<p>Cultivating cross-disciplinary understanding across science and engineering instruction will be essential to preparing the next generation of scientists to prosper in an increasingly interdisciplinary STEM workforce. This study reports on the culmination of a project that has been aimed at addressing this challenge by investigating how science and engineering students use the first law of thermodynamics, a guiding principle of the crosscutting concept of energy and matter, to transfer across disciplinary boundaries. A qualitative interview study was undertaken in which chemistry-, engineering-, and physics-major students were recruited and tasked with addressing familiar and unfamiliar first law problems that incorporated the systems, language, and notation of each respective discipline. Guided by the dynamic transfer framework, data were analyzed via a general inductive approach to categorize the contextual resources, or target tools, students leveraged to address the provided problems. This analysis revealed three unique guiding epistemologies whose frequency and character of emergence signify field-specific approaches to transferring into an unfamiliar disciplinary context. Connections are drawn to highlight the capacity of the derived findings and developed methodology to support cross-disciplinary understanding in the classroom and in future transfer of learning research.</p>

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Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:29:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5067.pdf: 2747208 bytes, checksum: c9d6a71cd2840bbbbbb38d4fda229305 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-15 / This study aims to report the results of a didactic and pedagogic research that uses a sequence of experimental and investigative work for the metric relations involving perimeter and area of a circle, a topic of extreme importance to basic education. This research, which was conducted in the footsteps of Didactic Engineering, occurred in two rooms of grade 8/9 years of Elementary School II of a public school in the state of São Paulo. The results indicate that the use of the proposed work can promote learning through lessons more enjoyable and participatory students. / O presente trabalho tem por objetivo relatar os resultados de uma investigação didático-pedagógica que utiliza uma sequência de atividades experimentais e investigativas, para trabalhar as relações métricas envolvendo perímetro e área do círculo, um tema de extrema importância para o ensino básico. Essa investigação, que foi conduzida seguindo os passos da Engenharia Didática, ocorreu em duas salas de 8ª série/9º ano do Ensino Fundamental II de uma escola pública no interior do Estado de São Paulo. Os resultados indicam que a utilização desta proposta de trabalho pode favorecer a aprendizagem por meio de aulas mais prazerosas e participativas pelos alunos.

<p>This research uses the composition practices of three experienced letterpress typesetters as a case study for the development of a methodology for studying human-technology interaction. This methodology tries to take seriously the implications that theories of materiality have for empirical research in writing and technology.</p> <p>Data was collected from three experienced typesetters, each of whom was observed setting type for two hours, then interviewed for 1 ½ to 2 hours, using observation footage to inform interview questions. Interview transcripts and observation footage were then coded for observable material intra-actions and the influences that characterized those actions and brought them into being.</p> <p>Data analysis produced six desiderata, or desires for design, that emerged as driving the composition process: 1) a desire to use the technology, 2) a desire for efficiency, 3) a desire to imitate/defer to historical practices, 4) a desire for letter-level correctness, 5) attention to aesthetics, and 6) a desire to communicate.</p>

<p></p><p>In this dissertation, I argue that there is value in treating students as implementors during processes of educational innovation. I lay the groundwork for this argument through a review of literature comparing best practices in the implementation of innovations in higher education with best practices from active learning, blended learning, and collaborative learning research. This is followed by a phenomenographic and narrative analysis: a deliberate combination of phenomenography and narrative analysis methods for the interpretation of data and representation of findings, leveraging the strengths of each approach to account for the other’s shortcomings. The result of this work is an outcome space containing a hierarchical framework typical of phenomenography describing the various ways in which the participating students experienced implementation within the context of a blended learning environment called <i>Freeform</i>. The presentation of this framework is followed by a series of constructed narratives which contextualize how the hierarchical framework may be evidenced in student experiences of implementation in higher education. </p> <p><br></p><p>The hierarchical framework contains six categories of description: Circumstantial Non-Adoptive, Circumstantial Adoptive, Preferential Non-Adoptive, Preferential Adoptive, Adaptive, and Transformative. Proceeding from Circumstantial Non-Adoptive and Circumstantial Adoptive to Transformative, each subsequent category of the model characterizes implementation experiences that are increasingly impacted by students’ own self-awareness of their personal learning needs and subsequent self-directed learning behavior. This represents a departure from previous implementation research in engineering education for a number of reasons. First, it demonstrates that there is value in considering students’ roles as implementors of educational innovations, rather than tacitly treating them as subjects to be implemented upon. Second, the use of the word “circumstantial” intentionally acknowledges that the external (environmental) factors that influence implementation can be distinct to individual implementors while remaining contextual in nature. Third, it demonstrates that the processes of implementation which students undergo can lead to concrete changes in learning behavior that extend beyond the scope of the implementation itself.</p><p><br></p><p>Narrative analysis is used to develop a series of narratives that embody the implementation experiences communicated by student participants. These narratives are constructed using disparate ideas, reflections, and tales from a variety of participants, emplotting representative characters within constructed stories in a way that retains the student perspective without adhering too closely to any individual participant’s reported experience. This approach serves two goals: to encourage readers to reflect on how the categories of the hierarchical framework can be demonstrated in students’ experiences, and to reinforce the fact that individual students can exhibit implementation experiences and behaviors that are characteristic of multiple categories of the framework simultaneously. It is important to remember that the categories included in the framework are not meant to characterize students themselves, but rather to characterize their interactions with specific pedagogical innovations. </p><p></p><p> </p><p><br></p><p>The study concludes by interpreting these results in light of literature on implementation and change, proposing new models and making suggestions to faculty to inform the future implementation of educational innovations. Faculty are encouraged to treat students as implementors, and to exercise best practices from implementation literature when employing educational innovations in the classroom. This includes adopting practices that inform, empower, and listen to students, intentionally employing strategies that allow students to exercise their own agency by understanding and utilizing innovations effectively. Prescribing specific innovations and forcing students to use them can be detrimental, but so can freely releasing innovations into the learning environment without preparing students in advance and scaffolding their resource-usage behaviors. Instructors and researchers alike are encouraged to consider implementation from a new perspective, students as implementors, and faculty as facilitators of change. </p><p><br></p>

<p>STEM education has been a topic of reform in education for many years and it has recently focused primarily on the education methodology called STEM integration. Universities and state departments of education have defined teacher education programs and STEM initiatives that explore the necessary ingredients for a curriculum using this methodology, but they do not provide explicit instructions for the design of the learning environment. The purpose of this study was to explore the question "What are the characteristics of high school learning environments that support integrated STEM instruction?" </p> <p>This qualitative study used a postpositive lens and multiple-case study framework to distill the experiences and evidence gathered from four STEM certified high schools in the state of Indiana. This distillation resulted in three universal themes common to each school which were: the allocation of universally accessible free space for STEM integration, the importance for mobility of resources and students, and the need for supportive technological resources. </p> <p>This study is applicable to both those who are educators working in STEM education and those researchers looking to understand the STEM integration paradigm or learning environment design. Educators can use this study to plan their own learning environments and researchers can use this study as a pilot to many other outlets in the topic of STEM integration. </p>

<p>This paper delves into the current definitions and ideas of the Service-Learning pedagogy and how it ties into community engagement. The importance of service learning and community engagement is talked about in this paper as well as the proven benefits of both. The goal of this paper is to answer and better understand students’ relationships to service-learning courses such as why they take them and how to better engage them in the learning</p>

<p>  </p> <p>Informal learning environments are critical to supplemental student learning outside the formal classroom space. The problem the research addressed is the lack of informal STEM learning programs for underrepresented minority, female, urban, and rural students. The purpose of this research was to demonstrate the effect informal STEM learning has on the population’s self-efficacy and interest in STEM. The intervention for this research study was a seven-day informal learning summer camp involving five STEM projects from around the field and aligned with relevant fields offered by the Purdue University Polytechnic Institute. The participants worked in large and small group sessions with program volunteers to gain foundational learning outcomes. The outcome was measured using the STEM-CIS survey instrument in a pre-and post-testing format. The data was coded from the Likert scale and then used to calculate statistics and effect size for Likert-style data. The intervention was performed during the summer of 2021 and yielded results showing that students felt the effect of having role models and professionals involved in the STEM field. </p>

<p>  </p> <p>The dissertation study presented here explores what higher education instructors believe about problem-solving. Beliefs about problem-solving pedagogy and the influences that change pedagogical approaches in the post-secondary realm of physics education require more robust exploration. The level of change that occurs through the day-to-day teaching cycle and the support that garners improvement are essential aspects of teaching in higher education that need robust understanding.</p> <p>Insight into higher education could illuminate the transitional experience of students between high school and college-level physics. This study explores the beliefs of Indiana college and high school educators, all of whom teach college-level physics content, and probed how those beliefs shaped higher education instructional strategies and teaching philosophies. The study was conducted using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach.</p> <p>The findings show that physics educators in college and high school learning environments lacked support explicitly geared toward them and physics. All the educators included in the study taught college-level physics. Four of the six participants were the only ones teaching physics in their schools. Despite the isolation, all participants noted the importance of peer-to-peer learning for themselves and their students, noting interactions with exterior training opportunities (e.g., educational conferences or online educator communities). However, the most crucial source of change in their teaching beliefs and approaches that the participants noted was the feedback they received from students.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>In order to comprehend complex and abstract phenomena, students must partake in the process of learning by integrating complex and invisible components without ever physically encountering or manipulating such components. Prior knowledge and experiences will influence the way students assimilate and model new experiences and knowledge. If prior knowledge possesses a degree of non-normative conceptions, students' understanding of abstract phenomena may diverge dramatically from accepted scientific explanations. Embodied cognition proposes that learning about natural phenomena can develop from information gained via interactions between the body and the physical environment. Multimodal experiences can shape students' conceptual understanding of abstract phenomena.</p> <p>Incorporating technology tools to explore science concepts is a trend utilized to give high-quality education. The use of physical and virtual manipulation tools in science instruction has favored the improvement of modeling science phenomena in general. Visuohaptic simulations are also learning manipulatives that blend physical and virtual manipulation affordances as a unison experience. </p> <p>The current dissertation proposed the implementation of a learning experience where students engage in experimentation with a visuo-haptic simulation to explore and model reaction forces on truss structures. The study examined undergraduate students’ conceptual understanding, graphical representations, and the modeling refinement process of reaction forces on truss structures before, during, and after engaging with visuo-haptic simulation on truss structures using different modalities. A design-based research methodology was implemented to design, explore, and refine a learning experience with a visuo-haptic simulation of truss structures through two research phases. The learning experience occurred as a laboratory activity in a statics course at a Midwest university.</p> <p>The first phase of this dissertation investigated students' conceptual understanding and graphical representations of reactive forces on a complex truss structure by interacting with a visuo-haptic simulation of truss structures. Students participated in two treatment groups: visuo-haptic exposure and visual-only exposure. The results of the first phase suggested that students that engaged with the visuo-haptic simulation using different modalities improved their conceptual understanding of truss structures significantly. Moreover, students exposed to haptic feedback significantly improved their graphical representations on tasks where the haptic feedback was involved. </p> <p>The second phase of the current dissertation examined students’ developing models of reactive forces on a truss structure before, during, and after engaging with a visuo-haptic simulation of truss structures. Students participated in two sequential treatment groups: visual to visuo-haptic and haptic to visuo-haptic. The quantitative results suggest that both treatment groups performed significantly better in their model representations after being exposed to the learning experience but show no difference across treatment groups. The qualitative results suggest that the visual to visuo-haptic group interpreted their experiences much more coherently, leading to a more sophisticated version of their model of reaction forces on truss structures. </p>