Faculty Characteristics that Influence Student Performance in the First Two Years of Engineering

Abstract

is professor in the Materials Science Program in the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University. He teaches in the areas of introductory materials engineering, polymers and composites, and capstone design. His research interests include evaluating conceptual knowledge, misconceptions and technologies to promote conceptual change. He has co-developed a Materials Concept Inventory and a Chemistry Concept Inventory for assessing conceptual knowledge and change for introductory materials science and chemistry classes. He is currently conducting research on NSF projects in two areas. One is studying how strategies of engagement and feedback with support from internet tools and resources affect conceptual change and associated impact on students' attitude, achievement, and persistence. The other is on the factors that promote persistence and success in retention of undergraduate students in engineering. He was a coauthor for best paper award in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2013. Dr. Ying-Chih Chen, Arizona State UniversityYing-Chih Chen is an assistant professor in the Division of Teacher Preparation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.His research takes two distinct but interrelated paths focused on elementary students' learning in science and engineering as well as in-service science teachers' professional development. The first focus involves how language as a learning tool improves students' conceptual understandings, literacy, and representation competencies in science. His second research focus is on how in-service teachers develop their knowledge for teaching science and engineering in argument-based inquiry classrooms. This research is aimed at developing measures of teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for adopting the argumentbased inquiry approach, as well as developing tools to capture the interactive nature of PCK.Prof. James A Middleton, Arizona State University Dr. Eugene Judson, Arizona State UniversityEugene Judson is an Associate Professor of for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. His past experiences include having been a middle school science teacher, Director of Academic and Instructional Support for the Arizona Department of Education, a research scientist for the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (CRESMET), and an evaluator for several NSF projects. His first research strand concentrates on the relationship between educational policy and STEM education. His second research strand focuses on studying STEM classroom interactions and subsequent effects on student understanding. He is a co-developer of the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) and his work has been cited more than 1500 times and his publications have been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals such as Science Education and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Prof. Robert J CulbertsonRobert J. Culbertson is an Associate Professor of Physics. Currently...

Facilitating Change in Instructional Practice in a Faculty Development Program through Classroom Observations and Formative Feedback Coaching

“…Denton and Hasbruck [14] found in the K-12 setting that giving feedback along with data not only improves teaching performance, but it also improves student performance as well. This same tendency was found to be true in undergraduate courses as well [17], including one study where higher scores on the RTOP correlated to higher student achievement [18].…”

Board 46: Statewide Coalition: Supporting Underrepresented Populations in Precalculus through Organizational Redesign Toward Engineering Diversity (SC:SUPPORTED) Results from Year One

“…The launch pilot focuses on elucidating the pathways that lead students into college math courses below calculus and on testing interventions at points of maximal theoretical impact. Although the data we collect is specific to South Carolina, the framework for the study (Figure 1) is grounded in engineering identity theory and draws on national research on engineering identity and engineering pathways [1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Each critical decision point is affected by a range of inputs that are not unique to South Carolina; collecting representative data to understand the relative impact of those input variables within the nearly closed system in South Carolina will provide insight that translates to the larger national context.…”