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1. Creating Pathways for Equity in STEM Through Family Engagement: Highlighting the Experiences of Hispanic/Latine Youths

   Dou, R. ; Cian, H. ( November 2020 , Connected science learning)

   null (Ed.)

   In order for children to identify with STEM fields, it is essential that they feel there is a place within STEM for individuals “like them.” Unfortunately, this identification is difficult for Hispanic/Latine youths because of lack of representation and even stereotyping that is widespread in educational institutions in the United States. Some research has been done, though, that suggests there is promise in understanding the ways that parents help children see themselves as “STEM people” in spite of these obstacles. Building on this work, we present some of our own research on the experiences of Hispanic/Latine youth in South Florida and how their parents use the resources they have (i.e., capital) to engage their children in STEM and help them develop positive self-perceptions. We find that parents use STEM capital they have, convert other capital into STEM capital, and establish family dispositions that are supportive of STEM identity development. We show how these ideas can be applied to make programming more inviting for Hispanic/Latine youths and emphasize the need to consider parental involvement in any efforts to increase children’s identification with STEM. 

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2. The Influence of Participation in a Multi-Disciplinary Collaborative Service Learning Project on the Effectiveness of Team Members in a 100-level Mechanical Engineering Class

   Ringleb, SI ; Pazos, P ; Noginova, J ; Cima, F ; Ayala, OM ; Kaipa, K ; Kidd, JJ ; Gutierrez, K ( January 2021 , 2021 ASEE Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Engineers need to develop professional skills, including the ability to work successfully in teams and to communicate within and outside of their discipline, in addition to required technical skills. A collaborative multi-disciplinary service learning project referred to as Ed+gineering was implemented in a 100-level mechanical engineering course. In this collaboration, mechanical engineering students, primarily in the second semester of their freshman year or first semester of their second year, worked over the course of a semester with education students taking a foundations course to develop and deliver engineering lessons to fourth or fifth graders. Students in comparison engineering classes worked on a team project focused on experimental design for a small satellite system. The purpose of this study was to determine if participating in the Ed+gineering collaboration had a positive effect on teamwork effectiveness and satisfaction when compared to the comparison class. In both team projects, the five dimensions of the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) system were used as a quantitative assessment. The five dimensions of CATME Behaviorally Anchored Ratings Scale (BARS) (contribution to the team’s work, interacting with teammates, keeping the team on track, expecting quality, and having relevant Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities - KSAs) were measured. Additionally, within the CATME platform team satisfaction, team interdependence and team cohesiveness were measured. ANCOVA analysis was used to assess the quantitative data from CATME. Preliminary results suggest that students in the treatment classes had higher team member effectiveness and overall satisfaction scores than students in the comparison classes. Qualitative data from reflections written at the completion of the aforementioned projects were used to explore these results. 

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3. Community Cultural Wealth in Latinofuturism: Leveraging Speculative Fiction for STEM + Arts Asset-Based Pedagogies

   Ojeda-Ramírez, S. ( June 2023 , International Conference of the Learning Sciences)

   In this conceptual paper, we present our work in progress towards the theorization and operationalization of an asset-based pedagogy for STEM + Arts content infused with the aesthetic and speculative fiction movement of Latinofuturism. As Latine scholars, we aim to contribute to the education field with an alternative approach to support the Latine population who is still disproportionately underrepresented in the STEM fields. Through our review of the literature and media, we use the theoretical framework of Community Cultural Wealth, specifically its six forms of capital, to examine Latinofuturism as a genre that can connect STEM + Arts themes with Latine culture through speculative practices. We propose that asset-based pedagogies situated in Latinofuturism aesthetics provide emancipatory opportunities for Latine to dream and think beyond the current barriers of access to STEM + Arts and create a new STEM culture for and with Latine. 

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4. Factors that Affect Retention and Satisfaction Among Newly Hired Aerospace Engineers

   Davis, Lucas ; Ahn, Benjamin ; Dong, Yun ; Campbell, Ravonte N ( June 2020 , ASEE annual conference)

   Turnover plays a significant role in the productivity of any organization and is especially vital within the initial adjustment period of new hires. Organizations seek to develop strategies to reduce turnover to help solve this issue, but these strategies require knowledge of what influences the retention and satisfaction of the employees. The objective of this research is to identify the factors that managers perceive to affect the retention and the satisfaction of newly hired aerospace engineers so that managers or employers can create strategies to reduce turnover within this group. While research has been conducted on general retention and satisfaction, no research has been specific to the aerospace engineering field and its newly hired employees. These aspects are important because unique factors can arise within specific fields. The current study used qualitative research methods to analyze seven semi-structured interviews with experienced managers of newly hired aerospace engineers. These interviews were analyzed to find key factors that managers consider to affect retention and satisfaction. This research identified six themes for retention factors: local and national economic trends, personal factors unique to each newcomer, the quality of work assigned to the newcomer, the social environment of the workgroup, benefits offered to employees, and the newcomer’s role and how it fits in with the workgroup. This study also identified six themes for satisfaction factors: the quality of work assigned to the newcomer, management styles and actions, general work environment, benefits, fit with a mentor, and expectations for the aerospace industry. 

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5. Sample-Constrained Black Box Optimization for Audio Personalization

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i9.28881  

   Rajagopalan, Rajalaxmi ; Wei, Yu-Lin ; Roy_Choudhury, Romit ( March 2024 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   We consider the problem of personalizing audio to maximize user experience. Briefly, we aim to find a filter h*, which applied to any music or speech, will maximize the user’s satisfaction. This is a black-box optimization problem since the user’s satisfaction function is unknown. Substantive work has been done on this topic where the key idea is to play audio samples to the user, each shaped by a different filter hi, and query the user for their satisfaction scores f(hi). A family of “surrogate” functions is then designed to fit these scores and the optimization method gradually refines these functions to arrive at the filter ˆh* that maximizes satisfaction. In certain applications, we observe that a second type of querying is possible where users can tell us the individual elements h*[j] of the optimal filter h*. Consider an analogy from cooking where the goal is to cook a recipe that maximizes user satisfaction. A user can be asked to score various cooked recipes (e.g., tofu fried rice) or to score individual ingredients (say, salt, sugar, rice, chicken, etc.). Given a budget of B queries, where a query can be of either type, our goal is to find the recipe that will maximize this user’s satisfaction. Our proposal builds on Sparse Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and shows how a hybrid approach can outperform any one type of querying. Our results are validated through simulations and real world experiments, where volunteers gave feedback on music/speech audio and were able to achieve high satisfaction levels. We believe this idea of hybrid querying opens new problems in black-box optimization and solutions can benefit other applications beyond audio personalization.

    

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