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

随着越来越多地使用在线教育课程来补充全国大学和学院的面对面教学，重要的是要了解这些形式的教学辅助工具如何帮助学生参与，获得兴趣，并在他们的课程中脱颖而出。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来激励学生参与基础但难以掌握的概念知之甚少。 特别是，我们的目标是探讨这些类型的教学辅助工具如何影响参与和工程领域的代表性不足的群体和妇女的学生的兴趣。 将特别关注工程领域内辍学率较高的主题的课程和在线教学辅助工具（例如，工程静力学）。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，当学生参与在线工程教学辅助工具时，将观察到生物识别反应。 生物特征响应是人体的生理特征，例如眼睛跟踪和皮肤电导。这项研究将探讨什么动机或动力不足的人口坚持使用的教学援助，以及他们的经验与这些教育电子工具的影响继续在工程领域的动机。 这项工作的更广泛的影响是，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，使更广泛的学生能够追求并在工程方面取得成功。这种探索性的，混合方法的多模态研究的智力价值是了解交织的机制（即动机，情感，注意力和生理影响）的代表性不足和非传统的妇女在工程，因为他们从事在线教学辅助工具和工具。此外，这项工作将告知技术接受模型，以更好地理解和衡量这些结构之间的关联。虽然该模型的目的是了解外部激励因素的影响，如感知的有用性和易用性的特定技术，确定个人的行为或选择使用/受益于特定的技术;它不允许有意义的上下文分析的子组内的工程，如性别，种族/民族和年龄，以及他们的交叉性工程。 这项探索性的工作将有助于推进工程教育的知识基础，围绕教育电子学习工具的工程特定理论和教学法的发展，重点是理解交叉性在接受中发挥的作用，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响进行评估来支持审查标准。

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.