Research
Project 1: Instructional Change Teams
This project explores the area of team-based collaboration in higher education. We are particularly looking at instructional changes teams consisting of STEM faculty and other stakeholders who are making instructional changes. The focus of this project is to understand the aspects of team collaboration that can help the team achieve its outcomes. This work was led by Drs. Andrea Beach, Charles Henderson, and Alice Olmstead.
The focus of this work is on various aspects of teams' collaboration, starting from how teams are set up, how they coordinate their work together, their affective and cognitive states resulted from their collaboration, and finally, team outcomes. The research was exploratory, and we first aimed to understand those factors, specifically in this particular context. This work resulted in the development of a model (see below) that describes the identified categories of
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When I joined this project, the researchers had identified the five subcategories of team inputs and the four subcategories of team outcomes.
The focus of the second part of this work, in which I was involved, was to unpack those team processes and emergent states to help us identify specific aspects of how teams should work to have higher changes of success. Therefore, we focused on a subset of these teams to elicit information from the team members within each team about their team's collaboration. We conducted individual interviews with 23 team members from four teams. We identified three emergent states: shared vision, psychological safety, and team cohesion, that are linked to productive team outcomes, and five team processes: strategic leadership, egalitarian power dynamics, team member commitment, effective communication, and clear decision-making processes, that helped develop those states. More specifically, we find:
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We thank the National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding our work through the #1525393, #1914857, and #1914880 awards.
Project 2: Investigating the process of how departmental structures are related to doctoral students’ self-efficacy and persistence: an analysis of factors from 19 physics graduate programs
Project 3: Computational thinking integrated in physics labs: towards a framework to describe students’ computational thinking in a laboratory setting
In the Spring of 2018, I participated in an instructional change team at the Department of Physics at WMU. The team aimed to transform an introductory physics laboratory course such that students get exposed to computational thinking through an inquiry-style instruction and a project-based design laboratory. In parallel, I developed a research study to investigate how students develop computational modeling skills in a real classroom setting. I collected video footage data from student-group interactions throughout the semester for three consecutive semesters. This projects aims:
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