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Description
Academia is not what it used to be. In today’s fast-paced world, requirements

are constantly changing, and adapting to these changes in an academic curriculum

can be challenging. Given a specific aspect of a domain, there can be various levels of

proficiency that can be achieved by the students. Considering the wide array

Academia is not what it used to be. In today’s fast-paced world, requirements

are constantly changing, and adapting to these changes in an academic curriculum

can be challenging. Given a specific aspect of a domain, there can be various levels of

proficiency that can be achieved by the students. Considering the wide array of needs,

diverse groups need customized course curriculum. The need for having an archetype

to design a course focusing on the outcomes paved the way for Outcome-based

Education (OBE). OBE focuses on the outcomes as opposed to the traditional way of

following a process [23]. According to D. Clark, the major reason for the creation of

Bloom’s taxonomy was not only to stimulate and inspire a higher quality of thinking

in academia – incorporating not just the basic fact-learning and application, but also

to evaluate and analyze on the facts and its applications [7]. Instructional Module

Development System (IMODS) is the culmination of both these models – Bloom’s

Taxonomy and OBE. It is an open-source web-based software that has been

developed on the principles of OBE and Bloom’s Taxonomy. It guides an instructor,

step-by-step, through an outcomes-based process as they define the learning

objectives, the content to be covered and develop an instruction and assessment plan.

The tool also provides the user with a repository of techniques based on the choices

made by them regarding the level of learning while defining the objectives. This helps

in maintaining alignment among all the components of the course design. The tool

also generates documentation to support the course design and provide feedback

when the course is lacking in certain aspects.

It is not just enough to come up with a model that theoretically facilitates

effective result-oriented course design. There should be facts, experiments and proof

that any model succeeds in achieving what it aims to achieve. And thus, there are two

research objectives of this thesis: (i) design a feature for course design feedback and

evaluate its effectiveness; (ii) evaluate the usefulness of a tool like IMODS on various

aspects – (a) the effectiveness of the tool in educating instructors on OBE; (b) the

effectiveness of the tool in providing appropriate and efficient pedagogy and

assessment techniques; (c) the effectiveness of the tool in building the learning

objectives; (d) effectiveness of the tool in document generation; (e) Usability of the

tool; (f) the effectiveness of OBE on course design and expected student outcomes.

The thesis presents a detailed algorithm for course design feedback, its pseudocode, a

description and proof of the correctness of the feature, methods used for evaluation

of the tool, experiments for evaluation and analysis of the obtained results.
ContributorsRaj, Vaishnavi (Author) / Bansal, Srividya (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
The goal of this study was to understand elementary school children’s perceptions of engineering. A total of 949 elementary school students were surveyed, individually or as a whole group, to examine gender and age differences in achievement-related beliefs (i.e., competency, interest, and importance) pertaining to engineering-related skills and activities. The

The goal of this study was to understand elementary school children’s perceptions of engineering. A total of 949 elementary school students were surveyed, individually or as a whole group, to examine gender and age differences in achievement-related beliefs (i.e., competency, interest, and importance) pertaining to engineering-related skills and activities. The results of this study found that specific skills and activities showed significant gender and age differences for each of the three measures. Significant findings showed that younger students (kindergarten through second grade) found many of the engineering-related skills and activities more interesting than the older students (third through fifth grade); however, the older students rated more of the skills and activities as being important. Gender differences showed that girls typically rated themselves as being more competent, more interested in, and valuing the skills and activities that pertained more to mindset ideas, such as learning from your mistakes and failures or not giving up, whereas boys rated themselves higher in more of the hands-on activities, such as building with things like legos, blocks, and k’nex.
ContributorsHandlos, Jamie Lynn Harte (Author) / Miller, Cindy (Thesis director) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Chemical Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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Description
Students with disabilities are underrepresented and underserved in college science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees. Disabled individuals comprise 26% of the U.S. population but only about 9% of the students enrolled in STEM undergraduate programs. Individuals with disabilities who do pursue STEM degrees report unique challenges within their programs,

Students with disabilities are underrepresented and underserved in college science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees. Disabled individuals comprise 26% of the U.S. population but only about 9% of the students enrolled in STEM undergraduate programs. Individuals with disabilities who do pursue STEM degrees report unique challenges within their programs, including struggling to receive needed accommodations and experiencing discrimination from peers and instructors. However, there has been limited research on the extent to which disability characteristics affect their experiences in STEM. To address this gap in the literature, we surveyed over 700 undergraduates with disabilities enrolled in STEM majors across the U.S. and probed their sense of belonging in science, feelings of morale, perception of campus climate, experienced classroom stigma, responsiveness of disability resource offices, scientific self-efficacy, science identity, and science community values. Using linear regression, we will assess and present on outcomes related to students’ persistence in college, outcomes specific to students with disabilities, and outcomes specific to these students in STEM. The findings of this work can be used to inform recommendations to create more inclusive experiences in college STEM for students with disabilities.
ContributorsNorton, Jennifer (Author) / Cooper, Katelyn (Thesis director) / Baumann, Alicia (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Chemical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-05