When using qualitative coding techniques, establishing inter-rater reliability (IRR) is a recognized method of ensuring the trustworthiness of the study when multiple researchers are involved with coding.
Background: Participating in undergraduate research experiences (UREs) supports the development of engineering students' technical and professional skills. However, little is known about the perceptions of research or researchers that students develop through these experiences. Understanding these perceptions will provide insight into how students come to understand knowledge evaluation and creation, while allowing research advisors to better support student development. Purpose: In this paper, we explore how undergraduate engineering students perceive what it means to do research and be a researcher, using identity and epistemic cognition as sensitizing concepts. Our goal is to explore students' views of UREs to make the benefits of these experiences more accessible. Design/Method: We created and adapted open-ended survey items from previously published studies. We collected responses from mechanical and biomedical engineering undergraduates at five institutions (n = 154) and used an inductive approach to analyze responses. Results: We developed four salient themes from our analysis: (a) research results in discovery, (b) research includes dissemination such as authorship, (c) research findings are integrated into society, and (d) researchers demonstrate self-regulation. Conclusions: The four themes highlight factors that students perceive as part of a researcher identity and aspects of epistemic cognition in the context of UREs. These results suggest structuring UREs to provide opportunities for discovery, dissemination, societal impact, and self-regulation will help support students in their development as researchers.
Contemporary science education frameworks identify computational thinking as an essential science and engineering practice that supports scientific sense-making and engineering design. Despite national emphasis on teaching science, engineering, and computational thinking (NGSS Lead States, 2013), little research has investigated the ways that elementary teachers support students to engage in science and engineering practices (SEPs) within integrated science, engineering, and computational thinking curricula. This study explores how teachers provide verbal support of SEPs to upper elementary students during a 4-week NGSS-aligned curricular unit that challenged students to redesign their school to reduce water runoff. Students conducted hands-on investigations of water runoff and created computational models to test their designs. Teacher audio data during the classroom implementation was collected and qualitatively coded for different purposes of verbal support, such as to understand how (pragmatic), when, and why (epistemic) to use SEPs, in three focal lessons. Results show that teachers provided a range of pragmatic and
Editor of the Journal of Engineering Education. Her research focuses on the interactions between student motivation and their learning experiences. Her projects focus on student perceptions, beliefs and attitudes towards becoming engineers and scientists, development of problem solving skills, self-regulated learning, and epistemic beliefs. She earned a B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of Vermont, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Clemson University.
This paper presents the first results from draw-a-scientist tests (DASTs) over five years that were used to measure the effect of 8-10 week long astronomy clubs and week long summer camps on 3 rd-5 th grade elementary school students' perceptions of scientists. We facilitated these DASTs prior to these clubs or camps, which provide a baseline for a student's initial conception of scientists, and once at the end, to determine whether their conception changed, possibly as a result of their involvement. In total we analyze 89 pairs of DASTs using a numerical grading scheme designed to quantify the presence of various features in the drawn scientist and their activities. We find that there is a gender imbalance in both the pre-and postclub drawings, with only 32% and 35%, respectively, of students drawing female scientists. We also find that a third to a half of the scientists have a stereotypical appearance and/or are performing stereotypical activities. Although we find insignificant changes (<5%) in most categories, we do find an 8% increase in the number of scientists that have a stereotypical appearance, which is worth following up, but a significant 12% decrease in the number of scientists who are performing stereotypical activities. In addition, we present some possible improvements to implementing DASTs and discuss other possible assessments that could provide a more direct method of gauging the effect of these astronomy clubs or camps.
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