The commercial space industry is facing a shortage of qualified workers due to the aging and retirements of the workforce and the inability to find sufficient candidates who can meet the security requirements. Additionally, technically qualified individuals are also looking to other industries instead of space. The needs of the industry, and for manufacturing engineers specifically, are not well understood. In order to better understand and satisfy the needs of industry and for manufacturing engineers, the purpose and objective of this study was to explore the training, educational experiences, and technical competencies of entry-level manufacturing engineers. All the participants in the study had worked as a manufacturing engineer in the commercial space industry. There were five expert level and three entry-level manufacturing engineers (n = 8). Expert-level manufacturing engineers had at least three years of experience and entry-level manufacturing engineers had less than three years of experience. This qualitative descriptive study involved interviewing the participants to explore their experiences. Six themes emerged from the findings and included: (a) mentoring used as a teaching tool, (b) you’re going to be doing pretty good, (c) worst case is millions of lives, (d) understand, be familiar, or proficient, (e) the interpreter or the bridge between the design engineer and the shop floor, and (f) the storyteller or make your data tell a story.

<p>Biology education in both high school and college calls for integrating scientific knowledge and reasoning into authentic laboratory in recent years. Students are expected to learn science by participating in the process of inquiry, argumentation, and explanation.</p><p>The purpose of this study is to investigate how the 9^th and 12^th grade students interpret their learning experiences during laboratory activities and evaluate students’ use of biological knowledge and understanding about the nature of science.</p><p>The results suggest most students were able to understand the main purpose of the laboratory activities. Most students were able to use change across traits to support the conclusion of evolutionary change. However, only a small number of students realized the limitation of the evidence.</p><p>Overall, this study provides support that the conceptual analysis of disciplinary evidence scaffolded activity helps both 9^th graders and 12^th graders with their authentic laboratory experience during laboratory activities.</p><p> </p><p> </p>

<p dir="ltr">Understanding how rubrics work to better use them in the classroom is an open question for educational practitioners and researchers. This meta-analysis sought to estimate the effectiveness of rubric use on performance and explore its interaction with rubrics’ measurement properties, characteristics of rubric use, and contextual variables that may influence this effect. To begin, we identified 41 experimental and quasi-experimental primary studies of rubric use effects (80 effect sizes) of 8,968 participants. After removing over-influential studies from the analysis, results showed a significant positive effect of rubric use on performance (Hedges’ <i>g</i> = 0.47). No moderator variable significantly impacts the effect of rubric use on performance. A rubrics’ content analysis identified patterns in rubric design that seemed to co-vary with the effect sizes. These results can inform best practices to improve the effectiveness of rubric use. Practical implications for designing and implementing rubrics as instructional tools in the classroom are presented.</p>

In educational research, the cognitive activity of problem posing is recognized as an important component of mathematics teaching and learning. Compared to the prevailing educational paradigm of problem solving, problem posing features less commonly in classroom instruction. During the past 20 years, numerous studies examining the use of problem posing in school mathematics instruction have documented positive outcomes in terms of students’ knowledge, problem-solving abilities, creativity, and attitudes and beliefs regarding the study of mathematics. However, despite these promising results, problem posing in mathematics instruction has rarely been studied in the population of students with learning disabilities (LDs). This study describes a problem-posing intervention that draws on existing Conceptual Model-based Problem Solving program (COMPS, Xin, 2012) and conceptual research into the problem posing task. The COMPS-based problem posing intervention is designed to teach word problem posing skills to students with LDs under structured problem posing situations. The study applies a single-subject multiple-baseline design across three participants to investigate the effects on participants’ word problem solving and problem posing skills. The results showed that all three students demonstrated increased math performance on both problem solving and problem posing tests when the COMPS-based Problem Posing intervention was used. In addition, both immediate and maintenance effects on student learning were noted.

This study examines current educational practices by looking at factors leading up to increased attention on student achievement and the role of teacher effectiveness evaluation models in delivering a quality education. The RISE teacher effectiveness evaluation model used in Indiana and two teacher evaluation models commonly used, by Charlotte Danielson and Robert Marzano, are examined based on their capacity to evaluate and support the professional performances and growth of art teachers.

<p>  </p> <p>The Home Numeracy Environment (HNE) is an essential factor that helps explain children’s numeracy skills. Research in this field has been developed mostly focused on monolingual English-speaking families. More recent studies have analyzed this construct for Latine families using existing HNE measures. However, the existing HNE scales have not taken into consideration cultural differences that contextualize the home environment (Kung et al., 2020), and using those measures in more diverse samples might provide biased results from a deficit perspective. </p> <p>Given the growth of the Latine population in the U.S. and the importance of the HNE for explaining monolingual children’s early numeracy skills, it is important to understand how Latine families foster those skills by identifying and recognizing those families’ funds of knowledge. In this thesis, I use a sequential mixed methods design with the overarching purpose of first understanding the HNE of Latine families living in the U.S. through semi-structured interviews and then developing a culturally contextualized HNE scale for Latine families. Findings from the interviews highlight that numeracy for Latine Families is everywhere and part of everyday informal interactions. The developed HNE scale for Latine families consist of 30 items and reflects three factors: Parents-Child Interactions, Parents’ Math Anxiety, and Math Beliefs. This work enriches the body of knowledge regarding the HNE, not only because of the focus on Latine families but also because of the use of inductive and deductive approaches, the inclusion of a group of experts to validate the scale, and procedures such as IRT to assess items’ performance on the scale. This study updates and increases the cultural relevance of an important measure, as it is the HNE </p>

<p>Undergraduate engineering students usually face difficulties understanding electric circuit concepts. Some of those difficulties regard with misconceptions students bring into the classroom and develop during the learning process. Additionally, the increasing complexity of the topics along the fundamental electric circuits course constitutes another factor to those difficulties students experience. Another component we can add to this equation consists of the need of modernize and actualize the curriculum to meet the society’s demands of the next taskforce. Therefore, it is important to investigate the conceptual difficulties students experience when they analyze complex electric circuits. In this dissertation, I identify what those conceptual difficulties are when undergraduate sophomore engineering students attempt to analyze solid-state device circuits. The context of this research comprises a modernized version of the traditional fundamental electric circuits course. This modernized version includes DC analysis, 1^st order transient analysis, AC, and solid-state device analysis. </p> <p>This dissertation took the form of three individual but complementary studies. Each study contributes to partially answer the overall research question. However, each study answered its own research problem. The first study attempted for identifying what concepts beginning students find challenging regarding semiconductors physics, diodes, and transistors. The second study identified student’s misconceptions when they analyze two solid-state device circuits, one with a diode, and the other with a transistor. The final study looked for determining what misconceptions students use at both earlier and more advances stages along the course. This study also searched for understanding how students move through conceptual changes along the semester. </p> <p>The general findings comprise three main points. First, students bring misconceptions into the classroom probably built from their previous experiences. Second, they also can develop those misconceptions through the learning process. This is particularly key regarding the relatively new and complex topics from student’s perspectives. Finally, language plays an important role on the kind of misconceptions students develop. How students perceive the professional community use language contributes to either consolidate or modify old misconceptions or develop new ones.</p>

<p> </p> <p>This dissertation researched the scope of mathematics achievement disparities in the United States and how these disparities can be minimized through a self-efficacy lens. To answer pertinent research questions with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2019 mathematics assessment in Grades 4, 8, and 12, gap analyses, two-level cross-sectional multilevel modeling, and two-level structural equation modeling were conducted. The discoveries demonstrated that the excellence gaps in U.S. in mathematics achievement by race/ethnicity, gender, NSLP, ELL, and IEP persisted and widened from Grade 4 to Grade 8 yet decreased at Grade 12. Self-efficacy was a noteworthy predictor of students’ mathematics achievement, displaying large effect sizes across grades. The disparities in mathematics achievement by student subgroups lessened when students' self-efficacy was equal. Moreover, self-efficacy mediated the relationships between mastery-approach goals, performance-approach goals, interest, persistence in learning and achievement. Additional results demonstrated that the status of being racially/ethnically underrepresented students partially moderated the connections between motivational variables and mathematics achievement. School locale and the percentage of underrepresented students significantly impacted students’ achievement. This dissertation underscores the importance of self-efficacy in closing mathematics achievement gaps and improving students’ mathematics achievement. </p>

<p>Although ABET has outlined educational outcomes to help prepare students with the necessary competencies to succeed in professional engineering practice, it is unclear how confident students are in their professional engineering skills. <i>Competency</i> refers to the<i>“generic, integrated and internalized capability to deliver sustainable effective performance in a certain professional domain, job, role, organizational context, and task situation.” </i>Understanding their competency provides students with a bridge to connect their academic experiences with their ability to perform their workplace duties. To help students assess their competency, I developed the Self-efficacy Inventory for Professional Engineering Competency (SEIPEC), an inventory that aims to measure engineering students’ self-efficacy for professional engineering competencies. Unlike other inventories in engineering that measure the academic experience or other self-efficacy inventories that do not focus on the engineering population, this career assessment is designed for college-level engineering students to evaluate their subjective readiness for successful performance in the workplace. </p> <p>SEIPEC is a tool for students to self-assess their professional competencies, aiming to empower students to become reflective about their learning and increase awareness of workplace competencies. SEIPEC was developed based on the American Association of Engineering Societies’ Engineering Competency Model (ECM). The ECM identifies factors that contribute to self-efficacy for professional engineering competency. ECM was developed using the Delphi method and encompasses a comprehensive list of competency statements that were approved by industry leaders and engineering educators to encapsulate the competencies needed for a professional engineer.</p> <p>The data include 434 complete responses from bachelor’s and master’s students at a Midwest research-intensive university. The sample represents 13 engineering disciplines, such as electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering, and includes 282 male and 146 female students, 48 first-generation students, and 63 international students. After the exploratory factor analysis and the confirmatory factor analysis, a four-factor model with 20 competency statements was validated as the measurement for self-efficacy for professional engineering competency. The four factors that contribute to the self-efficacy of professional engineering competency include (a) sustainability and societal impact, (b) health and safety, (c) application of tools and technologies, and (d) engineering economics. </p> <p>The SEIPEC tool has the potential to empower engineering students to reflect upon and connect their academic experience with professional competencies. SEIPEC would provide students with a method to self-evaluate their skills in addition to other assessment methods such as course grades and traditional engineering exams. <a>The results of self-assessment for professional engineering competencies could increase students’ awareness of professional competencies, thus helping students to become more intentional in connecting learning with their professional preparation. </a>Career advisors and counselors can also use this tool to guide career advising conversations revolving around students’ choice to pursue and prepare for engineering as a career path. </p>

<p>Critique is an essential skill of professional designers to communicate success and failure of a design with others. For graphic design educators, including critique in their pedagogical approaches enables students to improve both their design capability and critique skills. Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ) is an innovative approach of assessment where students and instructors make comparisons between two designs and choose the better of the two. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between instructors’ and students’ critiquing practices. The data was collected through think-aloud protocol methods while both groups critiqued the same design projects. </p> <p>The results indicate that it took students longer to finish the same amount of critiques as those completed by instructors. Students spent more time describing their personal feelings, evaluating each individual design, and looking for the right phrases to precisely express their thoughts on a design. Instructors, with more teaching experience, were able to complete the critique more quickly and justify their critique decisions more succinctly with efficient use of terminology and a reliance on their instincts. </p>