Kerrie Anna Douglas

Assessing Counselors’ Self-Efficacy in Suicide Assessment and Intervention

Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs Standards state that counseling students must be adequately trained in suicide assessment and intervention. To evaluate how well students or practicing counselors are prepared, there is a need to measure self-efficacy specific to the tasks required in suicide assessment and intervention. The purpose of this study was to develop and assess the validity evidence for the Counselor Suicide Assessment Efficacy Survey (CSAES), a measure of self-efficacy related to suicide assessment and intervention. CSAES was studied for use in measuring the outcomes of suicide assessment curricular and professional development. Detailed results of reliability and validity studies are reported.

Integrating analytics and surveys to understand fully engaged learners in a highly-technical STEM MOOC

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer the ability to educate large numbers of diverse learners who might not have access, time, or the financial resources necessary for more formal coursework. While some studies have focused primarily on understanding MOOC learners purely through their access rates to course materials, others have sought to understand learners through surveys. We combined these two sources of data to address two research questions: (1) What are the patterns of user behavior in an advanced, technical MOOC? and (2) What are the characteristics of fully engaged learners? By analyzing clickstream and pre-survey data for a nanotechnology-related MOOC, we identified differences and similarities between fully engaged learners and other groups. The lack of strong indicators to predict fully engaged learners suggests a need for improved data from pre-course surveys.

Surveying the motivations of groups of learners in highly-technical STEM MOOCs

Highly technical STEM MOOCs have recently become widely available, but little is known about the motivations of the various groups of learners participating. In this work, we perform a detailed survey of 1,624 learners to examine their motivations in detail. These learners exhibited overall high levels of intrinsic motivation, but varied in their extrinsic motivation, according to their current position as students, workers, or unemployed individuals. Students generally reported the highest levels of extrinsic motivation compared to other groups (p<;0.001). The results from this analysis indicate that additional factors about learners in each group, such as their course participation and performance, should be examined in future work to help better understand the various needs of those enrolling in highly technical STEM MOOCs.

Assessing Early Engineering Thinking and Design Competencies in the Classroom

Young children are capable of understanding ideas that educators had once thought to be too complex for these ages. Children start to engage in creative design and develop engineering thinking at early ages as they play, create, solve puzzles, and ask questions. Just as it is important to highlight these activities as early engineering practices, it is important to use assessment practices necessary to support further development of engineering thinking. In this chapter, we lay the foundation for assessment of young children’s engineering thinking through discussion of current research on early engineering thinking and effective approaches to assessment as we outline engineering design competencies for young learners. We also present the Mosaic framework, a model that guides assessment practices in engineering and provides practical strategies that are necessary to maintain complexity while teaching and assessing engineering design to young children. We urge the community toward a multi-faceted view of assessment that targets student learning evidence and growth supported by curriculum design, and teacher professional development, along with assessment tools and strategies.

A self-assessment instrument to assess engineering students' self-directedness in information literacy

Information literacy, the ability and processes of information gathering and application, is of paramount importance to engineers, engineering design, and engineering decision-making. Building on prior qualitative research, this paper presents the development and initial validation study of a self-directed information literacy assessment for engineering and technology students (n = 366). Internal consistency was found to be high, (α = 0.895). Exploratory factor analysis results provide evidence of structural aspects of validity and support for scoring structure. In addition, areas were identified for future development of the items and instrument.

A Comparison of Beginning and Advanced Engineering Students’ Description of Information Skills

Abstract Objective – The purpose of this research was to examine how beginning and advanced level engineering students report use of information when completing an engineering design process. This information is important for librarians seeking to develop information literacy curricula in the context of engineering design. Methods – Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews about information strategies used in engineering design with 21 engineering students (10 first and second year; 11 senior and graduate). Researchers transcribed interviews and developed an inductive coding scheme. Then, from the coding scheme, researchers extracted broader themes. Results – Beginning level engineering students interviewed: (a) relied primarily on the parameters explicitly given in the problem statement; (b) primarily used general search strategies; (c) were documentation oriented; and (d) relied on external feedback to determine when they had found enough information. Advanced level engineering students interviewed: (a) relied on both their own knowledge and the information provided in the problem statement; (b) utilized both general and specific search strategies; (c) were application oriented; and (d) relied on self-reflection and problem requirements to determine when they had found enough information. Conclusion – Beginning level students describe information gathering as externally motivated tasks to complete, rather than activities that are important to inform their design. Advanced level students describe more personal investment in their use of information through consideration of information based on their prior knowledge and questioning information. Future research should consider how to best support beginning level engineering students’ personal engagement with information.