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1. A New Survey of Student Attitudes Toward Statistics: The S-SOMAS

   https://doi.org/10.52041/iase.icots11.T14D1  

   Whitaker, Douglas; Unfried, Alana; Batakci, Leyla; Bolon, Wendine; Bond, Marjorie; Kerby-Helm, April; 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 Student Survey of Motivational Attitudes toward Statistics is a new instrument designed to measure affective outcomes in statistics education. This instrument is grounded in the established Expectancy-Value Theory of motivation and is being developed using a rigorous process. This paper provides an overview of the four pilot studies that have been conducted during the survey development process. Additionally, a description of the methods used for analyzing the data and the way the results are used to holistically make decisions about revisions to the survey is included. Brief confirmatory factor analysis results are included from two pilot studies to demonstrate that substantial progress has been made on the development. Once finalized (Spring 2023), the survey will be made freely available. 

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2. Leveraging Mixed Reality and the Three Apprenticeships Model to Facilitate & Assess Authentic Learning Experiences for Civil Engineering Students

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE44824.2020.9274289  

   Perry, Logan; London, Jeremi; Wu, Wei; Ayer, Steven; Smith, Kieren; Patil, Karan (October 2020, 2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   null (Ed.)

   This work-in-progress paper presents highlights from a multi-year study aiming to develop and assess the impact of a mixed reality experience that sufficiently replicates the learning civil engineering students experience during a physical design and construction task. Human Centered Design principles and tenets of the Carnegie Foundation's Three Apprenticeships Model (i.e., learning related to "Head", "Hand", and "Heart") inform the project design, development, and assessments. The development of heart-focused assessments is one focus during the second year in this three-year project. This paper includes a brief overview of the project progress, in general, along with preliminary findings regarding the instrument development. It summarizes the results of a pilot study, including an item analysis of the survey responses. These findings offer preliminary evidence for the content validity and substantive validity of the instrument. Next steps and implications for the engineering education community are also discussed. 

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3. Leveraging Mixed Reality and the Three Apprenticeships Model to Facilitate & Assess Authentic Learning Experiences for Civil Engineering Students

   Logan Perry, Jeremi London (January 2020, The 2020 Frontiers in Education Conference)

   This work-in-progress paper presents highlights from a multi-year study aiming to develop and assess the impact of a mixed reality experience that sufficiently replicates the learning civil engineering students experience during a physical design and construction task. Human Centered Design principles and tenets of the Carnegie Foundation’s Three Apprenticeships Model (i.e., learning related to “Head”, “Hand”, and “Heart”) inform the project design, development, and assessments. The development of heart-focused assessments is one focus during the second year in this three-year project. This paper includes a brief overview of the project progress, in general, along with preliminary findings regarding the instrument development. It summarizes the results of a pilot study, including an item analysis of the survey responses. These findings offer preliminary evidence for the content validity and substantive validity of the instrument. Next steps and implications for the engineering education community are also discussed. 

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4. Board 236: Design for Sustainability: How Mental Models of Social-Ecological Systems Shape Engineering Design Decisions

   Katz, A; Paretti, M; Shealy, T; Bilow, F (June 2024, American Society for Engineering Education)

   Understanding how engineers connect technical work to broader social-ecological systems is critical because their designs transform societies and environments. As part of a national study to explore how civil and chemical engineers navigate design decisions, we are developing a survey instrument to assess mental models of social-ecological-technical systems (SETS). Mental models (Johnson-Laird, 2001; Rouse & Morris, 1986), are internal representations that individuals use to describe, explain, and predict the form, function, state, and purpose of a system. In this case, the system is the connection between technical design and broader social-ecological systems. The project is informed by three frameworks: 1) planned behavior, 2) mental models, and 3) social-ecological-technical systems (SETS). The project integrates the theory of planned behavior with mental models to build fundamental knowledge of engineers’ mental models of SETSs, changes in their mental models over time, and relationships between mental models and design decisions. This paper presents the instrument development process centered on eliciting mental models of SETS. SETS (McPhearson et al., 2022) is a generalized framework that positions social, technical, and ecological elements of a system as vertices of a triangle, with interactions in all directions. The instrument will include both closed-ended and open-ended items, allowing us to leverage advances in natural language processing to scale qualitative data analysis and combine an inferential framework often associated with quantitative studies with the richer information flow associated with qualitative studies. Previous work using SETS has identified individual components within each vertex salient to the specific context (Bixler et al., 2019). In this paper, we report on the phases of instrument development that support this contextualization: 1) Initial interview protocol development followed by semi-structured interviews with six engineering students outside the target majors to test how well the protocol elicits information about students mental models of SETS, 2) revisions to the interview protocol followed by semi-structured interviews with senior-level students in chemical and civil engineering students (12 per discipline), 3) deductive and inductive analysis of those interviews, using SETS as our deductive coding scheme followed by inductive coding to refine and contextualize the analysis and support survey development. We conclude with the initial survey instrument, which will undergo pilot testing in the summer of 2024. The results both support instrument development and offer an exploratory analysis of civil and chemical engineering students’ mental models of SETS. 

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5. Work in Progress: Understanding Student Perceptions of Stress as part of Engineering Culture

   Cross, Kelly J.; Jensen, Karin J. (January 2018, American Society of Engineering Education Conference Proceedings)

   High levels of stress and anxiety are common amongst college students, particularly engineering students. Students report lack of sleep, grades, competition, change in lifestyle, and other significant stressors throughout their undergraduate education (1, 2). Stress and anxiety have been shown to negatively impact student experience (3-6), academic performance (6-8), and retention (9). Previous studies have focused on identifying factors that cause individual students stress while completing undergraduate engineering degree programs (1). However, it not well-understood how a culture of stress is perceived and is propagated in engineering programs or how this culture impacts student levels of identification with engineering. Further, the impact of student stress has not been directly considered in engineering regarding recruitment, retention, and success. Therefore, our guiding research question is: Does the engineering culture create stress for students that hinder their engineering identity development? To answer our research question, we designed a sequential mixed methods study with equal priority of quantitative survey data and qualitative individual interviews. Our study participants are undergraduate engineering students across all levels and majors at a large, public university. Our sample goal is 2000 engineering student respondents. We combined three published surveys to build our quantitative data collection instrument, including the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS), Identification with engineering subscale, and Engineering Department Inclusion Level subscale. The objective of the quantitative instrument is to illuminate individual perceptions of the existence of an engineering stress culture (ESC) and create an efficient tool to measure the impact ESC on engineering identity development. Specifically, we seek to understand the relationships among the following constructs; 1) identification with engineering, 2) stress and anxiety, and 3) feelings of inclusion within their department. The focus of this paper presents the results of the pilot of the proposed instrument with 20 participants and a detailed data collection and analysis process. In an effort to validate our instrument, we conducted a pilot study to refine our data collection process and the results will guide the data collection for the larger study. In addition to identifying relationships among construct, the survey data will be further analyzed to specify which demographics are mediating or moderating factors of these relationships. For example, does a student’s 1st generation status influence their perception of stress or engineering identity development? Our analysis may identify discipline-specific stressors and characterize culture components that promote student anxiety and stress. Our objective is to validate our survey instrument and use it to inform the protocol for the follow-up interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the responses to the survey instrument. Understanding what students view as stressful and how students identify stress as an element of program culture will support the development of interventions to mitigate student stress. References 1. Schneider L (2007) Perceived stress among engineering students. A Paper Presented at St. Lawrence Section Conference. Toronto, Canada. Retrieved from: www. asee. morrisville. edu. 2. Ross SE, Niebling BC, & Heckert TM (1999) Sources of stress among college students. Social psychology 61(5):841-846. 3. Goldman CS & Wong EH (1997) Stress and the college student. Education 117(4):604-611. 4. Hudd SS, et al. (2000) Stress at college: Effects on health habits, health status and self-esteem. College Student Journal 34(2):217-228. 5. Macgeorge EL, Samter W, & Gillihan SJ (2005) Academic Stress, Supportive Communication, and Health A version of this paper was presented at the 2005 International Communication Association convention in New York City. Communication Education 54(4):365-372. 6. Burt KB & Paysnick AA (2014) Identity, stress, and behavioral and emotional problems in undergraduates: Evidence for interaction effects. Journal of college student development 55(4):368-384. 7. Felsten G & Wilcox K (1992) Influences of stress and situation-specific mastery beliefs and satisfaction with social support on well-being and academic performance. Psychological Reports 70(1):291-303. 8. Pritchard ME & Wilson GS (2003) Using emotional and social factors to predict student success. Journal of college student development 44(1):18-28. 9. Zhang Z & RiCharde RS (1998) Prediction and Analysis of Freshman Retention. AIR 1998 Annual Forum Paper. 

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