Studying Undergraduate Curricular Complexity for Engineering Student Success (SUCCESS)

研究本科课程的复杂性以促进工程学生的成功（SUCCESS）

基本信息

批准号：
2152441
负责人：
David Reeping
金额：
$ 34.99万
依托单位：
University of Cincinnati Main Campus
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2022
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2022-04-01 至 2025-03-31
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2152441&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Studying Undergraduate Curricular Complexity Engineering

项目摘要

As the demand for engineering graduates grows, there has been mounting interest in understanding what prevents students from completing their degrees. Not everyone follows the same pathway to an engineering degree; current longitudinal research suggests that subpopulations of students take different routes to either completing or abandoning their studies. Accordingly, the BPE program seeks to support research on understanding systematic barriers that push out students from underserved communities. This project will examine a barrier that all students must overcome when pursuing an engineering degree, the curriculum itself. An emerging framework called Curricular Analytics has provided a new method of thinking about how curricula in engineering can be analyzed. The framework quantifies features of the curriculum that make it “complex” such that they can be connected to outcomes like graduation rates. This project will use a longitudinal dataset called the Multi-Institution Database for Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD), which contains nearly two million records from undergraduate students at 21 U.S. universities from 1987 through 2018 – 14.4 % of which are engineering students. Using these data, student course-taking trajectories will be created, clustered to find patterns based on measures of curricular complexity and compared to established curricula across engineering disciplines, then disaggregated into subpopulations. This project has the potential to empower administrators, curriculum designers, and advisors to understand how the complexity of the curriculum as defined by faculty and students’ deviances from it affects the success of different subpopulations of students. The project will use the perspective of curricular complexity to examine what kinds of programs such as first year experiences, enrollment models, and course sequencing that support the retention and graduation of different subpopulations of students.To explore what barriers curricular factors impose on different students, the Curricular Analytics framework’s measures will be applied to capture a curriclum’s sequencing and interconnectedness quantitatively and study diverse student pathways - both as codified and as experienced. The guiding research question is: what is the variation in curricular complexity among the following strata – institutions, disciplines, matriculation models, populations, and pathways – and to what extent does curricular complexity relate to outcomes for diverse population subgroups? This project will combine curricular complexity with student outcomes and course-taking data from the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) to understand curricular factors in broadening participation in engineering, including retention and degree completion. This project will involve creating trajectories from student course-taking data using association analysis. The curricular complexity for these trajectories will be calculated and disaggregated across the strata of interest. These new data will be used to explore how curricular complexity for ecosystem metrics like discipline stickiness and migration yield are related to the complexity of a curriculum. The combination of the MIDFIELD database with the curricular complexity framework can bring a new perspective on differences in longitudinal studies on engineering student degree attainment and retention in the context of broadening participation. Currently, curricular complexity is a nascent framework with descriptive and explanatory potential, such as correlating program quality with curricular complexity measures. The empirical results can directly inform future curriculum revisions and policy efforts at the studied institutions through unique reports delivered to the appropriate administrative stakeholders. By disseminating these results directly to institutional stakeholders, The project will leverage MIDFIELD’s potential for disaggregation to impact inclusion efforts of underrepresented students in engineering at the curricular and programmatic level.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.

随着对工程毕业生的需求的增长，人们对了解什么阻止学生无法完成学位一直存在着兴趣。并非每个人都遵循相同的工程学位途径。当前的纵向研究表明，学生的亚群采取不同的途径以完成或放弃学习。根据BPE计划的说法，该计划旨在支持了解系统障碍的研究，这些障碍推动了服务不足社区的学生。该项目将检查一个障碍，所有学生在攻读工程学位，课程本身时都必须克服。一个称为课程分析的新兴框架为如何分析工程课程的方式提供了一种新的思考方法。该框架量化了使其“复杂”的课程的特征，以便它们可以与毕业率之类的结果连接。该项目将使用一个纵向数据集，称为工程纵向开发（中场）的多机构数据库，该数据库包含1987年至2018年21所大学的本科生的近200万张记录，其中包括工程学学生。使用这些数据，将创建学生课程轨迹，并基于课程复杂性的测量来查找模式，并将其与工程学科的既定课程进行了比较，然后将其分开为子人群。该项目有可能使管理人员，课程设计师和顾问能够了解教师和学生偏离的课程的复杂性如何影响学生的不同亚人群的成功。该项目将利用课程复杂性的角度来检查哪些课程，例如第一年的经验，入学模型和课程测序，以支持学生的不同亚群体的保留和毕业。和经验丰富。指导研究问题是：以下Stra（机构，学科，基质模型，人群和途径）课程复杂性的变化是什么，当前复杂性与潜水员人口亚组的结果有多大关系？该项目将将现代复杂性与来自多个机构数据库的学生成果和课程学习数据相结合，以调查工程纵向发展（中场），以了解现代因素扩大参与工程的参与，包括保留和学位完成。该项目将涉及使用协会分析从学生学习数据中创建轨迹。这些轨迹的课程复杂性将在整个感兴趣的阶层进行计算和分离。这些新数据将用于探索生态系统指标（如纪律粘性和迁移产量）的课程复杂性与课程的复杂性有关。中场数据库与课程复杂性框架的结合可以为在扩大参与的背景下对工程学生学位属性和保留的纵向研究的差异带来新的看法。当前，当前的复杂性是一个具有描述性和利用潜力的新生框架，例如将程序质量与现代复杂性度量相关联。经验结果可以直接通过交付给适当的行政利益相关者的独特报告来直接在研究室机构的未来课程修订和政策工作。通过将这些结果直接传播给机构利益相关者，该项目将利用中场分类的潜力来影响当前和程序化级别中人为不足的学生在工程领域的包容性工作。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用该基金会的知识分子优点和广泛的攻击来评估NSF的法定任务，并以评估的支持为宝贵。