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Your school reached its target percentage for women in engineering. So what? And now what? With all the discussion and reporting of percentages of women in engineering, educators may be tempted to assume that attaining a target number, or ‘critical mass,’ alone solves the problems related to engagement of a gender diverse student body. We argue that while critical mass may be necessary, it is insufficient...
Work in Progress. Introductory, or “weed out” chemistry courses are well-known for deterring undergraduate students from pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Specifically, students' motivations resulting from experiences in these courses can influence STEM retention. Using grounded theory, our preliminary analysis of qualitative data collected in an undergraduate...
Work-in-Progress. “I felt so dumb, and it's not fair that I cannot grasp this information to save my life, and other people can with no problem.” Why do some students feel empowered in the classroom, and feel they have control over their own learning, while others do not? Our qualitative investigation is a part of a larger mixed-methods study about students' situational motivations in introductory...
Work-in-Progress. Students' contextual motivation in introductory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses has been a focus of many recent studies; this work provides a new lens to this work by investigating students' situational motivations. Grounded theory is used to analyze survey responses from ten students in an introductory STEM course at a small private technical school...
In this Work-in-Progress paper we examine students' situational motivation in introductory STEM courses through analysis of survey responses about students' experiences in a required course at each of two large public institutions. The students in each course convey different perceptions of course relevance: learning-performance relevance and temporal relevance. Learning-performance relevance, exclusive...
Instructors often cite student motivation as a critical component of successful learning experiences, or a key barrier to student engagement in the classroom. Given motivation's influence on identity and well-being, and the important relationships between motivation and learning outcomes such as creativity, critical thinking, self-regulation, and performance, it is reasonable to assign student motivation...
Early analysis does not support a link between students' motivation levels and their survey participation rates, suggesting that repeated sampling throughout a semester may be more capable of documenting a representative cross-section of student experiences than we originally expected.
Understanding student motivation is an essential aspect of effective course design. Since motivations are related to learning outcomes ranging from critical thinking to creativity to lifelong learning, helping students develop positive motivations toward learning is critical for the engagement and success of tomorrow's STEM graduates. In this workshop, we explore the specific roles that instructors...
The learning goals of students are not only essential for personal guidance, but they also provide educators insight into individual approaches to learning and student self-perceptions. In this study, the learning goals of students in an introductory project-based materials science course were analyzed to determine differences by gender. Student goals were coded according to their inference of different...
A capacity for self-directed learning (SDL) and lifelong learning is widely recognized as an important outcome for today's engineering graduates. Key to SDL is the development of self-reflection abilities, which enable students to critically evaluate learning tasks and contexts, to adjust and adapt their self-regulatory processes to new environments, and to maintain motivation and persistence in the...
The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Olin) are establishing a student-centered hands-on interactive approach to engineering education (similar to Olin's) at UTEP, where it will reside in UTEP's innovative B.S. in Leadership Engineering (LE) program. The goal of the proposed collaboration is to catalyze UTEP's educational innovation through a cross-campus...
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