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WORK IN PROGRESS Understanding Student Learning Profiles in Second Year Problem-Solving Engineering Classes

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

NEE Technical Session - Innovative Teaching Strategies I

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--40598

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/40598

Download Count

377

Paper Authors

biography

Yael Gertner University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Dr Gertner joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois in 2020 as a Teaching Assistant Professor. She received her B.S. and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current focus is on broadening participation in Computer Science and Computer Science Education She has been developing materials and teaching for iCAN, a new program for broadening participation in CS for students who have a bachelor’s degree in a field other than computer science.

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biography

Juan Alvarez University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Juan Alvarez joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois faculty in Spring 2011 and is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at York University, Canada, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chemical Physics Theory Group at the University of Toronto, Canada, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Saskatchewan. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.S. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois in 2004 and 2002, respectively. He teaches courses in communications, signal processing and probability.

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Benjamin Cosman University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Jennifer Amos University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Abstract

Student motivation, mindset, and learning styles play a role in student success and satisfaction, and research in engineering education is beginning to link these factors to student retention and learning outcomes. In this work in progress, we add to that prior work by surveying students in a second-year bioengineering course to identify their motivations, mindsets, and learning styles and check which correlates with student success. This set might be specific to this course because it necessitates conceptual problem-solving which requires a unique set of skills that are often new to students. They require thinking through the problem and gaining an abstract conceptual understanding before proceeding. During the first week of Fall 2021, 84 second-year engineering students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign answered a questionnaire with 60 questions taken from validated instruments related to the factors mentioned previously. We conducted a statistical analysis on our data which consists of student performance data (i.e. midterm and final grade) and quantitative data from the questionnaire. We found that the students in our study as a whole have a mindset, intrinsic motivation and sense of belonging that should be conducive to positive learning outcomes. Final grades were correlated with students’ responses to questions related to “thinking” as a preferred strategy. We also observed a correlation between grade improvement and questions taken from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory and sense of belonging. In future work, we plan to use this for designing interventions that are specifically tailored to students in this class. We plan to extend our work to other conceptual problem solving Engineering courses.

Gertner, Y., & Alvarez, J., & Cosman, B., & Amos, J. (2022, August), WORK IN PROGRESS Understanding Student Learning Profiles in Second Year Problem-Solving Engineering Classes Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40598

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