Collaborative Research RAPID: Matriculation and Well-Being Under Emergent Events (MWEE): Using Data to Empower Campus Communities in Times of Crisis

2019年秋季，在美国高校就读的近2000万学生中，每个人的教育都因新冠肺炎疫情而中断。学院和大学迅速、动态地做出反应，帮助缓解疾病传播，同时继续提供高质量的学习体验。缓解策略包括快速过渡到在线学习，在几乎没有通知的情况下关闭校园宿舍，以及在几周内大幅改变学生和大学生活。这种混乱已经极大地改变了我们的社区，这些变化可能对我们最脆弱的学生尤其具有挑战性，包括那些有住房和饥饿不安全感或行为健康问题的学生。这个快速的项目，入学和突发事件下的幸福感(MWEE)，将利用与新冠肺炎大流行相关的时间敏感数据来研究学生幸福感。Mwee将把重点放在本科项目中的工程学学生身上，在这些项目中，课程成功的一个组成部分通常是动手实验室和团队合作。MWEE将利用来自五个校园的数据，让社区参与进来，并鼓励制定流程和行动来应对这一全球挑战。这些机构包括一所私立大学、一所公立大学和三所赠与土地的大学，其中一所是历史上的黑人学院和大学(HBCU)。地理区域包括南部、中西部和太平洋西北部。更好地了解影响弱势学生成功的关键因素，可以为制定有效的干预措施，减少与新冠肺炎相关的大学流失提供洞察力。这些知识还可以潜在地为大学做出应对其他紧急事件的决策提供依据。MWEE的目标是(I)从多个来源收集和合成与学生健康和行为有关的结构化和非结构化数据，以及(Ii)利用机器学习和优化技术从数据中学习，以确定最佳实践，识别处于风险中的学生，并为潜在的政策和干预措施提供信息。MWEE方法将创建一种新的融合的科学范式，以了解、评估和衡量个人和社区在复杂和新颖情况下的幸福感和复原力，如新冠肺炎大流行。预计大学将能够将结果与来自校园的数据分层，以预测包括COVID-19在内的紧急事件的留校率和毕业率。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Each of the nearly 20 million students that attended American colleges and universities in Fall 2019 had his or her education disrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Colleges and universities responded quickly and dynamically to help mitigate disease spread while continuing to deliver a high-quality learning experience. Mitigation strategies involved rapid transitions to online learning, closure of on-campus housing with little to no notice, and drastic changes to student and university life over several weeks. The disruption has drastically changed our communities, and these changes may be particularly challenging for our most vulnerable students, including ones with housing and hunger insecurity or behavioral health issues. This RAPID project, Matriculation and Well-Being Under Emergent Events (MWEE), will utilize time-sensitive data associated with the COVID-19 pandemic to study student well-being. MWEE will focus on engineering students in undergraduate programs where a component of course success is often hands-on labs and teamwork. MWEE will harness data from five campuses, engage communities and encourage the development of processes and actions to address this global challenge. The institutions include a private university, a public university, and three land-grant universities, one of which is a historically black college and university (HBCU). Geographic regions include the South, Midwest and Pacific Northwest. A better understanding of critical factors that influence the success of vulnerable students can provide insight for developing effective interventions for reducing college attrition associated with COVID-19. The knowledge can also potentially inform university decisions regarding response to other emergent events. MWEE aims to (i) collect and synthesize structured and unstructured data from multiple sources that relate to the health and behavior of students and (ii) utilize machine learning and optimization techniques to learn from the data to identify best practices, identify students at risk, and inform potential policies and interventions. The MWEE methodology will create a new convergent scientific paradigm to understand, assess, and measure individual and community well-being and resilience during complex and novel situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It is expected that universities will be able to layer the results with data from their campuses to predict retention and graduation rates given emergent events including COVID-19.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.