Conference Session

Diversity, Inclusion, and Access

Collection

2021 Illinois-Indiana Regional Conference

Authors

Samuel Darko; Gurcan Comert; Jessica Furrer, Benedict College; Andress Carter-Sims, Benedict College; Balaji Iyangar, Benedict College

Tagged Topics

Diversity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Access

), and HBCUs (Gasmanand Nguyen, 2014, Toldson 2018, and Toldson, 2019) represent a unique venue through which toreach a large population of such students. This research focused on increasing retention rates andimproving academic and career success in the STEM disciplines at an open-enrollment HBCUthrough a hands-on and mentorship-focused research program. We have utilized the “ScientificVillage” model, where students interacted as peers assisting, encouraging, holding each otheraccountable, and interacted with faculty mentors. Incorporating hands-on research furtherstimulated and engaged students to enhance interest in STEM curriculum and careers. This was avoluntary, three-year, mixed-method, hands-on research program that tracked a cohort of

Conference Session

Labs and Experiential Learning

Collection

2021 Illinois-Indiana Regional Conference

Authors

Gurcan Comert; Zulfikar Berk, University of South Carolina; Robert Petrulis; Balaji Iyangar; Esmail M Abuhdima, Benedict college; Negash Begashaw, Benedict College

Tagged Topics

Diversity, Labs and experiential learning

careers in intelligent transportation systems. Students have been part of a multi-disciplinary,eight-week summer research experience that integrated curricular and extracurricular activities. Verybriefly, workshops, trainings, site and lab visits, hands-on data collection and sensor involved research oncampus and on other university campuses targeted critical skills with a problem-based learning approach.The students also participated in a series of critical thinking sessions presented by the project team ondefining a research problem, literature search, and the research process (Pierce et al., 2019, Comert et al.,2020).The numbers of participants in past two summers were 8 and 7, respectively. The students were teamed inmultidisciplinary groups

Conference Session

Classroom Methodologies

Collection

2021 Illinois-Indiana Regional Conference

Authors

Brian S. Woodard, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign; Tiffany Wenting Li; Ziang Xiao, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign; Molly H Goldstein, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign; Michael L. Philpott, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

Tagged Topics

Classroom methodologies, Diversity

onlinewithout the standard use of pencil and paper sketching. Upon closer investigation of the data, male studentsimproved more than female students did. Further study is needed to determine if these results arerepresentative of typical trends and how the training could be modified to result in more equitable outcomesfor all the students.IntroductionDecades of research has consistently shown that spatial skills are one of the strongest predictors of futuresuccess in STEM coursework and STEM careers independent of math and verbal ability. Wai et al. [1] andShea et al. [2] reviewed numerous longitudinal studies with many thousands of participants to concludethat spatial skills are critical to developing expertise in STEM. Additionally, visualization