"Why Do They Enroll in This Course? Undergraduates’ Course Choice from a Motivational Perspective"4/16/2021
Abstract
Why do students pick various courses? Interdisciplinary research has highlighted the role of structural constraints, normative expectations, and individual motivation as the joint influences of agency and structure in the service of life goals. Here, we examined undergraduates’ reasons for course choices for their most difficult and most important courses. We compared the reasons for non-major vs. major courses, for freshman vs. juniors, and across different disciplines. College students selected courses that fulfilled their major or breadth requirements, particularly in their freshman year. STEM courses were taken more for career development reasons than other disciplines, particularly humanities courses; social sciences courses were taken more for interest than STEM courses; and humanities courses were taken more for intellectual broadening than STEM courses.
Lee investigates the roles that social agents play in immigrant youths’ adaptation to their new environment and ways to foster their well-being. She currently is working on a project funded by Mott Foundation to examine after-school quality and Templeton Character Development project with her advisor Simpkins and Chancellor’s Professor Emerita Deborah Lowe Vandell.
Simpkins is a developmental psychologist, studying child and adolescent development. She researches how families, friendships, and social position factors (such as ethnicity and culture) shape adolescents’ organized after-school activities and motivation. She is currently working on research focused on the positive outcomes of youth’s participation in activities as well as the predictors and correlates of high school students’ STEM motivational beliefs. She is co-PI on grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation that study how organized after-school activities support positive development from childhood through young adulthood. Simpkins directs the Center for After School and Summer Excellence (CASE) and Project REACH and co-directs the After School Activities Project. Abstract Experiencing low support from teachers can be associated with low academic achievement. Nonetheless, individual- (i.e., ability self-concepts) and contextual-level (i.e., parental support) protective factors may help adolescents to display academic resilience. This study examined whether high school students’ math ability self-concepts and parental support can mitigate the possible negative association between perceived low math teacher support and their math achievement. Correlational data were drawn from the High School Longitudinal Study (N = 14,580, Mage = 17.42 in 11th grade, 51% female), a nationally representative study of high school students in the U.S. The measures of protective factors (i.e., math ability self-concepts and parental support) were obtained from the surveys administered to students and parents in 9th grade. Students’ perceived teacher support and their math achievement score were measured in 11th grade. A series of linear regression analyses were estimated to test our hypotheses. Perceived low teacher support was negatively associated with adolescents’ math achievement. Adolescents’ math ability self-concepts were directly and positively associated with their math achievement. The interaction between perceived low teacher support and ability self-concepts in predicting adolescents’ achievement varied by parental support. The association between perceived low teacher support and adolescents’ math achievement was not statistically significant when adolescents were high on one of the protective factors. That is, high parental support may be protective for adolescents with low math ability self-concepts. This study highlights the interaction between adolescents’ academic motivation and parental support in demonstrating resilience to perceived low teacher support.
Abstract
The current study positions high school relationships and resources as assets to college-going Latinx students, examining the potential academic benefits of maintaining high school friendships and participating in support services offered from the high school context. The participants were 165 graduates (86.4% Latinx; 75.6% low-income) from a high school that operates an Alumni Success program delivering college support services to alumni. Interval regressions with moderation tests were used to investigate associations between a college GPA outcome and (a) sense of belonging and (b) friend group composition. The findings suggest friendships from the high school context may promote academic success for students with low sense of belonging in two-year colleges. Contrary to studies of predominately white students, high school friendships appear to have an enduring association with academic achievement. Next, t-tests and proportional equivalence z-tests were used to investigate differences between students who utilized the Alumni Success program and those who did not, and further, how these differences compared to other types of college-based support services. The results suggest providing college support services from the high school context may be an effective, culturally responsive strategy that complements existing college-based programs and recognizes diverse pathways to college success for Latinx students. Three doctoral students, lab manager named National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows4/13/2021
UCI School of Education receives more than 10 percent of GRFP fellowships nationally in field of STEM Education and Learning Research The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program named three UCI School of Education doctoral students – Socorro Cambero, Marixza Torres, and Valery Vigil – GRFP fellows, all in the field of STEM Education and Learning Research. Additionally, Rachel Nicole Smith (B.S. ‘19), lab manager for the School of Education’s Working Memory and Plasticity (WMP) Lab, received a GRFP fellowship in STEM Education and Learning Research. The NSF awarded 39 GRFP awards nationally in STEM Education and Learning Research. Each GRFP fellow receives a three-year annual stipend of $34,000, which goes toward tuition, fees, and opportunities for international research and professional development. Socorro Cambero
To understand how a course foregrounded on principles of culturally responsive pedagogies informs the perspectives and practices of future Latinx science teachers, Cambero will follow participants as student teachers for two years and as classroom teachers for one year, noting the course’s impact at different stages. Associate Professor June Ahn and Assistant Professor Adriana Villavicencio serve as Cambero’s GRFP advisors. Marixza Torres
Torres’s research interests include academic achievement, adolescent development, diversity and equity in education, resilience processes, and familism. Professor Gustavo Carlo serves as her advisor. Valery Vigil
Vigil expects that her research, to be conducted in Santa Ana, will identify methods to increase learning, support, and participation of Latinx children in STEM. “This will be the first study of its kind to carry out research with a bilingual socially contingent CA and will thus shed light on its affordances for promoting learning among children in multilingual families,” Vigil said. Professor Mark Warchauer serves as Vigil’s advisor. Rachel Nicole Smith
Smith joined the WMP lab while an undergraduate pursuing her bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science. This fall, she will attend Washington University in St. Louis as a Ph.D. student in Education.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. The program is the country’s oldest fellowship program that directly supports graduate students in various STEM fields. Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. For more information, please click here.
Abstract
The extant literature suggests that human-centered approaches to design such as Participatory Design (PD) lend to more reusable and relevant design outputs, but often assumes this progression as an inevitable outcome of PD work. To investigate the factors contributing to this assumption, we document a comparative case analysis of the design processes of three studies centered on learning in communal spaces. All three studies shared the overarching objective of designing signage to promote playful learning opportunities in grocery stores, providing a rare opportunity to analyze different approaches to PD work in a controlled design area. We compare how three components interact throughout each design process: 1) researchers’ goals 2) researchers’ pedagogical frameworks and 3) community roles. We propose that future researchers consider the interplay of these three components as points of deliberation to formulate innovative and intentional PD practices. We offer a set of guidelines incorporating these components that researchers can reference when structuring their PD process.
Lin is particularly interested in applying and developing quantitative methodologies to examine the social and cognitive aspects in online learning. Dowell is serving as her advisor.
Dowell’s research interests encompass cognitive psychology, discourse processing, group interaction, and learning analytics, with focuses on using language and discourse to uncover the dynamics of socially significant, cognitive, and affective processes. She applies computational techniques to model discourse and social dynamics in a variety of environments including small group computer-mediated collaborative learning environments, collaborative design networks, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Abstract Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) is one of the most essential 21st century skills for success across educational and professional settings. The hidden-profile paradigm is one of the most prominent avenues of studying group decision making and underlying issues in information sharing. Previous research on the hidden-profile paradigm has primarily focused on static constructs (e.g., group size, group expertise), or on the information itself (whether certain pieces of information is being shared). In the current study, we propose a lens on individual and group’s collaborative problem-solving skills, to explore the relationships between dynamic discourse processes and decision making in a distributed information environment. Specifically, we sought to examine CPS skills in association with decision change and productive decision-making. Our results suggest that while sharing information has significantly positive association with decision change and effective decision-making, other aspects of social processes appear to be negatively correlated with these outcomes. Cognitive CPS skills, however, exhibit a strong positive relationship with making a (productive) change in students final decisions. We also find that these results are more pronounced at the group level, particularly with cognitive CPS skills. Our study shed lights on a more nuanced picture of how social and cognitive CPS interactions are related to effective information sharing and decision making in collaborative problem-solving interactions.
Ahn serves as faculty director of Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN) and a member of the Connected Learning Lab (DLL) at UCI. Currently, he is editor of Educational Researcher.
Nguyen is specializing in Teaching, Learning, and Educational Improvement (TLEI) for her doctoral work. Her research interests include design of STEM learning experiences and multimodal assessment to study collaboration and conceptual understanding. She is advised by Professors Mark Warschauer and Rossella Santagata. Abstract The process of using Learning Analytics (LA) to improve teaching works from the assumption that data should be readily shared between stakeholders in an educational organization. However, the design of LA tools often does not account for considerations such as data privacy, transparency and trust among stakeholders. Research in human-centered design of LA does attend to these questions, specifically with a focus on including direct input from K-12 educators. In this paper, we present a series of design studies to articulate and refine conjectures about how privacy and transparency might influence better trust-building and data sharing within four school districts in the United States. By presenting the development of four sequential prototypes, our findings illuminate the tensions between designing for existing norms versus potentially challenging these norms by promoting meaningful discussions around the use of data. We conclude with a discussion about practical and methodological implications of our work to the LA community.
Abstract
Although online courses can provide students with a high-quality and flexible learning experience, one of the caveats is that they require high levels of self-regulation. This added hurdle may have negative consequences for first-generation college students. In order to better understand and support students’ self-regulated learning, we examined a fully online Chemistry course with high enrollment (N = 312) and a high percentage of first-generation college students (65.70%). Using students’ lecture video clickstream data, we created two indicators of self-regulated learning: lecture video completion and time management. Performing a k-means clustering on these indicators uncovered four distinct self-regulated learning patterns: (1) Early Planning, (2) Planning, (3) Procrastination, and (4) Low Engagement. Early Planning behaviors were especially important for course success—they consistently predicted higher final course grades, even after controlling for important demographic variables. Interestingly, first-generation college students classified as Early Planners achieved at similar levels as their non-first-generation peers, but first-generation students in the Low Engagement group had the lowest average grades among students. Overall, our results show that self-regulation may be an important skill for determining first-generation students’ STEM achievement, and targeting these skills may serve as a useful way to support their specific learning needs.
Abstract
While existing work points to the ways parenting behaviors and specific value socialization approaches influence children’s internalization of moral values (Baumrind, Child Development 43, 261–267, 1972; Hoffman, Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice, 2001; Grusec & Davidov, Child Development, 81, 687–709, 2010), little work has considered the experiences of African American and lower-income families. The current study capitalized on the availability of 53 video-recorded mother–preadolescent conversations about their disagreements from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (Vogel et al., Early head start children in grade 5: Long-term follow-up of the early head start research and evaluation study sample. OPRE Report # 2011-8, 2010). Using inductive analysis, we assessed mothers’ affective tone, communication styles, and message content during the discussion of problems involving honesty and lying. Mothers tended to display warm yet firm affect, incorporate both autonomy-supportive and dominant-directive communication styles, assert that lying is never acceptable, and explain why lying is problematic. Mothers’ affect, communication styles, and message content reflected a no-nonsense approach to transmitting values about honesty to their children. To our knowledge, the current study is the first qualitative observational investigation of low-income African American mothers’ conversations regarding honesty with their children. "Factors influencing U.S. speech and language therapists’ use of technology for clinical practice"3/31/2021
There is an increasing number of technological resources available to speech and language therapists (SLTs) for use in clinical practice, but the factors that influence SLTs’ selection and use of such resources are not well understood. In related fields, technology acceptance models have been employed to explain users’ adoption of technology and to inform the advancement of empirically supported technological resources. We surveyed 209 practising SLTs in the United States representative of the speech and language membership of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA). Participants completed a 38‐item electronic survey representing four categories: (1) technology use, (2) technology attitudes and factors influencing technology use, (3) employment information and (4) demographics. Items measuring technology attitudes served as indicators of the research model, which mapped the primary relationships of a technology acceptance model. Survey data were collected before the Covid‐19 pandemic. The research model accounted for 66% of the variance in SLTs’ behavioural intention to use technology, which significantly and positively predicted the amount of time they reportedly spent using technology in the workplace. Subjective norms and attitudes towards technology use directly predicted the intention to use technology. Perceived usefulness and ease of use indirectly predicted intention to use technology. Survey respondents reported using technology during 48% (SD = 24%) of their overall weekly work hours on average, with a large majority reporting using technology at least once per week for planning (89% of respondents), assessment (66% of respondents) or intervention (90% of respondents). These findings statistically explain the relationships between SLTs’ attitudes and their intention to use technology for clinical practice, contributing to our understanding of why SLTs adopt certain technologies. We also detail the nature and frequency of technology use in the clinical practice of SLTs. Future directions for this work include further exploring use categories, employing direct measurements of technology use and exploring the impact of recent changes in SLT service delivery due to the Covid‐19 pandemic on SLTs’ technology attitudes.
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