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Study Partners Matter: Impacts on Inclusion and Outcomes

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

The Role of Peers in Promoting Learning and Persistence

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

17

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37777

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37777

Download Count

395

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Paper Authors

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Neha Prabhu University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign

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Neha Prabhu is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently majoring in Computer Science and pursuing a business minor. Her technical interests include data science, algorithms, and artificial intelligence for education. Outside of schoolwork, her passions include travelling and cooking!

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Michelle Perry University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4422-0454

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Michelle Perry is Professor of Educational Psychology and Affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research contributes to the understanding how young students learn mathematics, and the classroom contexts for learning. Her detailed work on teaching practices, teacher learning, and discourse practices in elementary mathematics classrooms has yielded important insights on teaching practices that are linked to student understanding. She has also taken her passion for student learning in STEM to investigations of college students from groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields, to examine ways in which they navigate online STEM classes, leading to their successes, in ways that are important and sometimes surprising, given the difficulties and barriers that these students may experience in traditional in-person STEM classrooms.

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Renato F. L. Azevedo University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign

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Renato Ferreira Leitão Azevedo is a PhD Student in Educational Psychology (Cognitive Sciences of Teaching & Learning Division) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He holds a M.Sc. in Applied Statistics from UIUC, a M.Sc. in Accounting Education & Research from University of Sao Paulo (USP), B.S. in Information Systems and B.S. in Accounting. At UIUC he serves as Research Assistant at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and as Teaching Assistant (EPSY 456 - Human Performance and Cognition in Context). Within Cognitive Psychology, he has been working with Prof. Daniel Morrow, on the nature of complex human problem solving and learning. The current research projects aim to improve self-care (e.g. taking medications) and health outcomes among older adults. These interdisciplinary projects leverage expertise in computer science, medicine, human factors, and education to improve provider/patient collaboration related to self-care. He has further interest in investigating relationships among professional expertise, cognition, decision-making, risk perception, and workload in complex task domains such as accounting and behavioral economics.

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Lawrence Angrave University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9762-7181

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Lawrence Angrave is a Fellow and Teaching Professor at the department of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His interests include (but are not limited to) joyful teaching, empirically-sound educational research, campus and online courses, computer science, engaging underrepresented students, improving accessibility and creating novel methods that encourage new learning opportunities and foster vibrant learning communities.

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Suma Bhat University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign

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Suma Bhat is Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her primary research interests are natural language processing and she endeavors to make engineering education diverse and inclusive.

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Abstract

Socio-cultural theory shows that significant learning takes place during social interactions and lack of opportunity to interact with others can have detrimental impact on learning outcomes. Moreover, not having others whom students deem to be ``like me'' can lead to feelings of not belonging in the field. Unfortunately, many students feel isolated and this isolation affects persistence and success in college-level Engineering courses. Given these oftentimes detrimental conditions, this investigation represents an exploration to understand the ways in which women, a group notoriously underrepresented in Engineering, feel connected to others in their Engineering classes, how this is related to their feelings of belonging, and how feelings of belonging are related to their academic outcomes.

Specifically, we examined the ways in which students understand, find, and utilize study partners as supports for feelings of belonging and for learning engineering content. Survey results from students in three large undergraduate Engineering courses (N=157) suggest that obstacles to finding study partners may adversely affect sense of belonging, participation, and learning outcomes.

This investigation provides insights into these equity challenges and the results suggest new strategies for equitable interventions to support all students---and particularly underrepresented groups in engineering.

Prabhu, N., & Perry, M., & Azevedo, R. F. L., & Angrave, L., & Bhat, S. (2021, July), Study Partners Matter: Impacts on Inclusion and Outcomes Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37777

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