Publications
The need to prepare students for the workplace, shortage of skilled labor, and fast-paced changes in the industry necessitate improvements in the pedagogical frameworks of educational communities. Practitioners are required to provide practical insights, rigor, and realism to complement academia pedagogic efforts in construction education. However, this is being plagued by several complexities. Leveraging advances in computational techniques, this paper presents the considerations of practitioners and instructors in workforce development collaborations as inputs for a graphical user interface of a technology-driven matching platform for connecting professional and educational communities. Practitioners' considerations are students and specific course-support related, while instructors' considerations are related to practitioner suitability, project, and company characteristics. The study contributes to human factors principles in user interface design as well as user-centered design principles by highlighting information requirements of a collaborative network of instructors and practitioners. The findings of this study also provide insights to enhance industry-academia collaborations.
Internships are widely promoted high-impact practices that can have positive impacts on students' academic and post-graduate success, yet how specific features facilitate these outcomes is understudied. Instead, internships are often studied in terms of mere participation, without recognizing that these experiences are complex pedagogic spaces shaped by professional cultures and decisions about instructional design. In this sequential mixed-methods study we use sociocultural learning theory to interpret data from online surveys (n = 435) and focus groups (n = 52) with students at five institutions. Stepwise linear regression analyses of demographic and programmatic variables associated with intern satisfaction, developmental value, and career adaptability indicated that first-generation status, sex, race and income level, and supervisor behaviors were significantly associated with satisfaction and development. Analyses of qualitative data revealed that features of positive (clear communication, availability, feedback) and negative (unavailability, inattention to learning) supervision impacted student experiences. These findings reveal that internships should be designed with careful attention to task scaffolding, student autonomy and supervisor assistance, depending on the professional context and situation. These results highlight the need for colleges and employers to design internships as mentored and culturally shaped learning spaces, provide supervisor training, and consider the cultural backgrounds of students when matching them to internships.
Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has been widely recognised as an important aspect of the expertise for teaching. However, the extent to which teachers' own teaching practice can be a learning resource for them to develop PCK has not been systematically explored. This empirical study aimed to explore the unique contribution of the work of teaching in teachers' PCK growth by concurrently considering other external professional learning opportunities teachers may have on the job. Using longitudinal data from 207 elementary and middle school teachers in the United States, we found that teachers increased their PCK through teaching on their own, albeit at different rates. Our findings were robust when other external learning opportunities teachers had were taken into account. Our findings underscored the importance of teachers' robust knowledge of school mathematics in the development of their PCK through teaching.
The science education community is deeply invested in growing the next generation of scientists. One way to do this is through evidence-based interventions that support the motivation and performance of students in introductory classes. The literature is replete with interdisciplinary research presenting such interventions. Unfortunately, the process of developing and evaluating pedagogical practices is not the same as the process required to scale those efforts into actual university classrooms. Efforts to spread the word about successful practices often move slowly, through relatively small personal and professional networks. We present a complementary proactive strategy designed to raise awareness of one exemplar intervention across a broad swath of U.S. biology faculty. Our 30-minute anonymous engagement (in three 10-minute asynchronous virtual sessions) resulted in this particular intervention being adopted in some form by more than 4 in 10 faculty who learned about it, reaching an estimated 7,500 students across the United States. We describe the three phases of our intervention adoption process, each informed by social psychology theories of persuasion and decision-making, and provide a detailed guide and ready-to-use resources to replicate the process using other evidence-based interventions ready for scale. © 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Choice and autonomy are central tenets of interest-driven learning. Yet, in most studies on interest in school, students' choice and autonomy have been confined within the boundaries of the curriculum and the subject matter in question. This limits our understanding of how schools can support interest-driven learning as well as students' interest development in educational settings more broadly. To address this gap, in this study, we have focused on student learning when they are allowed to follow their interests beyond the curriculum during school time. Building on relational and practice-based perspectives on interest, we conceptualized such extensions as productive deviations and centered on a particular case of two 6th-grade students - Tamaz and Nuri - who created two computer games during their time in the FUSE Studio, alternative STEAM learning infrastructure for schools. Our interactional analysis of Tamaz and Nuri's problem-solving during their game-making shows that their productive deviation formed a significant learning experience for them in terms of game design and working with computers. Overall, our study contributes to discussions on fostering and supporting students' interest-driven learning and interest development in school settings.
The role of top-down control in divergent creativity remains heavily debated. An outstanding question about the state dynamics of creativity concerns acute shifts between heightened and lowered creative states. Particularly, do transitions between creative states incur a switch cost as observed in other domains of cognition? Prior research showed that asymmetric switch costs are often incurred such that reaction time is asymmetrically slower when participants switch from a task involving more top-down control to a task involving less top-down control. We tested the hypothesis that frequent acute transitions from creativity-cued responding (associated with heightened creative state) to uncued responding (associated with lowered creative state) would incur an asymmetric switch cost such that uncued responding would be disproportionately impacted by state changes. We utilized the thin slices verb generation task in a task-switching paradigm. Consistent with the hypothesis of asymmetric switch costs in shifts between creative states, we observed a substantial switch cost when switching from creativity-cued trials to uncued trials, but no switch cost when switching from uncued trials to creativity-cued trials. These findings provide indirect evidence that heightened creative states may require substantially more top-down control than lowered creative states, supporting the theory that divergent creativity requires increased top-down control.
Authorship of academic publications is central to scientists' careers, but decisions about how to include and order authors on publications are often fraught with difficult ethical issues. To better understand scholars' experiences with authorship, we developed a novel concept, authorship climate, which assesses perceptions of the procedural, informational, and distributive justice associated with authorship decisions. We conducted a representative survey of more than 3,000 doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and assistant professors from a stratified random sample of U.S. biology, economics, physics, and psychology departments. We found that individuals who tend to have more power on science teams perceived authorship climate to be more positive than those who tend to have less power. Alphabetical approaches for assigning authorship were associated with higher perceptions of procedural justice and informational justice but lower perceptions of distributive justice. Individuals with more marginalized identities also tended to perceive authorship climate more negatively than those with no marginalized identities. These results illustrate how the concept of authorship climate can facilitate enhanced understanding of early-career scholars' authorship experiences, and they highlight potential steps that can be taken to promote more positive authorship experiences for scholars of all identities.
The work of elementary science teaching is challenging given the wide array of subject matter most teachers are expected to teach and a systematic de-prioritisation of science at these grades. In this literature review (63 papers; 2010-2020), we use a framework of readiness for science teaching. Using this framework allows us to illustrate foundational characteristics and abilities that preservice teachers may start with and develop as they become well-started beginners for elementary teaching in the face of systemic challenges. To this end, we identify what is known from the research literature about the strengths that preservice elementary teachers bring to this difficult work with regard to their characteristics and abilities in addition to the challenges they face, describing a foundation on which preservice teachers can build. We also highlight additional studies that show how teacher education can build on preservice teachers' strengths and support them in areas that are challenging. We identify themes around novices' identities, dispositions, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, self-efficacy, knowledge, engagement in and with science practices, lesson planning, and lesson enactment. Finally, we highlight four implications for science teacher educators, noting focal areas that may compensate for challenges preservice elementary teachers face while building on their strengths.
In this paper, we explore measurements of design creativity through metrics related to the processes used in designing and relate them to the metrics used in psychology for idea creativity, ie, novelty and fluency. Our goal was to test the reliability of psychometric measures of creativity to assess creativity in team design. We studied 19 teams of 3 professional engineers that engaged in a one hour-long design task. Design tasks have a greater ecological validity than single repetitive tasks like the AUT and the RAT. Engaging in a design task involves a wide range of cognitive activities, which contribute to creative ideation and to expanding the design space. This study focused on the relationship between the teams’ design idea creativity and design behaviors during the task. We explored to what extent design collaboration between teammates, design evaluation and the co-evolution of the problem-solution space relate to the psychometric measures of idea creativity. Results suggest no specific trend in the correlation between collaboration and idea creativity as measured by the metrics used in psychology, while more cognitive focus on problem-solution co-evolution negatively correlates with these measures of idea creativity. The paper concludes with potential explanations for this lack of correlation. © 2024 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
The University of Tennessee has a Master of Mathematics (M.M.) program for secondary educators interested in college-level teaching. The program includes a capstone course on topics related to college-level teaching and can be thought of as a kind of professional development which allows secondary educators to explore options for their careers. This paper outlines the design, structure, and implementation of the course, including that it incorporated findings from an active research project. We describe details of class design, activities, our reflections, and how the course can serve as a way for teaching ideas to flourish between high school and college educators. © 2024 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.


