger-scale KGs are better than the smaller ones for most queries, proving the importance of relatedness and comprehensiveness to ensure the usefulness of the KG. Originality/valueThe KG construction process, data-quality-based and application-based evaluations discussed in this paper provide valuable references for KG researchers and practitioners to build high-quality domain-specific knowledge discovery systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2225229
- PAR ID:
- 10472133
- Publisher / Repository:
- Emerald Publishing Limited
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Information Discovery and Delivery
- ISSN:
- 2398-6247
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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