Research Initiation: Collaborative Research: Understanding pedagogically motivating factors for under-represented and non-traditional students in an engineering classroom

随着全国大学和学院越来越多地使用在线教育课程来补充面对面的教学，了解这些形式的教学辅助工具如何帮助学生参与、激发兴趣并在课程中脱颖而出将是非常重要的。在科学、技术、工程和数学领域，人们对如何设计这些电子教学工具以激励学生接触基本但难以掌握的概念知之甚少。特别是，我们的目标是探索这些类型的教学辅助工具如何影响来自代表性不足群体的学生和工程学领域女性的参与和兴趣。我们将特别关注那些在学生中途辍学率较高的工程(如工程静力学)课程和在线教学辅助工具。这项工作的一个独特之处在于，神经营销等领域的研究方法将被纳入这项研究，在学生参与在线工程教学辅助工具时，将观察生物识别反应。生物识别反应是人体的生理特征，如眼睛跟踪和皮肤电导。这项研究将探索哪些动机或动力不足的人群坚持使用教学辅助工具，以及他们使用这些教育电子工具的经验如何影响继续在工程领域工作的动机。这项工作的一个更广泛的影响是，通过了解在线教学辅助工具如何吸引和激励学生，我们可以了解如何更好地设计电子工具和应用程序，使更多的学生能够在工程学方面取得成功。这项探索性的、混合方法的多模式研究的智力价值在于了解工程学中未被充分代表的女性和非传统女性在从事在线教学辅助工具时相互交织的机制(即动机、情感、注意力和生理影响)。此外，这项工作将为技术接受模型提供信息，以更好地理解和衡量这些结构之间的关联。虽然该模型旨在了解外部激励因素的影响，如特定技术的感知有用性和易用性，以决定个人的行为或选择使用/受益于特定技术；但它不能有意义地对工程学中的子群体进行背景分析，如性别、种族/族裔和年龄，以及它们在工程学中的交叉性。这项探索性工作将围绕教育电子学习工具的特定工程理论和教学方法的发展，帮助推进工程教育中的知识库，重点是了解交叉性在接受、学习和参与过程中所起的作用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

With the increased use of online educational lessons to complement face-to-face instruction in universities and colleges nationwide, it will be important to understand how these forms of instructional aids help students to engage, garner interest in, and excel in their courses. In the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math, little is known about how these electronic instructional tools can be designed to motivate students to engage with concepts that are fundamental, yet difficult to master. In particular, we aim to explore how these types of instructional aids influence the engagement and interest of students from underrepresented groups and women in the field of engineering. Special focus will be given to courses and online instructional aids for topics within engineering where drop-out rates are known to be high among students (e.g., engineering statics). One unique element of this work is that research methods in fields like neuromarketing will be incorporated into this study where biometric responses will be observed as students engage with online engineering instructional aids. Biometric responses are physiological characteristics of the human body such as eye tracking and skin conductance. The study will explore what motivated or demotivated underrepresented populations to persist in using the instructional aid and how their experience with these educational electronic tools influence the motivations towards continuing in the field of engineering. A broader impact of this work is that by understanding how online instructional aids engage and motivate students, we can understand how to better design electronic tools and apps that will enable a wider range of students to pursue and succeed in engineering. The intellectual merit of this exploratory, mixed-method multi-modal research study is to understand the intertwined mechanisms (i.e. the motivational, affective, attentive, and physiological influences) of underrepresented and non-traditional women in engineering as they engage in online instructional aids and tools. In addition, this work will inform the Technological Acceptance Model to better understand and measure the associations between these constructs. While the model aims to understand the influence of extrinsic motivators such perceived usefulness and ease of use of specific technologies that determine an individual's behavior or choice to use/benefit from a specific technology; it does not meaningfully allow for contextual analysis of subgroups within engineering such as gender, race/ethnicity and age, as well as and their intersectionality within engineering. This exploratory work will help advance the knowledge-base in engineering education around the development of engineering-specific theories and pedagogy for educational electronic learning tools with emphasis on understanding the mechanisms that intersectionality plays in their acceptance, learning and engagement.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.