This collaborative project between NCSU and ETS is focused on developing new noninvasive process-based measurements for students engagement with writing tasks, including analyses of their writing quality, working habits, and responses to feedback. As part of this project we will develop a secure instrumented platform for online writing tasks that will provide analytical tools for instructors and researchers to monitor and evaluate student's work.

The RET Site at NC State University will immerse a diverse group of teachers in a vibrant research community building and analyzing cutting-edge socially relevant and human-centered applications including games, tutors, and analytics platforms. We will recruit teacher teams to include at least one who is learning to teach introductory computer science (e.g. Computer Science Principles), as well as STEM teachers and one teacher or undergraduate with significant programming experience. Teachers will learn about the socially relevant applications of computing and how computer science can be used within almost all careers, and they will develop lessons that help raise student interest in computing while teaching disciplinary content. We will connect teachers to resources from the STARS Computing Corps, an NSF-funded national consortium of institutions dedicated to broadening participation in computing. We will to create a supportive culture of collaboration while promoting individual contributions to research through just-in-time training throughout the summer.

Recent policy documents for graduate STEM education note that engineering programs do not adequately help students develop abilities to work in collaborative and team settings, to communicate to diverse audiences, and to deal with diverse opinions, ideas, and backgrounds. Additionally, the emergence of new fields at the interface of two or more disciplines requires a workforce with the ability to work collaboratively with people from different disciplines. Moreover, most engineering problems in the field involve multiple heterogeneous teams working on subsystems that need to be integrated as a working system. Students need to learn how to work within and across teams - and disciplines. In this project we seek to improve graduate engineering education by studying students������������������ interactions and learning within and across collaborative groups, when integrating into professional engineering endeavors, and when engaged in interdisciplinary projects, in order to identify promising approaches, identify obstacles, and generate theory for the effective preparation for the workforce of graduate engineering students. We are guided by the theoretical framework of communities of practice (CoP), which has a strong emphasis on collaboration, diverse groups and audiences, and the need to communicate across disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. The CoP framework also provides mechanisms for the enculturation of novices into disciplinary groups, as well as for the dissemination of ideas across such groups. We have selected three courses from three different departments to foster and study this CoP approach. The selected classes afford CoP-guided studies of different grain sizes, using diverse concepts from the CoP framework, and in a variety of disciplines. Through this approach that involves various settings and granularities, we seek to develop a broader view of CoPs in engineering that can build theory for this field and guide implementation across subfields of engineering education.

The University of Florida and North Carolina State University jointly propose FLECKS, a Design and Development proposal for the NSF's Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) program. FLECKS (Friendly Learning Environment for Kids' Computer Science) addresses the pressing need for the development of fundamental computer science competencies in upper elementary-school children. The goal of the proposed project is to design, develop, and investigate FLECKS, an intelligent learning environment to teach collaborative computer science problem solving. Collaboration is a central academic and professional practice in computational thinking, yet it presents many challenges for elementary school students. Students often struggle to collaborate successfully due to individual differences in academic status; gender; cultural background; personality; attitudes toward collaboration; or attitudes toward learning. In order to address these challenges, FLECKS will provide dyads of students with a rich, scaffolded environment where they use an interactive online coding environment to engage in computer science challenges related to their STEM subject areas. Central to the innovation is the way in which the dyads are supported. FLECKS are animated virtual characters that take a rich set of multimodal features as input, and then adapt to students������������������ patterns of collaboration, including who has control of the keyboard and mouse; who speaks when; and the problem-solving actions the students take in the online environment.

Modern computer science classrooms support student learning by integrating a large number of educational tools and platforms from forums to intelligent tutors and automated tests. This proliferation of tools can overwhelm students who have difficulty navigating across platforms or connecting the information between platforms. We propose to develop an open platform for student and instructor guidance that supports data integration and analysis. The system will be designed to synthesize student interaction data from a rich set of educational tools. The integrated data and will provide the basis for automated analysis of students' work and work habits allowing for automated and instructor-driven interventions to support student learning. Additionally, the integrated system will provide pedagogical guidance on how students can best use classroom learning tools not individually, but in concert.

RCTs are expensive and often show small effects. Even RCTs of widely adopted digital learning platforms can show disappointing results and these results have little impact on subsequent adoptions of programs already entrenched in the educational landscape. New methods are needed to both estimate effects and to indicate ways of improving outcomes for already-adopted digital learning tools. With platforms currently in wide-scale use, novel approaches to assessing use patterns and their relations with outcomes can both evaluate maximal effectiveness and provide means for improved effectiveness. Our study will use a data-driven approach to identify patterns of both student use and teacher implementation in the widely-adopted software Spatial Temporal Mathematics (ST Math). By linking these patterns with important learning and motivational outcomes we can form recommendations regarding promising actions teachers and administrators can take in implementing ST Math and refinements program developers can make in guiding students toward successful patterns. This work has the potential to not only transform use and success of the platform studied, but to create methods that can be refined and transferred to the study and implementation of other platforms.