A New Approach to Evaluate Student Learning Outcomes Resulting From Participation in Remotely Operated Vehicle Competitions

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There is a growing national demand for students who possess content knowledge and skills that prepare them to enter college level technician education programs and the skilled technical workforce. Robotics competitions are popular venues for engaging students in STEM disciplines, and they connect students, mentors, and institutions to a variety of successful and engaging technology-based programs. The Marine Advanced Technology Education Center (MATE) has supported the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Competition since 2001 as a way to interest and engage students in STEM, help them develop 21st Century workplace skills, and enable them to envision themselves on career pathways. This project will support high school, community college, and college/university students who participate in regional and international ROV competitions to identify the knowledge and skills they need to gain through this activity, to see clearly the areas where they need to improve, and to use this knowledge to their advantage as they continue their education and/or prepare to enter the workforce. This project builds upon and extends findings obtained using a set of comprehensive post-competition surveys that support the value of the ROV competitions for participating students, and is strongly aligned with the goals of the ATE program. In addition to the MATE Center at Monterey Peninsula College (MPC), the project brings together the State University of New York College at Buffalo (Buffalo State), and the technical resources available through the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College. This project builds on EvaluateUR, a successful evaluation method developed at SUNY Buffalo State. EvaluateUR provides detailed data measuring a broad range of desirable student outcomes that include both content knowledge and outcomes that are critically important in the workplace, such as communication skills, creativity, autonomy, an ability to overcome obstacles, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. EvaluateUR also provides students with "metacognition" skills - the ability to understand their academic strengths and weaknesses and take greater ownership of their own learning. The project will adapt the innovative design of EvaluateUR to serve students participating in MATE's regional and international ROV competitions, support faculty advisors as they mentor students who are designing and building ROVs, and provide reliable feedback to MATE about the academic value of the competitions. The following objectives will be supported: 1) Ensure that all students involved in the competitions know at the outset of their participation what specific knowledge and skills they should be mastering in order to prepare for additional education and/or the workplace; 2) Measure more precisely for each student how much growth he or she has demonstrated toward achieving such mastery; 3) Accomplish these goals in a way that strengthens student metacognitive abilities; and 4) Create a database, for each institution participating in the competitions, of reliable, statistically validated findings showing student growth on specific knowledge and skills. It is also anticipated that other robotics competitions, such as FIRST, VEX, Botball, and the Association of Unmanned Vehicle System International's (AUVSI) suite of land, air, and sea programs, represent potential users of this methodology, and dissemination of project results will include these robotics communities as well as other national associations and the ATE PI community. This project is funded by the NSF Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy.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.