Portland, Oregon
June 23, 2024
June 23, 2024
June 26, 2024
NSF Grantees Poster Session
8
10.18260/1-2--47016
https://peer.asee.org/47016
77
Diana Arboleda, PhD, is a civil engineering Lecturer at the University of Miami, Florida. She received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Miami in 1988 and after a full career as a software engineer in corporate America she returned to earn a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. Her research interests are in engineering education.
James Giancaspro, Ph.D., P.E. is an associate professor of civil engineering with an emphasis on structures and mechanics. He has two years of industry experience and 18 years of teaching and research experience at the University of Miami. His current engineering education research interests include instructional technology in mechanics, undergraduate student retention, and graduate student support.
Aaron Heller is a clinical psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami having received a B.A. in Psychology from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. His work focuses on understanding the relevance of real-world, naturalistic mood dynamics to psychiatric disease and psychological wellbeing.
This paper/poster shares the initial findings of an Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) study conducted in an undergraduate engineering mechanics course (Statics) at a 4-year university. Like many early undergraduate engineering courses, Statics is notorious for high attrition and often stifles students' subsequent persistence in engineering programs. The objective of the study described herein is to identify links between students' self-efficacy, motivation, emotional states, and other factors that may serve as early-warning indicators of dropout. The EMA approach utilizes repeated experience sampling of students' psychological state using cell phone-based polling. Sampling is conducted on a semi-daily basis as well as proximal to high-stakes assessments. Unlike prior studies that only measured students' psychological state twice (at the start and end of a semester), this study is unique in that it measures a broad range of psychological variables repeatedly (up to 65 times over 17 weeks). The surveys utilized in this study include validated instruments such as PANAS, MSLQ, APPLES, as well as new instruments specific to learning outcomes in Statics that have been developed by the authors. Preliminary quantitative results suggest that (a) students' emotional state rapidly declines once the semester begins, (b) negative affect remains worse than baseline throughout the semester, (c) students' weekly change in negative affect after the 4th week of the course may serve as the best predictor of their persistence and final grade in the course. These observations are generally true for all students enrolled in Statics regardless of their final grade. The study is ongoing and will be replicated in future studies to increase the relatively small samples size, which is the primary limitation of the current findings.
Arboleda, D., & Giancaspro, J., & Heller, A. (2024, June), Board 426: Work in Progress: Real-Time Ecological Momentary Assessment of Students' Emotional State in Statics Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--47016
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