Chen, X., & Raghavan, A., & Yi, J. S., & Madhavan, K. (2012, June), How Does an Interactive Knowledge Platform Influence Decision-making of Novice Researchers in Engineering Education Research?   Paper presented at 2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, San Antonio, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--21456

\bibitem{asee_peer_21456}
  Chen, X., \& Raghavan, A., \& Yi, J. S., \& Madhavan, K. (2012, June), \emph{How Does an Interactive Knowledge Platform Influence Decision-making of Novice Researchers in Engineering Education Research? }
  Paper presented at 2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, San Antonio, Texas.
  10.18260/1-2--21456

Xin Chen, Adithya Raghavan, Ji Soo Yi, and Krishna Madhavan.  "How Does an Interactive Knowledge Platform Influence Decision-making of Novice Researchers in Engineering Education Research? ".  2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, San Antonio, Texas, 2012, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2012.  https://peer.asee.org/21456 Internet.  21 Dec, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_21456}
  Xin Chen, Adithya Raghavan, Ji Soo Yi, and Krishna Madhavan.
  "How Does an Interactive Knowledge Platform Influence Decision-making of Novice Researchers in Engineering Education Research? ".
  \emph{2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, San Antonio, Texas, 2012, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2012.
  https://peer.asee.org/21456 Internet.  21 Dec, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_21456
author = "Xin Chen, Adithya Raghavan, Ji Soo Yi, and Krishna Madhavan"
title = "How Does an Interactive Knowledge Platform Influence Decision-making of Novice Researchers in Engineering Education Research? "
booktitle = "2012 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2012"
month = "June"
address = "San Antonio, Texas"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/21456}
number = {10.18260/1-2--21456}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -         How does an Interactive Knowledge Platform Facilitate Decision-Making of                Novice Researchers in Engineering Education Research?Background: Engineering Education Research (EER) is a newly emerging and highlyinterdisciplinary field of research. Many first-year PhD students in the EER community comefrom an engineering background. They usually have difficulties of shifting mindset from solvingspecific engineering problems to conducting rigorous educational research (Borrego, 2007).They are concerned with how they would fit their research interests to the larger knowledgebody, what other related work has been done, and what questions are worth asking in this field.Given the great demand for understanding the emerging field of EER, an interactive visualizationplatform iKNEER (Interactive Knowledge Network for Engineering Education Research,http://www.ikneer.org) was developed with the goal of supporting researchers in the EERcommunity (Madhavan et. al, 2011). iKNEER is potentially helpful for first-year PhD students’research process by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state of the field, and theinsights about academic trends related to topical areas and who to follow on certain topics.Research Questions: There are many other computational tools developed aiming at helpingresearchers to characterize their respective research fields and identify patterns and trends in theliterature, such as CiteSeerx (Li, Councill, Lee, & Giles, 2006) and Apolo (Chau, Kittur, Hong,& Faloutsos, 2011). These tools often employ sophisticated data-mining algorithms andadvanced information visualization techniques. They are usually tested as effective under limitedcontext. For example, one tool may help users to locate references related to certain topics fasterthan others. However, little research has been found investigating novice researchers’ researchactivities in a realistic context, such as how researchers use these tools and why they feel thesetools are useful or not. The goal of this paper is to answer the following questions: (1) How doesiKNEER potentially facilitate decision-making of novice researchers with the research directionsthey choose? (2) What is the perceived usefulness of this tool among novice researchers? (3)What are the issues identified during the use of iKNEER and how these insights inform futuredevelopment of such tools?Methods: In this paper, we employ a qualitative approach to answer those questions. We presentresults from semi-structured interviews with first-year PhD students in Engineering Education.The participants are recruited among first-year PhD students registered in an introductoryresearch methods class. Students write a research proposal as the class final assignment whileusing iKNEER as an assistive tool. The data is analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis tolook for emerging common themes and patterns in order to address our research questions. Theresults of this study bring insight into human perceptions of the research tool, and could informfuture development of such tools.Borrego, M. (2007). Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Trained Engineers Learning        Educational Research Methods. Journal of Engineering Education, 96(2), 91–102.Chau, D. H., Kittur, A., Hong, J. I., & Faloutsos, C. (2011). Apolo: making sense of large        network data by combining rich user interaction and machine learning. Proceedings of        the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 167–176).Li, H., Councill, I., Lee, W. C., & Giles, C. L. (2006). CiteSeerx: an architecture and web service        design for an academic document search engine. Proceedings of the 15th international        conference on World Wide Web (pp. 883–884).
AU  - Xin Chen
AU  - Adithya Raghavan
AU  - Ji Soo Yi
AU  - Krishna Madhavan
CY  - San Antonio, Texas
DA  - 2012/06/10
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - How Does an Interactive Knowledge Platform Influence Decision-making of Novice Researchers in Engineering Education Research? 
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/21456
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--21456
ER  -