Browsing by Subject "curriculum"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 22
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    Applying Bibliometric Techniques: Studying Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education Curriculum
    (Computation, 2022) Herzog, Patricia Snell; Ai, Jin; Ashton, Julia
    Bibliometric methods are relevant for a range of applications and disciplines. The majority of existing scholarship investigating citation and reference patterns focuses on studying research impact. This article presents a new approach to studying the curriculum using bibliometric methods. Through a review of existing definitions and measures of interdisciplinary research and standardization procedures for comparing disciplinary citations, three measures were considered: variety, balance and dissimilarity. Bibliometric algorithms for assessing these measures were adopted and modified for a curriculum context, and three interdisciplinary programs were investigated that span undergraduate and graduate degrees. Data objects were course syllabi, and required references were coded for disciplinary affiliations. The results indicated that—despite purportedly pursuing a singular goal in the same academic unit—the programs employed distinct citation patterns. Variety was highest in the master’s program, and balance was highest in the doctoral program. Dissimilarity was highest in the doctoral program, yet a novel technique for disambiguating disciplinary composition was implemented to improve interpretation. The analysis yielded unexpected findings, which underscore the value of a systematic approach in advancing beyond discourse by harnessing bibliometric techniques to reveal underlying curricula structure. This study contributed a well-grounded bibliometric method that can be replicated in future studies.
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    Becoming more than makers: the case to balance hard and soft skills in design foundations
    (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), 2015-03-26) Ganci, Aaron
    Many industries are looking to creatives to help them separate themselves from their competitors. This is especially true for designers, whose processes and visualization skills make them excellent collaborators for a wide variety of projects. Increasingly, designers find themselves working outside the traditional realm of creative activity.
 To be prepared for this new reality, creatives must add new skills to their traditional technical set. Students need to become experts in soft skills: knowing how to leverage empathy, tap into civic agency, develop research skills, learn to write well, and tell a compelling story. Design academia has been addressing these skills at the upper levels for a several years now. However, in order for creative professionals to truly excel in these new domains, they must begin to practice them earlier in their academic career.
 In this paper, I will make a case that soft skills should become equally important to technical skills within the foundation experience. I will provide insights about what skills are necessary for students to develop at a foundation level. These insights are derived from an ongoing research project where professional designers are observed and interviewed to accurately describe the roles and activity of contemporary design.
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    Biomedical Engineering Students Gain Design Knowledge and Report Increased Confidence When Continually Challenged with Integrated Design Projects
    (ASEE, 2020-06) Higbee, Steven; Miller, Sharon; Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Introduction: The undergraduate biomedical engineering (BME) curriculum should prepare students to confidently approach complex problems, as graduates will enter the workforce in an environment of rising healthcare costs, decreasing average life expectancy, and significant socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes. With this landscape, solutions to contemporary problems will require innovative thinking and groundbreaking medical technologies, suggesting that the future of BME will be increasingly design-oriented. Undergraduate BME curricula generally include laboratory and project components aimed at preparing students for senior capstone; however, students may begin capstone without the knowledge, skills, and confidence required for engineering design success. With these shortcomings in mind, we vertically integrated design experiences in our undergraduate BME curriculum and evaluated student design performance throughout. Methods: Four engineering design project assignments were developed and integrated into sophomore- and junior-level BME laboratory courses, establishing a continuous design thread spanning the four years of the undergraduate BME curriculum. Through the sequence of projects, student teams worked to design (1) fracture fixation devices, (2) electromyogram-controlled motor assemblies, (3) compact spectrophotometers, and (4) programmable drug dosing devices. We developed a common instructional Design Module, organized around an adapted version of the FDA waterfall diagram, and used it in each course to build student understanding of the BME design process. By emphasizing different portions of the waterfall diagram in each course and varying student deliverables, we implemented a stepwise approach to building student design confidence. The set of design projects also intentionally target a multitude of skills relevant to design, including computer-aided design (CAD), computational modeling, iteration, prototyping, programming (LabVIEW and Python), hardware-software integration, and technical communication. A mixed methods approach was employed to assess student knowledge, confidence, and achievement in design. A pre-/post-quiz (8 questions worth 10 points total) was used to assess student knowledge of design concepts and their application toward medical device design. Students self-reported their design confidence levels prior to the first design project and after each design project, and focus groups were held after design projects to assess student design confidence going forward. Students also rated how worthwhile and enjoyable they found each project using a reflection grid and reflected on the integration of prior coursework into their design projects. Finally, student design reports were scored by instructors using a rubric influenced by AAC&U VALUE Rubrics and the Informed Design Teaching and Learning Matrix. Students also self-reported design mastery via survey, and these responses were correlated to scores from the instructor rubric. Results: Students engaged in 200-level and 300-level projects demonstrated knowledge gains of the BME design process after one project (p < 0.0001) and further knowledge gains after a second project (not statistically significant). In particular, students gained knowledge related to the waterfall diagram, design requirements and constraints, and verification and validation (p < 0.005 for each). In their reflections, students demonstrate cognizance of prior coursework knowledge that they have integrated into their designs, adding to the sought-after sense of curricular connectedness. After the completion of each project, students self-reported significant confidence gains in four major areas (p < 0.05 for each): (1) design process and approach, (2) working with hardware, (3) working with software and interfacing with hardware, and (4) communicating results. Focus group responses support the observed quantitative improvements in student design confidence. Finally, instructor scoring of student design reports indicates that design achievement and ability to communicate design improve as students progress through the curriculum; however, student self-assessment of design mastery does not correlate strongly with instructor scores. Discussion: Active learning in undergraduate classrooms has been shown to improve performance, motivation, and communication skills among engineering students. By implementing and assessing hands-on engineering design project assignments at the sophomore and junior levels, we have improved student design knowledge, confidence, and achievement prior to capstone design. Future work will address limitations of student self-reporting of confidence levels and will investigate changes in the quality of capstone projects that could result from better prepared students.
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    CEISL Equitable and Inclusive Throughlines
    (2020) Price, Jeremy F.; Hall, Ted; Santamaría Graff, Cristina; Magee, Paula; Moreland, Brooke; Waechter-Versaw, Amy
    A graphic representation of the Throughlines that guide the work of the Collaborative for Equitable and Inclusive STEM Learning (CEISL): Empowering Families and Communities, Coalition Building, Equitable Practices and Systems, Multiple Ways of Knowing and Doing, Intentional Use of Technology, and Deep and Transformational Learning.
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    Curriculum Intervention: Assessing Need for and Implementation of Sustainability Development in a Global Context within the First-Year Engineering Curriculum at Purdue University
    (2017-05-04) Collins, Angela J.
    BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE: Globalization is a world-wide phenomenon that is reshaping international relations in tremendous ways and at impossible rates. Due to rapid advancements in communication, transportation, and information technologies, there has been an increasing connectedness of humanity around the globe. With this trans-global integration comes many benefits, but also countless challenges. It is critical that engineering education facilities constantly update and restructure their curriculum to produce engineers who are capable of tackling the world’s greatest global challenges of this globalization era. Therefore, our team proposes a curriculum intervention of the First-Year Engineering Program. We wish to analyze the depth of global competency concepts taught in the course, with a specific focus on sustainability because it is crucial that young engineers develop an understanding of sustainability and perform their specialized tasks with a sustainable vision in mind. METHODS: To ensure high quality development of Purdue engineers is this area, our research team proposes a curriculum intervention involving two parts: (1) An analysis of the global competency and understanding of sustainability of current engineering sophomores who recently completed the First-Year Engineering (FYE) program at Purdue University; (2) An implementation of concepts from a current Purdue course, CE/EEE 355 Engineering Environmental Sustainability, into the FYE curriculum, as well as an implementation of globalization concepts as needed. Furthermore, our team seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) How consistent is the material that is taught across different sections within the FYE program? (2) How much control and influence does each engineering professor have in covering the topics of globalization and sustainability? (3) What hands-on, practical experience and exposure to globalization concepts are the students getting? EXPECTED OUTCOMES: At the conclusion of this research project, our team expects two tangible outcomes: (1) A plan of implementation of sustainability and globalization concepts into the Purdue engineering curriculum; (2) A set of data measurements and specific goals to determine whether the implemented concepts make a difference. Countless research papers stress the importance of evaluating the impact of new initiatives. Thus, our research team seeks statistical evidence that the concepts learned in CE/EEE 355 make a significant impact on the capability of the student, and the implementation of new concepts based off of CE/EEE 355 make a significant difference when implemented into the FYE engineering curriculum. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, the forces of globalization are leading to rapid changes among global dynamics and international relations, and several effects of globalization, such as poor resource utilization, are beginning to pose a threat to humanity. Therefore, engineers must be able to evolve alongside society and must have the skills to tackle the world’s leading problems. Engineers must also understand the importance of sustainable development to ensure a bright future for younger generations to come. As a result, our team suggests a curriculum intervention of the FYE program to better educated Purdue’s young engineers on issues of globalization and sustainability. Purdue is among the top engineering institutions, but to maintain its relevance and influence, there must be a shift in the curriculum to better prepare its graduates to work in this highly-globalized era.
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    Curriculum Studies and Indigenous Global Contexts of Culture, Power, and Equity
    (Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 2021-02-23) Kazembe, Lasana D.
    For historically marginalized groups that continue to experience and struggle against hegemony and deculturalization, education is typically accompanied by suspicion of, critique of, and resistance to imposed modes, systems, and thought forms. It is, therefore, typical for dominant groups to ignore and/or regard as inferior the collective histories, heritages, cultures, customs, and epistemologies of subject groups. Deculturalization projects are fueled and framed by two broad, far-reaching impulses. The first impulse is characterized by the denial, deemphasis, dismissal, and attempted destruction of indigenous knowledge and methods by dominant groups across space and time. The second impulse is the effort by marginalized groups to recover, reclaim, and recenter ways of knowing, perceiving, creating, and utilizing indigenous knowledge, methods, symbols, and epistemologies. Deculturalization projects in education persist across various global contexts, as do struggles by global actors to reclaim their histories, affirm their humanity, and reinscribe indigenous ways of being, seeing, and flourishing within diverse educational and cultural contexts. The epistemologies, worldview, and existential challenges of historically marginalized groups (e.g., First Nations, African/African American, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific) operate as sites and tools of struggle against imperialism and dominant modes of seeing, being, and making meaning in the world. Multicultural groups resist deculturalization in their ongoing efforts to apprehend, interrogate, and situate their unique cultural ways of being as pedagogies of protracted resistance and praxes of liberation.
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    The Development of an Undergraduate Data Curriculum: A Model for Maximizing Curricular Partnerships and Opportunities
    (Springer, 2018) Murillo, Angela P.; Jones, Kyle M. L.; Library and Information Science, School of Informatics and Computing
    The article provides the motivations and foundations for creating an interdisciplinary program between a Library and Information Science department and a Human-Centered Computing department. The program focuses on data studies and data science concepts, issues, and skill sets. In the paper, we analyze trends in Library and Information Science curricula, the emergence of data-related Library and Information Science curricula, and interdisciplinary data-related curricula. Then, we describe the development of the undergraduate data curriculum and provide the institutional context; discuss collaboration and resource optimization; provide justifications and workforce alignment; and detail the minor, major, and graduate opportunities. Finally, we argue that the proposed program holds the potential to model interdisciplinary, holistic data-centered curriculum development by complimenting Library and Information Science traditions (e.g., information organization, access, and ethics) with scholarly work in data science, specifically data visualization and analytics. There is a significant opportunity for Library and Information Science to add value to data science and analytics curricula, and vice versa.
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    Exploring the curricular relationship between service experience design and interaction design
    (NordDesign Conference, 2014-08-28) Ganci, Aaron; Hong, Youngbok
    Connectivity in the contemporary networked society has required designers to shift their disciplinary focus from individual products to the entirety of human experience. The field of Experience Design (XD), pursuing an integrative flow of human experience, consisting of multiple dimensions [1],  and its subsets (interaction design, service design, spatial design, etc.) is growing in both size and complexity. Experience designers are starting to influence an ever-increasing scope of problem spaces. To be successful in today's experience design practice, designers must simultaneously approach problems from a broad, system level and a micro, tangible level and produce strategic design solutions. This work frequently involves the integration of many interconnected deliverables. Being influenced by cultural and social understandings of design, students tend to regard design as what they will make. This perception, with heavy focus on the solution phase in designing, causes a fragmented view in design education. In order to expand students’ integrative understanding of design, we have introduced a framework that is based on the tiers of human experience when engaging with design. We reflect on our experience from this experiment and discuss its values in student learning.
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    Framing Christian Privilege in Schools in an Age of Christian Nationalism
    (2023) Price, Jeremy F.
    Rising Christian nationalism has led to the reification of Christian privilege and an increase in the de facto oppression of minoritized communities in schools. This frame analysis takes Blumenfeld’s work on Christian privilege (2006) as a starting point and examines the developments of the injection of Christianity in schools through Supreme Court decisions and policy developments during a time of the increasing reification of Christian nationalism in schools and society, specifically in terms of curriculum and culture and climate. This research finds an increase in the deployment of marginalization and cultural imperialism but also provides three "frames of tension" that require negotiation by Christians if resistance to Christian nationalism in schools and education is to be sustainable.
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    Integrating DevOps Into the Web Development Curriculum with AWS
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Herbert, Jasmine; Elliott, Rob
    Currently within IUPUI’s Computer and Information Technology curriculum, students are responsible for hosting content on three main servers throughout the course of the degree program. Not only have these three main servers been preconfigured for the students but also they are typically reset at the conclusion of each semester resulting in lost files if the student has not saved their work locally. The overall goal of this research project is to study the benefits and feasibility of implementing a unified hosting service through the Amazon Web Services Educate program within the CIT curriculum. By implementing a unified hosting service, students will be provided with an experiential learning opportunity to manage their own AWS account from the 100 level courses throughout their entire undergraduate program. Ultimately, AWS has the ability to enable students on high-performance computing, prepare students for careers in cloud computing, and integrate a consistent platform into a variety of courses. Mentor: Rob Elliott, Department of Computer Information and Graphics Technology, Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI