The following is a list of projects that different members of our research collaborative are working on.
Embedding Personal Narratives in Engineering Courses to Improve Engineering Student Success
NFS Award #2142137
This project aims to serve the national interest by improving student persistence, particularly among historically marginalized student groups, through storytelling activities embedded in engineering courses. Students’ sense of belonging and engineering identity are predictors of students’ persistence in engineering programs. Effective educational interventions are needed that are intentionally designed to improve students’ sense of belonging and engineering identity. This project will examine how engaging engineering students in personal and professional reflection activities at a time when they are encountering the most intellectually rigorous part of their engineering programs affects student persistence. A storytelling curriculum will be developed and implemented in existing engineering courses and will target undergraduate engineering students in their second and third years. Students will learn how to write personal narratives about their engineering education experiences and communicate them to audiences through live performances or video recordings. Each semester will culminate in a public storytelling session attended by students and the broader community in which engineering students will have the opportunity to share their stories. The storytelling curriculum will be made available to the engineering education community through an online public repository.
The goal of this project is to develop, implement, and examine the mechanisms and effects of a new storytelling intervention designed to help shape and reinforce engineering students’ self-view. Past work suggests that storytelling pedagogy can support identity development. However, individual reflection and storytelling are typically not included in a traditional engineering curriculum that is focused on the application of scientific knowledge to solve engineering problems. This project will incorporate the element of storytelling and public performance into the pedagogy of multiple engineering courses. Undergraduate engineering students will learn storytelling techniques and apply these techniques to narratively communicate their personal experiences in engineering education. Using a mixed methods approach, this project will examine the efficacy of storytelling on student success in terms of students’ sense of belonging, professional identity, and persistence in the major. This project will identify themes in students’ stories that are associated with the most substantial impact on student success outcomes. This study will provide insights into why storytelling assignments enhance student success and what types of stories have the most impact on student success. Project results will contribute to the literature on narrative identity and inform subsequent efforts to refine storytelling assignments to enhance their influence on aspects of engineering students’ self-view. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.
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.
Collaborative Research: Scalable Storytelling Interventions to Support Graduate Student Success in STEM
NSF Award # 2325041
This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to Boise State University and Utah State University pilots a storytelling intervention to enhance professional identity and sense of belonging and reduce impostorism among students pursuing graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Traditionally, STEM graduate training has focused more on instilling technical content expertise and less on cultivating feelings of belonging and STEM identity critical to graduate student retention and success in STEM programs. This project addresses these missing components by developing a cohort-based program wherein students learn and apply storytelling techniques through writing and sharing transformative stories about themselves. Aided by a novel collaboration with The Story Collider, a nonprofit organization that aims to foster diversity and inclusion in science through storytelling, the project team will develop, implement, and assess the transferability of an innovative personal storytelling intervention with students at the two universities. Each project year will culminate in public performances in which participant cohorts perform their stories to university and community peers and stakeholders. The open-source storytelling curriculum will be made available through online repositories for the STEM education community to share and customize.
This project will expand pedagogical knowledge of effective instructional practices for developing graduate students into STEM professionals and advance theoretical knowledge in the fields of STEM education and narrative psychology. Using storytelling to engage STEM students in reflection at a time when they encounter intense intellectual and personal challenges, this intervention will engage STEM graduate students in formal training about storytelling techniques and then facilitate their practice of these techniques within a community of STEM graduate students. Training and peer interactions culminate in a personal story that each student may publicly perform. The project examines three hypotheses: (1) storytelling pedagogy will improve STEM graduate student professional identity and sense of belonging, and reduce feelings of impostorism, (2) storytelling performances will reinforce student retention and transition into STEM fields, and (3) storytelling performances will decrease the stereotyping among audience members of those who pursue STEM careers. Adopting a mixed-methods research approach, the project team will answer three research questions: (1) What are the thematic and structural characteristics of personal narratives that students write about their experiences in STEM graduate education? (2) How do students’ development and performance of a personal narrative about their experiences in STEM graduate education relate to their professional identity, sense of belonging, and feelings of impostorism? (3) How do the thematic and structural characteristics of personal narratives relate to the three professional constructs of professional identity, sense of belonging, and impostorism? The project team will collect and analyze mixed methods data, including participants’ stories, focus group interviews, and self-report measures related to professional identity, sense of belonging, and impostor phenomenon. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed data analyses will be used to determine how the storytelling intervention influences graduate students’ experience related to the three professional constructs.
The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test, and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.
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.
Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: The Use of Mobile Technology and Innovative Pedagogy to Improve Undergraduate Thermal-Fluid Science Learning
NSF Award #2106345
Student retention remains a problem in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. This project will utilize mobile technologies and a technology-enhanced curriculum to improve student engagement and learning in STEM undergraduate courses. The technology-enhanced curriculum will be fully integrated in the thermal-fluids course to deliver content and to facilitate student engagement with the content, instructor, and peers. This research project will measure how mobile technology, when purposefully integrated into engineering teaching, impacts student engagement, enhancement, and extension of learning to real-life problems. Through the full integration of mobile devices, findings from this research will transform the teaching and learning of the thermal-fluid science curriculum. The study will be led by a researcher who is new to the field of engineering education research, who will be mentored through research methods by an engineering education researcher. This aligns with the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation program’s goal of initiating new researchers into engineering formation research to meet the needs of a diverse workforce. Undertaking such research project will supplement the lead researcher?s experience in developing and implementing mobile learning in the classroom while using social science research approaches to advance both the professional formation of future engineers.
The underlying goal of this research is to measure how mobile technology, when purposefully integrated into engineering teaching, impacts student engagement, enhancement, and extension of learning. Using an undergraduate thermal-fluid science course as a model course, the primary contribution of this research is to directly improve and transform engineering students’ learning in one of the most difficult and abstract content in engineering curricula. Guided by a social-constructivist theoretical framework and the Triple E framework (Engagement, Enhancement of learning outcomes, and Extension of learning goals to real-life problems), the research team will conduct a mixed-methods study, implementing mobile devices with a stylus and a technology-enhanced curriculum. To examine the impact of mobile devices on student learning, the following research questions will be addressed in the areas of engagement, learning outcomes, and extension of learning goals to real-life problems: (1) Does mobile device use facilitate engagement in thermal-fluid science course content? (2) Does mobile device use increase learning of identified difficult concepts in thermal-fluid science courses, as indicated by increased achievement scores? (3) What are students’ perceptions of using mobile devices for solving real-life problems? The findings from this research will provide educators with a blueprint for the broader implementation of mobile devices in teaching and learning across STEM disciplines. Further, this project is one of the first applications of the Triple E Framework in higher education, offering potential to bridge research on educational technologies with evidence-based teaching practices.
This project is jointly funded by the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
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.