| NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | July 12, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 12, 2014 |
| Award Number: | 1400545 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Heather Watson
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | July 15, 2014 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $896,130.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $896,130.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
25 LOVE LN CONCORD MA US 01742-2345 (978)405-3205 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
25 Love Lane Concord MA US 01742-2345 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): | Advanced Tech Education Prog |
| Primary Program Source: |
|
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
This Advanced Technological Education project conducted by the Concord Consortium and Tide Water Community College will help to teach students of electronics how to work effectively in teams, both face-to-face and remotely online. The ability to work together online is uniquely relevant to a 21st century workplace that spans continents and crosses oceans. Employers repeatedly cite collaboration and communication as critically important skills for new entrants to the STEM workforce, yet schools and colleges continue to have difficulty evaluating student work other than by individual test-taking ability. The project is addressing the critical mismatch between the value of teamwork, especially online teamwork, in a modern STEM workplace, and the difficulty of teaching students to collaborate while also evaluating them individually. In a time of chronic unemployment and under-employment, strong demand exists for trained electronics technicians who are able to work effectively in teams. This project addresses the problem of collaboration skills highly-valued in the workforce being difficult to measure in educational environments in which performance and grades are assigned individually.
Supported by simulation technology created by an earlier NSF award, this project will advance the field by gathering and analyzing time-series data from teams of students working in a shared online workspace on realistic tasks representative of those found in the STEM work environment. The project is based on existing software that creates realistic simulations of electronic components and circuit boards that are linked together over the Internet and used to build and troubleshoot a resulting distributed circuit. The project will monitor students' actions as they work together, analyze the data produced, and report on the performance of each individual student, as well as that of the team as a whole. Analysis is based on using hidden Markov models to describe sequential interactions of the data from teams captured in both computer-generated logs and classroom observations. The data comprise actions, such as the modification of a circuit, measurements made with simulated test equipment, and written or oral communications. Patterns of actions are found that serve as markers for effective collaboration. This approach reduces the need for continuous supervision by an instructor and enables instructors to recognize and reward talent, work ethic, and collaborative and cognitive skills. Team members need not be co-located and work may be done by team members in an asynchronous fashion, mimicking conditions frequently encountered in the modern work environment.
This project will yield information regarding effective methods to assess both individual and team effectiveness for students participating in online collaborative laboratories. The information learned can apply to the teaching and assessment of collaborative problem-solving skills generally and are not restricted to the field of electronics. It is anticipated that evaluation of the project results will find application in the teaching and assessing of teamwork in a variety of other domains.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
Note:
When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external
site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a
charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from
this site.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project addressed the mismatch between the importance of teamwork in the modern STEM workplace and the difficulty of teaching students to collaborate while also evaluating them individually. Increasingly, employees in many fields must work together effectively, often with collaborators who may be separated by many continents and time zones, but in the classroom it is often difficult to distinguish between teamwork and cheating! As a result, most students encounter few opportunities to work with others in the course of their training.
To address this dilemma we developed a distributed computer simulation that presented a problem to teams of students and recorded their actions as they attempted to solve the problem. The simulation took the form of an electronic circuit that had been divided up into subcircuits. Working on separate computers, each member of the team was presented with a portion of the circuit, along with test equipment, an onboard calculator, and a chat window by means of which they could communicate with each other. The subcircuits were connected over the Internet in such a way that changes made to one subcircuit affected the state of the others. The students could observe, but not alter, their teammates’ subcircuits. Their collective goal was to create a circuit with specified properties or to place a given circuit into a particular goal state. The challenges were designed such that they could not be achieved by individual students working alone, but required them to collaborate.
The computer program monitored and logged all of the students’ actions: their manipulations of the circuit as well as their calculations, measurements, and communications. We developed techniques for analyzing this data after the fact, using it to assess the progress of each team and to group teams into meaningful categories based on their inferred content knowledge as well as their collaborative problem-solving skills. We anticipate that this line of research will eventually enable the automatic assessment not only of the performance of a team as a whole, but of the contribution to that performance of each team member. Armed with this information, faculty will be empowered to introduce collaborative challenges into their teaching without compromising their ability to allocate credit fairly to individual students. In turn, exposure to such challenges will increase students’ appreciation of the value of collaboration—an attitude we expect they will carry forward throughout their education and ultimately bring to the work environment.
Last Modified: 06/29/2018
Modified by: Paul Horwitz
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
