Building science knowledge, identity, and interest using place-based learning with non-dominant urban undergraduate and high school students

During remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed and implemented a place-based, 5E mini-unit for New York City high school and community college Earth science students, most of whom identify as belonging to non-dominant groups. As well as supporting standard science skills such as graphing and interpreting data, we leveraged active learning and culturally responsive pedagogies such as reasoning by analogy, storytelling, virtual field trips, and sketching. These strategies were aimed at developing science content and skills, science identities, and science interest. The mini-unit was taught over 6 to 7.5 hours. Pre-and post-surveys for 107 students from three schools showed significant gains in learning (38% increase;p= <0.0001). Science identity measurements increased slightly although they stayed relatively low. Science interest measurements were higher with small increases. Teacher influence and science classroom experiences ranked as the most important influencers of science interest. For 33 community college students, no correlation was found between content learning, science identity, and science interest. In this group, females and White students had higher scores for all three measures. Between pre- and post-survey, science identity increased, particularly for Black students, while science interest decreased for all but White students. For all students, overall increases between pre- and post-survey suggest the pedagogical approaches used during remote synchronous learning were successful at helping students grow as scientists. © 2023 National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

Towards a Method to Create Microlearning Capsules: Bullying and Cyberbullying Domain

The development of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) has become widespread due to the technology development and the COVID-19 pandemic;consequently, internet use has increased and impacted different social areas, like communication, education, and the way people relate. Therefore, increasing the cases of bullying and cyberbullying in children and teenagers. In addition, instructional tools, such as microlearning, have emerged in education, allowing for compressing and massifying educational content from different areas of knowledge. This tool aims to reduce learning time and can be deployed on any platform without using traditional means of learning. This paper presents an overview of a method for creating learning capsules in the domain of bullying and cyberbullying named LeCCMe. This method is based on the ADDIE instructional model and incorporates a diffusion phase to reach the largest possible population. Finally, a case study is presented, in which a learning capsule has been created to prevent bullying and cyberbullying. © 2022 IEEE.

Student Space Missions – Facilitating Pathways to Success for Next Generation Professionals in Space

The Undergraduate Student Instrumentation Project (USIP) was a NASA program created to engage undergraduate students in rigorous scientific research for the purposes of innovation and developing the next generation of professionals in space research. It is now run by the University of Houston using local resources. This student-led project, based on the 5E instructional model, is executed by the students from initial ideation of research objectives to the design, testing, and deployment of scientific payloads. The 5E Instructional model places the student at the center of knowledge building, while instructors facilitate interaction with content and guide the inquiry process. Since 2013, this project has been not only an effective vehicle for delivering STEM education but is also effective in increasing classroom engagement and interest in space. Space research is inherently interdisciplinary and crosscuts Geoscience, Engineering, and Technology. The project is designed to integrate engineering, technology, physics, material science, and earth and atmospheric sciences as an important opportunity for the students to gain access to cross-disciplinary experiential research. In addition to classroom engagement, the students build their own payloads and ground instruments. This project increases students’ command of essential skills such as teamwork, collaboration, problem solving, technology, communication, innovation, and leadership. For the faculty, the project was an extended exercise in professional development, learning how to implement project level inquiry-based education on this scale. For the students, this formative experience continues to encourage the development of a much broader range of technical skills than is typically offered within an undergraduate degree. Furthermore, the extensive time and energy that students commit to this project promotes a strong sense of personal and professional responsibility and emphasizes the necessity of coherent teamwork. Not only do students make valuable connections with each other during this process, but also to the broader space science community. They often work with professionals from outside of the USIP structure, and regularly attend and present at conferences and student competitions throughout the project. This paper will present a web-based scaffolding used to simulate the traditional face to face 5E experience during COVID. Student projects have included subjects ranging from atmospheric trace gas chemistry, LiDAR study of snow and sand avalanche dynamics, auroral electron precipitation, gravity wave modulation of the hydroxyl layer, search for stratospheric microplastics, and monitoring auroral radio emissions, among others. This program is a for-credit course of two to three years duration. Copyright © 2021 by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). All rights reserved.

Instruction Models of Located Cognition and Their Effectiveness Using Flipped Learning in Initial Training Students

The current moments lead us to search for different strategies and modalities for the teaching-learning process, where face-to-face work has prevailed for a long time until the arrival of the pandemic (Covid-19) to migrate to a ubiquitous job. The objective of the study is to analyze the relationship that exists between the instructional cognitive model and its implications of using flipped learning as a methodology to acquire meaningful learning where teachers assign instruction through a recorded video. This study was carried out with a quantitative approach, with a correlational descriptive design, 60 students from a public university voluntarily participated, the same ones who are finishing their higher studies and were selected with an intentional non-probabilistic sampling, the instruments used were two surveys, one for flipped learning and the other for cognitive instructional design. The results reveal a level of high cultural relevance in the learning environment developed by the teacher who uses flipped learning with university students. It is concluded that from the perception of the students there is a positive correlation and that it is conditioned that flipped learning will be successful or adequate to the extent that the cognitive instructional approach is efficient. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Investigation on Students' Educational Experience with HyFlex Instruction Model in Two Engineering Courses

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educators all around the world searched for effective ways to continue teaching. Although switching to online learning seemed to be the safest and most appropriate method at the time, the virtual setting is inadequate for providing active learning. Hands-on learning is indispensable especially for engineering programs. In Fall 2020, synchronous online mode was augmented with HyFlex instruction for the first time. HyFlex is short for Hybrid learning and Flexible course structure. The HyFlex course model provides students with the following options to choose from: (1) face-to-face, (2) online, or (3) a mixture of face-to-face and online. For the HyFlex instruction, instructors at the current institution divide the class into groups to follow social distancing in the classrooms, which reduces the number of students present in the classroom to roughly half of its maximum capacity. Depending on their assigned group, students take turn attending face-to-face classes in with the instructor present. When the student is not physically in the classroom, they join the class through Zoom meetings. In this study, our focus is on the HyFlex instructional model that our school implemented recently. Two engineering classes selected for this study are Electricity and Magnetism, a sophomore level Engineering Physics class, and Fluid Mechanics, a junior level class. Both classes have students from various engineering disciplines. The study group includes 103 students in Physics and 48 students in Fluid Mechanics. It should be noted that in Fall 2020, the semester started a week earlier and all the breaks were removed to encourage students to stay on campus in an effort to prevent spread of COVID-19. As the end of the Fall semester was approaching, both instructors noticed that some students were having more difficulty with the HyFlex instruction in comparison to traditional face-to-face instruction. These difficulties included not being able to complete assignments on time, lack of motivation, and having trouble obtaining and retaining information. To investigate this further, a survey was administered to study the influence of the HyFlex instructional model combined with the shortened semester on the mental and emotional health of the students. Documenting the advantages and disadvantages of this model will help us to shape a better instructional model that could be used more widely in the future. The instructors will discuss their observations on the HyFlex instructional model as well as feedback for future semesters. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021