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The Impact of Two-way Formative Feedback and Web-enabled Resources on Student Resource Use and Performance in Materials Courses

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Conference

2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Seattle, Washington

Publication Date

June 14, 2015

Start Date

June 14, 2015

End Date

June 17, 2015

ISBN

978-0-692-50180-1

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Materials Division Technical Session 1

Tagged Division

Materials

Page Count

15

Page Numbers

26.1549.1 - 26.1549.15

DOI

10.18260/p.24886

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/24886

Download Count

443

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Paper Authors

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Stephen J. Krause Arizona State University

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Stephen Krause is professor in the Materials Science Program in the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University. He teaches in the areas of introductory materials engineering, polymers and composites, and capstone design. His research interests include evaluating conceptual knowledge, misconceptions and technologies to promote conceptual change. He has co-developed a Materials Concept Inventory and a Chemistry Concept Inventory for assessing conceptual knowledge and change for introductory materials science and chemistry classes. He is currently conducting research on NSF projects in two areas. One is studying how strategies of engagement and feedback with support from internet tools and resources affect conceptual change and associated impact on students' attitude, achievement, and persistence. The other is on the factors that promote persistence and success in retention of undergraduate students in engineering. He was a coauthor for best paper award in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2013.

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Dale R. Baker Arizona State University

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Dale Baker is a science educator researching issues of equity and teaching and learning in science and engineering. She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Contributions to Science Education Through Research award from NARST, This is the highest award given by this international association which focuses on research in science education K-16.

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Adam R. Carberry Arizona State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-0041-7060

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Dr. Adam Carberry is an assistant professor at Arizona State University in the Fulton Schools of Engineering Polytechnic School. He earned a B.S. in Materials Science Engineering from Alfred University, and received his M.S. and Ph.D., both from Tufts University, in Chemistry and Engineering Education respectively. Dr. Carberry was previously an employee of the Tufts’ Center for Engineering Education & Outreach and manager of the Student Teacher Outreach Mentorship Program (STOMP).

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Terry L. Alford Arizona State University

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Dr. Alford holds the rank of professor in the School for the Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy. He currently integrates JTF tools and concepts into his on-line course delivery.

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Casey Jane Ankeny Arizona State University

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Casey J. Ankeny, PhD is lecturer in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. Casey received her bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2006 and her doctorate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in 2012 where she studied the role of shear stress in aortic valve disease. Currently, she is investigating cyber-based student engagement strategies in flipped and traditional biomedical engineering courses. She aspires to understand and improve student attitude, achievement, and persistence in student-centered courses.

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Bill Jay Brooks Oregon State University

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Bill Brooks is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. As an undergraduate he studied hardware, software, and chemical engineering. He ultimately received his Ph.D. from Oregon State University in Chemical Engineering. He is currently interested in the development of technology to study and promote STEM learning.

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Milo Koretsky Oregon State University

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Milo Koretsky is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC San Diego and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Chemical Engineering. He currently has research activity in areas related engineering education and is interested in integrating technology into effective educational practices and in promoting the use of higher-level cognitive skills in engineering problem solving. His research interests particularly focus on what prevents students from being able to integrate and extend the knowledge developed in specific courses in the core curriculum to the more complex, authentic problems and projects they face as professionals. Dr. Koretsky is one of the founding members of the Center for Lifelong STEM Education Research at OSU.

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Cindy Waters North Carolina A&T State University

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Dr. Cynthia Waters is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering and she specializes in porous metals for biological and transportation applications, and engineering education. Dr. Waters’ research expertise is in the creation and characterization of metallic foams and porous metals for the future of applications ranging from space exploration to biomedical implants. These metals display a high density to strength ratio and improved ability for energy absorption, which leads to usefulness in many applications. She gets excited in a classroom whether introductory or advanced courses and she has been told that she can make a difficult concept seem easy and that her excitement is contagious Waters believes that we must become ‘facilitators of learning’. She works alongside the students to groom their own metacognative processes and help produce a lifelong learner. Several of her currently funded NSF grant deal with facets of engineering education. These include areas of assessment studies of classroom material science pedagogical implementations; case studies in various engineering disciplines and; engineering faculty barriers to adopt evidence-based (or nontraditional) teaching methods.

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Brady J. Gibbons Oregon State University

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Abstract

The Impact of Two-Way Formative Feedback and Web-Enabled Resources on Student Resource Use and Performance in Materials CoursesTwo-way formative feedback has been used extensively in the JTF (Just-in-Time-Teaching withFrequent Formative Feedback) project to help instructors understand student thinking andrespond with directed feedback and creation of web-enabled student learning resources. Whenstudents respond to an open-ended question about issues on content and concepts in a class (e.g.muddiest points) their anonymous responses extend beyond the boundaries of the framework aninstructor uses to organize and communicate, and then assess and evaluate their knowledge andunderstanding. So, if there are hidden issues in student learning such as misconceptions, skillgaps (like charting), difficult concepts, vocabulary ambiguities, etc., the instructor may neverbecome aware of them or their existence. In formative feedback students’ needs and issues arethe defining framework of learning issues, impediments, or barriers that the instructor canaddress for more effective teaching. Thus, students are empowered to play a role in their learningwhen they provide input about their instruction. Instructors in the JTF project have created avariety of web-enabled tools and resources to address issues revealed by student feedbackacquired by using Concept Warehouse or Blackboard survey tools. One tool is "pencasts" inwhich a smart pen captures a person's writing and/or drawing on a notepad along with audioinput to make a "pencast" recording as an audio PDF. These tutorial problem pencasts have beenmade into videos for the YouTube on the channel MSEASUproblems. Another popular studentresource is Muddiest Point YouTube videos at www.youtube.com/user/MaterialsConcepts.Another resource is at Quizlet.com, a web-enabled illustrated vocabulary resource athttp://quizlet.com/MatSciASU. A final resource is SlideShare.net, a public web site to whichslide sets can be uploaded, with an example at http://www.slideshare.net/mseasuslides.The use of these and other resources such as textbooks, class notes, course slide sets, etc. hasbeen characterized by a new survey tool called the Student Resource Value Survey (SRVS). Thesurvey was administered four times during the semester before each of four exams. Thus, theresearch question for this work was, "What is the effect of two-way formative feedback andassociated web-enabled resources on student resource use and impact on student attitude." Theresults of a collaborative of five materials courses at three universities were the following. Therewas a very positive impact of JTF teaching strategies on student attitude, learning, andpersistence from all institutions. Student attitude results from a Student Impact Value Survey(SIVS) showed positive results of average 64% for Interest / Attainment Value and high valuesof 85% average of Utility Value, and also 84% agreeing that the cost of effort was low. Thus, thestudents have been well motivated through classroom practice using JTF pedagogy. The SVRSsurvey showed resources students used for exam study and problem solving changed across thesemester. A few notable trends were, for exam study resource use, teaching assistant went from25% to 80%, classmates went from 56% to 67%, YouTube Muddiest Point videos went from47% to 67%, textbook readings went from 28% to 10%, and Google use fluctuated between 42%and 61%. Thus, these results generally show increasing preference to use a peer mentor andclassmates as well as electronic resources and decreasing preference to use traditional resourceslike textbooks. Impact on persistence across collaborating universities was 97% for 227 studentsin four classes in Fall 2013 and 95% for 311 students in five classes in Spring 2014. Overall, theuse of two-way formative feedback and JTF pedagogy helped guide development of web-enabled student resources as well as shifting students' resource use away from traditionalresources like textbooks and more toward peer mentors, classmates and web-enabled resources.

Krause, S. J., & Baker, D. R., & Carberry, A. R., & Alford, T. L., & Ankeny, C. J., & Brooks, B. J., & Koretsky, M., & Waters, C., & Gibbons, B. J. (2015, June), The Impact of Two-way Formative Feedback and Web-enabled Resources on Student Resource Use and Performance in Materials Courses Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24886

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2015 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015