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Therapeutic foster care agencies provide temporary placements and a range of services to at-risk youth to help ensure their safety, permanency, and wellbeing. The practitioners that plan such care operate under heavy caseloads, limited resources, and high stakes. There is significant interest in supporting these practitioners with various technological interventions, but their work and the context around it is still poorly understood. This study aims to better understand the current assessment and treatment planning work in therapeutic foster care. We used the abstraction hierarchy modeling approach to outline the purposes, values, constraints, processes, and tools that define the workplace ecology encountered by care coordinators and clinicians from therapeutic foster care programs at Hillside, a collaborating human service organization. The resulting abstraction hierarchy was closely examined to identify areas for interventions and design implications. 

Academic institutions in the US have recently refocused their attention on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This panel consisting of engineering faculty, administrators and industry professionals will discuss how colleges of engineering can approach the problem of recruiting, retaining, and graduating undergraduate underrepresented minority (URM) students by using a sociotechnical systems modeling approach. The main thrust of the discussion is how an academic organizational system such as a college of engineering can be broken down into a social system consisting of the people (students, faculty, staff and other stakeholders), and a technical system consisting of programs and initiatives for URM student success. Joint analyses of the social system and the technical system can then reveal systemwide barriers and opportunities for enabling URM student success. 

Engagement, as a multidimensional construct, fluctuates due to various factors. Previous research that examined engagement as a subjective experience was mainly concerned with the qualitative structure of engagement in different contexts (e.g., task difficulty, aesthetics). Few studies have examined the user’s subjective engagement as a given task progresses over time. This paper reports findings from an online study that aimed to assess the usefulness of subjective measures in capturing momentary feelings related to task engagement, under varying task duration and difficulty conditions. The Short Stress State Questionnaire (SSSQ) and the User Engagement Scale (UES) were used to capture self-reported engagement during a Tetris game. The sensitivity of scales to task conditions and relationships among subscales were examined. Results showed that changes in SSSQ were sensitive to difficulty levels, and Engagement obtained from the SSSQ was highly correlated with UES subscales. SSSQ may be a particularly useful tool to capture participants’ momentary feelings during a task via its Engagement, Distress, and Worry subscales.