karen McNeal: awesome all right well it's exactly as i'm going to do a little bit of introductory remarks to join.
karen McNeal: and
karen McNeal: First of all welcome, and we have about.
karen McNeal: We have a break in between.
karen McNeal: So we've got three and three and then our break and we're going to about a variety of topics within do science, education, research, from visualizations.
karen McNeal: To narrated patients to smart city Apps and that move into connection of outdoor behaviors terminal risk, and then we learn a little bit about broadening participation both.
karen McNeal: Through the global pandemic, as well as an ips with university housing and academics, so I think it'll be a nice rich.
karen McNeal: Or the group of presentations and I don't want to say, thanks to all the speakers for submitting their abstracts and the token painters, for being here today to make this happen.
karen McNeal: remind me if I forget later that to add the stretch break link during our break time so everybody is encouraged to get up and off the computer and our.
karen McNeal: faculty Member Maryland boyd put that together our mayor Maryland vogel put that together, so I think it's a little nice nice thing to do, I should do it every day.
karen McNeal: Anyway, our token miners are Dr Kelly was our Dr Lindsay marlin and Dr stephanie shepherd who are all here and so without further I guess i'll let we got a little bit of time.
karen McNeal: I don't want to start us off too early and why don't we have our speakers that are here, introduce themselves and so abby would you like to say who you are and where you're from.
Abby Boyd: hi i'm abby boyd i'm a Grad student it comes in university and i'm Dr Keller was our schedule.
Abby Boyd: awesome.
Lindsay.
Lindsay Maudlin: hi i'm Lindsay muslin i'm a postdoc at auburn University in karen's lab.
karen McNeal: Great Tyler.
Tyler Smith: Tyler Smith i'm a second year PhD student here at auburn also in Document nails lab.
karen McNeal: awesome do we have.
karen McNeal: Athena.
karen McNeal: or mega here yet.
karen McNeal: doesn't look like it well, they will be joining us Athena is from Mississippi state she's an assistant professor at Mississippi state, I believe, and mega is a graduate student at auburn university with Dr john Donne on me try.
karen McNeal: We still have a couple of minutes so we'll let people into wine so we'll just kind of hang out here, thank you we've got our first speaker slides up so technically, we should be ready to go do we did take down the slide.
karen McNeal: Of the rise slide but be sure that we are being inclusive in our Q amp a and our responses and also.
karen McNeal: When a speaker speaking, please make sure to mute yourself, so that we don't have any background noise or interruptions.
karen McNeal: And as we're going, if you would like to put questions in the chat if you think of something just put it, and we will be allowed to we can, if there's time with the.
karen McNeal: Enough time in between speakers will allow you to unmute and ask the question if there's not time we might just quickly paraphrase it and see if we can get a quick response and if there's absolutely no time the speaker can just address it through the chat itself so that's how we'll.
karen McNeal: kind of go forward with today's session.
Steph Shepherd (she/her): I was gonna say real fast, yesterday I got very good at timing for the 20 minute talks, and so I I would be glad to at the 18 minute mark, so people know where we are put up my little sign.
Steph Shepherd (she/her): Okay.
karen McNeal: Look look for staff, if you can.
karen McNeal: have one person visible maybe try to have her while you're giving a talk.
karen McNeal: There wise if time is up, we will unmute ourselves and tell you.
karen McNeal: That it's time to wrap it up, but OK, so I think we're pretty close to being able to start now, and I see we've had a few additional participants i'm looking for our two other speakers and I think we have them yet, but hopefully will soon be joining.
karen McNeal: Okay, well, I guess i'm having if you want to go ahead and take it away we're really close to 805 so you might have gained an extra 30 seconds.
Abby Boyd: cool take the extra 30 seconds.
Abby Boyd: So hi everyone again i'm abby boyd i'm a second year Grad student in the department of engineering and science, education at clemson university, and this is a new technique for visualizing undergraduate you science involved.
Abby Boyd: So why do we care about involvement well involvement is really closely linked to persistence in just about any field so.
Abby Boyd: That means that, like students that are super involved in things that are like going to like academic clubs or like i'm just like.
Abby Boyd: getting involved with their friends are doing things they're they're more likely to stay in the major because they're making friends and they're having fun and they're doing things.
Abby Boyd: And so field experiences are typically very high involvement activities and it's important to understand the experiences so that we can understand how they impact the students.
Abby Boyd: So we applied asking theory of involvement to better understand the relationship between involvement and you signed persistence.
Abby Boyd: So absence theory of involvement at its basis, it has input environment and outputs so the inputs are things that you input so it's things like your background information.
Abby Boyd: previous experiences demographics stuff like that the environment is whatever is going on, currently, for whatever you're studying.
Abby Boyd: And then the output is, whatever your outcome is that you want to study, so it can be knowledge, it can be student grades, it can be persistence.
Abby Boyd: Whatever it is that you want to look at so for this particular study i'm our inputs, where the students background in previous experiences.
Abby Boyd: The Environment was the four years or four plus years that they were in undergrad for college and then the output was their ultimate career goals or their graduate student or graduate experiences.
Abby Boyd: So, as some theory is built on five big assumptions, so the first one is that involvement requires an investment of both psycho social and physical energy so that's not saying that you have to physically be like.
Abby Boyd: Moving or anything else, in order to be considered involved it's just saying that, like the level of involvement is dependent on both, how is the student mentally engaged and how are they physically engaged um.
Abby Boyd: involvement is continuous and the amount of energy invested varies from student to student.
Abby Boyd: So, if you think about just like individual students, some are going to be more interested, some are going to be more involved, even though you're doing the same activity.
Abby Boyd: i'm aspects of involvement are both qualitative and quantitative so that's talking about like.
Abby Boyd: It matters what they're doing, but it also matters, how long are they doing it um as students development is directly proportional to the extent to which they are involved.
Abby Boyd: And then, lastly, academic performance is correlated with the student involvement, so that one is great out here, because we didn't collect any information about their academic performances, but we might be able to in the future, and we hope to kind of continue that with our study.
Abby Boyd: So the particular experience that we're talking about here was a one week study abroad field experience in the Caribbean students were.
Abby Boyd: exposed to different geoscience research techniques like I said before, field experiences tend to be really high involvement in this one definitely was not an exception to that.
Abby Boyd: So they they learned lots about the geology on the island, they they got to be exposed to research, some of them, for the first time they collected data for geoscience project i'm just a whole bunch of geoscience involvement for them.
Abby Boyd: The interviews took place in the fall after the experience and so questions were intentionally broad so.
Abby Boyd: Though we were talking about an individual experience, we were able to get information about their kind of whole college experience up until that point.
Abby Boyd: I mean that's why we were able to identify critical incident in which they they talked about like, why did they become a geoscience major and why did they decide to come on this trip.
Abby Boyd: um the questions weren't like directing them linearly it's not like we said what did you do in your first year of college and then they explained it and and what did you do in your second year call.
Abby Boyd: It was like more open ended and that really allowed us to be able to see what was important to them and their geoscience involvement and when they did take place.
Abby Boyd: And then later I check into place with participants, two years after the experience and that's how we were able to get the career data.
Abby Boyd: Sir for participants are queen Taylor Anna and peyton, as you can see here.
Abby Boyd: Three of them are geoscience major so Quinn and Taylor were geoscience majors payton was a non geoscience stem major they're all for women.
Abby Boyd: And they all took place, or they all went on this experience at different times in their college career so payton was a first year student Queen and Anna or third year students and Taylor was a fourth year students.
Abby Boyd: So, how did we visualize student involvement so pipelines often show you how students come in and where they exit but you don't really see a lot that happens in the middle um.
Abby Boyd: So this type of visualization allowed us to see what was happening, while they were actually in college and while they were actually GEO science majors.
Abby Boyd: So the participants were interviewing the full following the experience like I said before, and they're critical incidents were identified encoded and then placed.
Abby Boyd: linearly where they happened and i'm going to show you that in a bit.
Abby Boyd: So baselines were created from identified incidents that were not I event and that couldn't be placed in an individual semester or an individual time period So these are things like.
Abby Boyd: A student saying oh my best friend wanted me or talk to me about geology I became really interested in, I wanted to do it so that's something that has an impact for your whole career but it's not something that you can really place in one time, so those went into the baselines.
Abby Boyd: And so those baselines were added to the individual scores for the events that you could put into an individual semester.
Abby Boyd: And that winning to the visualization so the scoring system was a scale of one to four, for being the highest you science involvement and then one being the lowest um and like we said, with the.
Abby Boyd: The five assumptions of atoms theory, so the amount of time that the experience took place and what they were doing went into how we accounted the score so something like a geoscience focus summer camp that's probably two months or whatever um.
Abby Boyd: that's going to be a little bit longer than just like a day field trip um so it's going to get scored higher.
Abby Boyd: um all of these scores were based on what we were looking at so like I said geoscience involvement so that's why I, like the career aspects.
Abby Boyd: For his geoscience career three stem career two is non stem and one is departure from higher education, but if you wanted to look at any sort of different field, or if you wanted to look at a specific.
Abby Boyd: course or something like that you can easily change these skills of four to whatever it is you needed to work your study.
Abby Boyd: So after we scored the events and added them to the baselines, this is what we came up with, so the.
Abby Boyd: The scores were put on this scale of relative involvement and you can see that it was linearly like pre college through their college and then onto their careers.
Abby Boyd: And we have the input from Athens theory in their pre college events, the environment is this four years of college and then the outputs are their career i'm so.
Abby Boyd: Sorry, the chat sorry.
Abby Boyd: So they had the four years of their career and then.
Abby Boyd: The the stars are where they went on this individual field experience so peyton went in her first year and and queen went in their third year and.
Abby Boyd: Taylor went in her fourth year um one last thing is that these kind of.
Abby Boyd: darker grayed out areas they weren't necessarily linear to their college or their career or sorry they weren't necessarily linear to their college experience so.
Abby Boyd: Some of the students describe things that happened in middle school that made them interested in.
Abby Boyd: geoscience and one of our students took a gap year after after college, before going to Grad school so that was not necessarily a linear face so though these four years of college word directly linear The others were not.
Abby Boyd: So, looking at them individually queen was a K 12 i'm sorry queen was a geoscience major she had a K 12 years science experience that resulted in kind of a mid range baseline.
Abby Boyd: And you can see that there, she was a transfer student so she became a geoscience major in her second year, and she is currently pursuing a geoscience career.
Abby Boyd: um so you can kind of see hers has what I would describe as kind of stair steps and that's what happens when you have some sort of involvement event or something that got added to her baseline that is long term and an increase in involvement.
Abby Boyd: um so in year one she joined college she may be took some courses, maybe talk to some people got some influence and that she had that boost up and then in year two she became a geoscience major.
Abby Boyd: year three she went on this experience and then she continued on until she graduated.
Abby Boyd: A Taylor also had a had a pretty low baseline comparative to the rest of them um she did have some K 12 teacher influence in in college or sorry in K 12 um.
Abby Boyd: She had a friend influencer early in her college career and she said that was why she decided to become a major so that you can see that kind of bump up here.
Abby Boyd: She had multiple field experiences so those are those kind of peaks along the way, and then this one here is the one that she.
Abby Boyd: That that was this experience that we were talking about um so the peaks happening, when you have something that's maybe shorter duration, but is a big increase in involvement.
Abby Boyd: But then you go right back down to your baseline or closer to your baseline and she is currently experience sorry currently pursuing as you science master's degree.
Abby Boyd: or you may have noticed with Taylor, we have an icon here, so all four of our participants chose their own pseudonyms, but they also.
Abby Boyd: were working on giving them the opportunity to design their icons such that we can they can have some say and how we represent them as we're talking about their work.
Abby Boyd: So Anna was a K 12 sorry kit and I had a K 12 geoscience experience she had the highest of the four baselines you can kind of see that here.
Abby Boyd: And she knew exactly what she wanted so she came into college, she was geoscience major right off the BAT she stated geoscience major the whole way through she did go on this field experience so she has.
Abby Boyd: One peak but her involvement was pretty much the same throughout, and you can see that in her life.
Abby Boyd: And then peyton so payton was our non geoscience major she was a another stem major so she had the lowest baseline of any of the four students.
Abby Boyd: She did have a pre college you science, research experience that was the summer right before she came to college so that's right here.
Abby Boyd: And then she had this experience in her first year and, as I said she she was a different major than geoscience so that's kind of why her as a whole, her baseline is a little bit lower um and the interview in check in took place before the completion of her college career so she.
Abby Boyd: Her line is not yet complete, because it was before the completion of her college career.
Abby Boyd: So here's all four of them again just to kind of see the comparison, so you can kind of see like they talked about with peyton being a little bit lower.
Abby Boyd: and
Abby Boyd: yeah just to see all four of them together and their progressions throughout their careers.
Abby Boyd: So future work is the incorporation of student grades, such that we can get that fifth aspect of Athens theory and look at student performance.
Abby Boyd: And also inclusion of both future corp covert to this experience but also we can adapt it to other forms of involvement for geosciences and beyond.
Abby Boyd: And we'd like to thank so Kelly, those are in class Members took a lot of the pictures that were in these slides and.
Abby Boyd: The material was based on work, supported by the nsf and we'd also like to thank our participants Dr Lisa Benson matt boy Victoria sellers and Leah we'd have like for their help throughout her study and there's my reference and i'd be happy to take any questions.
karen McNeal: awesome fabulous.
karen McNeal: Let my question can be noticed there if you have a question, you can put it in chat or unmute yourself.
karen McNeal: Have a question how would you.
karen McNeal: Think about like scaling this up and having others use this as a tool for engagement of students in the geosciences and what do you think ultimately.
karen McNeal: It can be used to for.
Abby Boyd: yeah so kind of like a.
Abby Boyd: said, with the.
Abby Boyd: pipeline models like it's I think it's a really good way just to kind of see what our students doing while they're in college and if you wanted to look at persistence, or if you wanted to look at like what.
Abby Boyd: What is it that's making you know why did these students decide to stay and why did these students decide to leave or whatever um.
Abby Boyd: it's a good way to see like maybe the more highly involved students are staying or maybe they're not and we don't actually know that um so all four of these students did stay.
Abby Boyd: exactly where they thought they would say when they were interviewed originally so like the check in was not a surprise for any of them um but, as you scale up you might find more things.
Abby Boyd: And like I said we didn't include any sort of great information.
Abby Boyd: So that that might be a big factor in in kind of what's going on, because you might have a super involved student but, for whatever reason they're not making the grades well that might explain why they decided to leave worse.
karen McNeal: yeah sure great.
Kelly Lazar: Question abby do you think that if you applied this to a larger n number of students, would you do hypothesize that you would find patterns in.
Kelly Lazar: Like the shape of these lines versus outcomes, or like some sort of relationship between experiences, they have in college and outcomes and.
Kelly Lazar: Like the development of a series of.
Kelly Lazar: lines like do hypothesize that there are like set like tracks, that you would see if you had a larger N, or do you think that each student has the potential to be really different and not falling maybe these these tracks.
Abby Boyd: Maybe both um so yeah I, I was surprised when when we first did it that, like we only had four students and they're they're all pretty different with their with their lines um.
Abby Boyd: But I I can't really think of much like you kind of have this stairs of a like increasing involvement that last a long time, you have the peaks of like.
Abby Boyd: An increase that doesn't last a long time um, I guess, maybe you could have like some sort of a trough that we didn't really see but I don't I can't think of too many other ways that you.
Abby Boyd: could vary the line so like different combinations of different things, yes, but i'm sure that, with the with a larger and then you would eventually start seeing patterns for.
Tyler Smith: Is this something that you could take and kind of continue looking at not just this set of students but.
Tyler Smith: You know.
Tyler Smith: Future cohorts and things like that on into you know what drive somebody to go get a Masters or continue on to a PhD or something like that.
Abby Boyd: Yes, yes.
Tyler Smith: I think, after undergrad and going just straight into you know, the private sector.
Abby Boyd: yeah I definitely think.
Tyler Smith: That.
Abby Boyd: it's something that you could see with that well and when this started like a lot of the questions were kind of like.
Abby Boyd: Why did you decide to come on this trip in the first place, and why did you like what influenced like I said what influenced you to be a Jew science major i'm so a lot of them were more looking at.
Abby Boyd: What what made you want to do this in your college career and stuff like that, but if you were to interview or make the check in a little bit more extensive than i'm sure you could see.
Abby Boyd: kind of what happened or not necessarily what happened, but why did they decide to go industry or to Grad school or whatever it is that they decided.
karen McNeal: Great thanks evie if you could stop sharing thanks for that Q amp a and Lindsay you're up next if you want to go ahead and start sharing and I will introduce you so.
karen McNeal: Great to great talk to start us off and now we're going to move on to our second talk, which is titled when are narrated animations most beneficial for student learning.
Lindsay Maudlin: Still muted there we go.
Lindsay Maudlin: um so to start I think it's important to kind of set the.
Lindsay Maudlin: background that we have this really strong scientific consensus is that climate change is real that it's happening and that it's us.
Lindsay Maudlin: And, but when we go to the American public there's obviously a big difference so seven and 10 Americans actually think global warming is happening and 58% of them think.
Lindsay Maudlin: that global warming is mostly human caused so when we consider this this gap, our main goal anytime we're trying to communicate.
Lindsay Maudlin: Climate change concepts is really just to work to close that gap and that helps set us up in a better position to make decisions for mitigation, adaptation purposes so given that kind of background.
Lindsay Maudlin: working to close the gap Susan hassle develops the climate communication.org website as a way to make climate change concepts and data.
Lindsay Maudlin: accessible to the general public as a whole, and one of the special features that she has with this on the bottom of the homepage is this narrated graphics section.
Lindsay Maudlin: And so that pops up a long list of different videos narrated animations that you can watch in the range generally from about a minute and a half to maybe two minutes.
Lindsay Maudlin: And they take one aspect of climate change content, so in this case the keeling curve.
Lindsay Maudlin: walk us through what the wiggles mean, but also that there's this strong upward trend and it talks a little bit about Charles keeling.
Lindsay Maudlin: And just gives a little bit of the background information, but the most important part is that the video shows the data itself but walks users through it in a piecemeal kind of way.
Lindsay Maudlin: So we were pulled in with Susan hassle to essentially evaluate how.
Lindsay Maudlin: How beneficial these narrated animations are, as you can imagine a lot of effort goes into developing them, and so we want to know is that effort worthwhile.
Lindsay Maudlin: And, and so we came up with a research design based on these two questions, so the first two students better understand these complex climate science concepts.
Lindsay Maudlin: When they're presented as the narrated animations as what's found in Susan hassles website, or when they're presented a still frame figures into for these we took screenshots of the exact same.
Lindsay Maudlin: plots and then instead of having an animation that's narrated we had text that you'll see in a moment that says the same information.
Lindsay Maudlin: or second question is, do those students have larger learning gains or more changes in their attitudes toward climate change after interacting with these narrated animations or with those still frame figures.
Lindsay Maudlin: So the study design starts with everyone taking the exact same pre questionnaire.
Lindsay Maudlin: And then participants were divided randomly and to one of two groups group a was the animated group so they interacted with Susan hassles narrated animations exactly as they're found on the website.
Lindsay Maudlin: And group be interacted with this still frame figures that are the exact same content just presented in a different way.
Lindsay Maudlin: And we identified seven of the long list of many options and that represented the different features that Susan hassle had implemented.
Lindsay Maudlin: And then, for each of those seven figures or graphics we use the same to multiple choice questions so overall they interact with seven different graphics and get the same 14 multiple choice questions.
Lindsay Maudlin: Through this part of the study as they're interacting with the graphics and we were I tracking so looking at where they were looking on the screen through that entire process.
Lindsay Maudlin: After interacting with the imagery then all of them, took the exact same post questionnaire that in terms of content is identical to the pre questionnaire, so we can measure those learning games.
Lindsay Maudlin: And then everyone completed a series of interview prompts and for what amounted to be about a 15 minute interview.
Lindsay Maudlin: So a closer look at our study participants we targeted undergraduates in introductory physical science courses at a large University in the southeast us.
Lindsay Maudlin: And we were able to recruit 52 and total so that amounted to about 26 in each group and but the the asterisk next to the 26 and the animated group indicates that there are two participants who's I tracking data, we had to throw out because of bad calibration with the eye tracking system.
Lindsay Maudlin: And this table breaks down just some of the basic demographic information that we had on these students so almost a pretty similar split between males and females, and when we look at their grade level in undergrad.
Lindsay Maudlin: We see a lot of emphasis on the freshmen and sophomores, and that makes sense given it was an introductory physical science class and that most students get kind of out of the way earlier.
Lindsay Maudlin: And we looked at majors and 83% of the animated group or stem majors and just 69% and the suffering Group and
Lindsay Maudlin: When we focus specifically on the geoscience majors within that broader stem category about 21% of the animated group where's your science majors and none in the steel frame group.
Lindsay Maudlin: So from those pre post questionnaires and we had 11 questions total nine were on some version of a liquored scale.
Lindsay Maudlin: between three and five point bikers skills i'm just showing these four questions and statements, because these are the ones that all explore in greater detail and a few slides.
Lindsay Maudlin: But we asked questions like how worried about climate change, are you how well informed, do you feel you are.
Lindsay Maudlin: And this sentence, the scientific data clearly shows that climate change is occurring and last I feel confident in interpreting scientific data that explains climate change.
Lindsay Maudlin: The other two questions i'm covered specific climate change concepts that were multiple choice questions and less about the participants thoughts and feelings towards the content.
Lindsay Maudlin: So a little background on eye tracking, this is a technology that determines where, when and for how long participants in this case, students, look at some content on a screen and.
Lindsay Maudlin: The setup picture here shows the eye tracker and it just sits at the bottom of the computer screen and is relatively unnoticed by the participant as they just scroll through content or read.
Lindsay Maudlin: Information on the screen, and so the content or sorry hardware that we used is the toby extra 60 which is pictured and then toby tx 300, which is a larger desktop version with the same technology.
Lindsay Maudlin: The toby software then after you've collected all the data can present.
Lindsay Maudlin: These heat maps and gaze plots so heat maps will show us other group of participants, where they're looking and focusing a lot of their effort and their.
Lindsay Maudlin: attention, and so in this example there's a large block of text and we can see that participants in general, on the whole read in an APP shaped pattern where they read the first sign in great detail the second line, a little less.
Lindsay Maudlin: And then that just continues to decrease the further down the paragraph, they go the other output gaze plots here is represented by to our data from two different participants one is purple and one is green.
Lindsay Maudlin: And it shows us the order in which they look at different elements on the screen and the size of the circle denotes the amount of time fixated on that location, so a bigger circle means they spent more attention or more time looking at that particular aspect of the screen.
Lindsay Maudlin: But Additionally, we can then go in, as the researchers and define areas of interest, so in this particular example we focused on that large block of text.
Lindsay Maudlin: And then, once that area is defined the software can calculate basic statistical kind of outputs from this so things like that might be the fixation count.
Lindsay Maudlin: How many times do they fixate anywhere inside that box throughout the duration of the study and.
Lindsay Maudlin: How long does it take them to fixate in that box, so that might tell us that something's really eye catching or something just gets overlooked, a lot.
Lindsay Maudlin: And then, as they navigate through the website and look at a lot of different things, we can also get a metric called total visit duration, so it sums up the amount of time that they spend looking in that area of interest through the full duration of their study.
Lindsay Maudlin: So, starting with that total visit duration and We calculated this for all of the ao is in the study and this will show you an example from the steel frame study.
Lindsay Maudlin: Looking at one of the the figures, so we made in this case, one of the ao is just the large block of text that walked participants through the same content that the other group was having read to them.
Lindsay Maudlin: And some of the other areas of interest, where the the titles and the access labels and the data and some of the other key points that were related to the multiple choice questions or the or the right answer for them multiple choice questions.
Lindsay Maudlin: What we found when we ran correlations between the total visit duration and the total scores so looking at whether or not they were able to answer the multiple choice questions correctly, we found a significant correlation between.
Lindsay Maudlin: When participants actually looked at the data within the graphs themselves and, but when we think about the text and do that same correlation study.
Lindsay Maudlin: there's not a significant correlation between their total scores, and the time that they spent looking at the text.
Lindsay Maudlin: And so it's interesting then that when we look at how the group's spent their time where their attention is given the still frame group as a whole, really spent a lot of their attention.
Lindsay Maudlin: focused on the text and less so, on the data we do see a warm spot on the right hand side of the the data.
Lindsay Maudlin: In the plot itself but overwhelmingly they are spending their time reading the text.
Lindsay Maudlin: The animated group though their attention is given almost primarily to the data itself and so instead of spending so much time reading they're able to look at the data and listen as that same information is being read to them.
Lindsay Maudlin: So our takeaway so far is that narrated animations do a much better job of drawing a user attention to the data itself.
Lindsay Maudlin: If we then switch to looking at the pre post questionnaires.
Lindsay Maudlin: We found across the board, that there were no statistically significant differences between the groups, so we don't see a larger change in attitudes or learning games between either group.
Lindsay Maudlin: But when we look at everyone as a whole, we do see statistically significant changes, and those are focused on those four items that I mentioned earlier, so with the question of how worried about global change are you we saw an increase into.
Lindsay Maudlin: Having more worry or being more worried about global change when we asked her well informed, they feel they are about global change across the board, we saw that they felt more informed after interacting with these images, regardless of group type.
Lindsay Maudlin: And they showed an increase in their confidence in the scientific data, and I think most importantly, they feel more confident and interpreting scientific data as a result of this study.
Lindsay Maudlin: So our takeaway here is that both types are still effective and both work and meet the the goals that I think we all have as educators in increasing our learning gains and helping our students become more aware of climate change.
Lindsay Maudlin: Going back to those multiple choice questions so remember, there were 14 total, and so the total score for every question they got correct they got a point so looking at total scores there's not a significant difference between groups.
Lindsay Maudlin: In the overall.
Lindsay Maudlin: 14 multiple choice questions, but when we break that down for each of the seven images or imagery.
Lindsay Maudlin: And the highest score for any of us would be to, and we do start to see some differences and the performance between the two groups.
Lindsay Maudlin: So the first is for this figure shown in the bottom right 800,000 years of CO2, the steel frame group actually performs slightly better than the animated group.
Lindsay Maudlin: And what's interesting here is that this is a relatively straightforward figure.
Lindsay Maudlin: there's just one data set that's plotted there's one X Axis one y axis and a couple of key points are highlighted with arrows at the end.
Lindsay Maudlin: hurt the right hand side of the trend line i'm with the fifth image, though we start to see a little more complexity in the graph type.
Lindsay Maudlin: So there are two trends or two data sets that are plotted and there are using the same X axis they each have their own y axis.
Lindsay Maudlin: And the point here is help or hoping that students make the connection between the patterns of the two.
Lindsay Maudlin: And so it requires a little more complexity and being able to connect the patterns between two different data sets.
Lindsay Maudlin: And we see here that the animated group actually performs a little better than the suffering group.
Lindsay Maudlin: and part of that has to do with the way that the narrative animation walks users through and really highlights those connections between the the patterns in North trend lines, something that is not illustrated or animated obviously in the steel frame version.
Lindsay Maudlin: And then last we go back to another somewhat simple.
Lindsay Maudlin: to gear where we're back to one access one one y axis both plotted in the same region and we can see how these two trend lines kind of compared to each other and here again we see a slightly better performance in the steel frame group.
Lindsay Maudlin: And so, in general, we can look at the fact that narrated animations in this study actually did a better job of breaking down these complex concepts and and helping students better understand that the complex figures.
Lindsay Maudlin: If we go back to that concept of the total scores out of 14 but focus on our low performers in the group.
Lindsay Maudlin: And those who scored 12 or fewer out of the total 14 and we see a slightly different picture.
Lindsay Maudlin: So to start, and when we look at their total scores the animated group actually performs a little bit better than the steel frame group.
Lindsay Maudlin: And, and again if we kind of break that down, we see some interesting things popping up in the item by item cases, so if we go back to that same less figure that I showed in the total.
Lindsay Maudlin: Scores for all all participants again, we see that the steel frame group does a little bit better with this particular image and then the animated group um but, again, this is one of the more simple figures within the entire study.
Lindsay Maudlin: The most complex, though in the whole study and the one that was in the interviews identified overwhelmingly as the most confusing and hard to understand figure.
Lindsay Maudlin: i'm really gets complicated because there are three different data sets that are plotted in the same almost 3D graph so not only are we looking at 3D data sets in a 2d.
Lindsay Maudlin: layout that could already be somewhat confusing, but now we're adding in this third dimension, and we see that the animated group actually does.
Lindsay Maudlin: Really really good compared to the steel frame group in this case, and I think the majority of that is that the narrated animation.
Lindsay Maudlin: Steps participants through one data set at a time, instead of just dumping all the information all at once, and it really helps to highlight, as you follow these.
Lindsay Maudlin: timelines to show their connection between the three different data sets.
Lindsay Maudlin: So our takeaway here is that narrated animations across the board, seem to be better for low performers.
Lindsay Maudlin: And when we piece all this back together and think about our research questions.
Lindsay Maudlin: To students better understand complex climate science concepts and that presented as these narrated animations or a still frame figures.
Lindsay Maudlin: And we see that the narrative animations are more effective when the figures are at their most complex and they're also more effective for the low performers.
Lindsay Maudlin: When we think about student learning gains and changes to their attitudes toward climate change.
Lindsay Maudlin: And we see that both the narrated animations and the steel frame figures both work that helping us increase the learning games and lead to positive changes in participants attitudes toward climate change.
Lindsay Maudlin: But additionally narrative animations do a much better job of drawing participant or user attention to the data itself so when we think about our.
Lindsay Maudlin: Teaching kind of situations, you know is is our purpose and showing a plot to get students to look at the data.
Lindsay Maudlin: And if so, then we really need to do our best to to draw their attention there, instead of elsewhere hmm.
Lindsay Maudlin: So recommendations for practitioners are educators when we're thinking about the fact that narrated animations are not necessary for every figure or graph so maybe it's better for breaking down the most complex figures and graphs and we should spend our effort and attention there.
Lindsay Maudlin: And they do help close the gap in the student performance so for those low performers who interacted with the narrated animations that helped increase their performance.
Lindsay Maudlin: And so, thinking about our low performers in our normal classroom settings Nora goal is always to help bring them up, and so this is one strategy for doing that.
Lindsay Maudlin: Additionally, narrated animations obviously take a lot of effort and energy, and so, rather than doing them all ourselves i'd like to.
Lindsay Maudlin: emphasize that there are existing resources, and we should definitely utilize them, so one or Susan hassles.
Lindsay Maudlin: kind of communication narrated animations there's so many on her website and that are just really quick and easy great for implementing in the classroom i'd also recommend katharine hayhoe is global weirding series, and they all go through a very good job of.
Lindsay Maudlin: Breaking down complex images and then last i'd like to reiterate that silver and figures aren't bad.
Lindsay Maudlin: um they are still able to help us increase learning gains for our students and change attitudes toward climate change.
Lindsay Maudlin: And, but one aspect that i'd like to highlight these that Susan hassle was the developer, both for the married animations and the steel frame two gears and our study.
Lindsay Maudlin: And because of her careful attention to detail and making those as close together as possible for the purposes of our study are still frame figures might be some of the better, more accessible.
Lindsay Maudlin: plots and figures out there, so that might that might be one thing to consider when you're implementing steel frame figures or graphs in your own classroom.
Lindsay Maudlin: At this point, i'm willing to take some questions if there's still time.
karen McNeal: awesome thanks Lindsay, I think, time is up, but you do question chat.
karen McNeal: So good address those questions that would be great um we're our third speaker is mega stressor.
karen McNeal: And it's a poster presentation titled communication is key to urban sustainability, the auburn smart, so the APP so what i'm going to do is i'm going to share my screen.
karen McNeal: So you guys can see in here the poster presentation and then mega is here Hello mega and once we've played that people can ask her questions.
karen McNeal: So please tell me I kind of lose the view of everybody, when I share screen, so if it's not playing correctly and you're not seeing something you should.
karen McNeal: Please let me know, and I will stop sharing you'll just have to verbally tell me all right i'm sharing screen now so if we can see that and i'm going to start playing.
karen McNeal: Communication is key to urban sustainability all been smarter the APP I may have stress to and Jonathan me draw from auburn university.
examines the possibility of using an open access communication platform like mobile application to encourage people to be more involved in sustainable majors sustainable urban education is key to successful development and a better future for all but urban studies.
Chandana Mitra Geoscience: from their history has been engaged in here on global cities are big cities like Atlanta, and you talk.
karen McNeal: To you can't hear it.
Chandana Mitra Geoscience: Again weekend you.
karen McNeal: Okay, good.
karen McNeal: it's coming back.
Chandana Mitra Geoscience: queue go good kolkata but there has been a big discrepancy when it comes to.
Chandana Mitra Geoscience: Having some studies for small and medium sized cities, but these are the cities that are gonna go rapidly in the near future and also are not equipped.
Chandana Mitra Geoscience: With the infrastructure, all the manpower to handle it right now, hence the study focuses in auburn a small sized city in the state of Alabama which has been growing exponentially with a rate of 560 7.91% age from 1980 do do not 2019.
And is examining the land use land cover change to people's perception of different sustainability majors and also exploring the idea of having.
An open access communication platform like mobile application to encourage people to understand and live a more sustainable life so all been.
has been growing a lot is a small and medium sized city is a university town and people have been coming and going as a students, but the general population of orbit is growing exponentially and so as as urban sprawl so seen such.
Increase in the urban area, and so in such a exponential rate is very necessary for a city like urban to be prepared to and be equipped to handle the.
Population growth and infrastructure growth, but in a more sustainable manner so UN United Nation in 2015 came up with the Sustainable Development Goals are asti geez they're 17 in total with incorporates all aspects of life from the first city like all been it's not.
possible to focus on on the 17th goes all at the same time, so in this study.
We are trying to come up with the top seven goals that the citizens have all been things that are the most important for them.
So define those seven goals we actually had a summer workshop age 2019 where we invited 30 participants from different avenues of life from students to work in professional to the tires.
And we did a workshop where we came up with seven goals and then we move ahead and increase the number of participants, we created the call tricks survey.
which has different question regarding the different demographics, reading the sustainable development goals and other information to gather about what they think about different sustainable majors and.
Based on those results, we have seven selected goals for all but right now, which are no poverty Zero Hunger good health and well being.
quality education clean water and sanitation, affordable and teen energy and finally decent work and economic growth.
The main purpose of the study is to see all the indicators that the UN have chemo for the seven ghouls.
And figure out if the data is being reported or not If yes in what format and what level whether a city level county level a State level and use that information.
To create a mobile application that has all this information in a easy to read, easy to understand and accessible manner, where people can.
absorb this information and also be able to speed on how they want to get this information and what can be done with this information so different.
interfaces that it was seen the poster I the first interface is for with city, since we want this application to be applicable for other cities as well, and hopefully it will be.
A second page actually explains you what exactly is UN sustainable goals.
And will show you the seven selected goals and when you click on each Google, he will be able to see all the information related to that particular goal for that city itself.
And we also have a map interface, where people can see the different layers on top of Google maps or open street map, providing them with different information such as transportation pipelines city boundaries.
Solar potential.
temperature and humidity and other aspects of the environment and of the social system affecting their lives, thank you.
karen McNeal: Okay, thanks mega.
karen McNeal: We have any questions.
karen McNeal: got five minutes.
karen McNeal: We can we can think of some.
karen McNeal: Well, while others are thinking mega I was going to ask you.
karen McNeal: When you think about so this smart APP would be used by citizens in the in the town right and so.
karen McNeal: Are you seeing this is sort of like.
karen McNeal: A pilot that you in all burn and that you'd like to see rolled out in other similar sized cities bigger cities, all the above.
Megha Shrestha: So, right now, our focus is more on small and medium sized cities so that's why we chose all one So yes, this will be like a pilot study and most of the data in the prototype will be dummy data.
Megha Shrestha: Besides the maps and geographical information or geospatial information we going to have there so we're hoping that we will be able to present this in front of the city officials and the city councils and see the responses and be.
Megha Shrestha: applicable to other cities as well.
Kelly Lazar: As you move into other towns and small cities, would you survey those populations to find out the UN sustainability goals and most interested in that or would you stick with the seven that you found for this pilot so.
Megha Shrestha: Our goal is to like create a model that can be used for other cities, I will not particularly go to the city and say like these are the seven goals, they should, but this is a model like you should.
Megha Shrestha: Post figure out where the city has and then do a survey, where you figure out what the citizens want, as well as what the city officials who wants and then, but the system that is more tina's toward that city so that's like it's a more than that, we are thinking of right now.
Megha Shrestha: Thank you for the question.
karen McNeal: I guess, I have another one, what do you as far as a viewer who's going to use this APP, what are the big goals that you're hoping that they get from the APP is it information and knowledge, or is it utility that they can.
karen McNeal: know what their cities is doing so, they have a maybe more from you know again kind of towards information, but you know pressure oh this isn't happening or this is happening, so we need to pressure, our leaders or something else, what do you want, or what is your main goal so.
Megha Shrestha: While I was going through the website they've all been city's website, one of the biggest issue that I saw was they have everything in PDF and it was so difficult for me to understand like what the city is doing, what are the future plans.
Megha Shrestha: What is happening right now, so we are hoping that this APP will be a portal where people can find this information easily and understand in a very short simple manner as soon as i'm hoping that we will have.
Megha Shrestha: Like one screen, where people can log in and actually send that I won't say complaints, but suggestions to the city option itself about what they want for the city because people's voices should be heard so that's like.
Megha Shrestha: I think it will we are trying to address both of those aspects of communication, it should be a two way communication.
Megha Shrestha: Thank you for the question.
karen McNeal: Any other questions for mega.
karen McNeal: Okay um If not, we, we are entering our.
karen McNeal: break period.
and
karen McNeal: We will have a bleep 15 minute break um I think that's correct yes and reconvene here at.
karen McNeal: 910 so not quite for two minutes because we're a minute or two over.
karen McNeal: I have put into the chat the link to Dr vogel stretch break, if you want to have some encouragement to get up out of your chair I know we all get right back and Oh, we gotta check email but ending up.
karen McNeal: seeing a little bit of auburn's campus hearing the birds and getting some stretching in.
karen McNeal: great idea it's there in the chat and if you all just want to stay connected you're welcome to you can just turn your video off and mute yourself if you are speaking in the next round may become a couple minutes early so.
karen McNeal: Here and you're connected, but again we're going to be kicking off at 910 central time, so you.
Steph Shepherd (she/her): Hopefully, I won't disappear in the next set like I did they did turn off the power for a few moments, so I was like oh.
karen McNeal: perfect, we can see your presentation view all right we've got a little bit longer For those of you who are coming back to your desk welcome back to.
karen McNeal: The climate or the geoscience education, research.
karen McNeal: session we are rounding out with our last three speakers and the first one we'll start with is Tyler smith's outdoor behaviors during coven 19 and their connection to environmental risk perception go ahead Tyler.
Tyler Smith: You don't mute myself.
Tyler Smith: As always alright so welcome, thank you for.
Tyler Smith: being here today, again, the title of my presentation is.
Tyler Smith: outdoor activities during coda 19 and their connections to environmental risk perception.
Tyler Smith: I am part of the auburn GEO cognition lab where we.
Tyler Smith: Take a look at GEO GEO science, education and do cognition are there's a qr code over here on the right hand side to our lab website, if you would like to take a look at that.
Tyler Smith: That will take you directly to that to that site.
Tyler Smith: And it'll be kind of present throughout the whole presentation here.
Tyler Smith: So environmental risk is kind of defined in literature as the perception of danger or risk to oneself or one's community and society overall.
Tyler Smith: specifically related to environmental issues, there are obviously different types of risk perception, but, of course, environmental risk perception is specifically.
Tyler Smith: related to environmental issues, it is a social contract construct that is kind of focused on human and earth system interactions and.
Tyler Smith: It requires an understanding of those interactions but not only that it all, you know as well as the scientific knowledge.
Tyler Smith: that's involved with with environmental.
Tyler Smith: processes and things of that nature.
Tyler Smith: Developing a measure of perceived environmental risk that is a.
Tyler Smith: really good paper that we kind of drew from quite a bit for this this particular study by Weber and colleagues from 2000.
Tyler Smith: So during the early stages of the cover 19 pandemic safer at home and shelter in place orders these legislative orders were kind of sweeping the nation.
Tyler Smith: You know, local and state governments were putting these these orders in place to kind of try to stem the tide of the pandemic and to kind of keep it under control as best as possible.
Tyler Smith: As a result of those orders, there were lots of employment changes people.
Tyler Smith: were laid off from their jobs, many who are considered non essential were laid off from their jobs or furloughed from their jobs for a time and then you know even more were.
Tyler Smith: transitioned into a work from home type scenario at the you know the peak unemployment during the pandemic the early stages of the pandemic was about 14.8% and that occurred in April of 2020.
Tyler Smith: And that's according to the Congressional Research Service report that was published in January of this year.
Tyler Smith: So we based our study here on this framework of connectedness to nature, which is a.
Tyler Smith: A well studied concept, it is you know it's it's there's lots and lots of literature out there, this whitburn at all paper is a good example of that from 2019.
Tyler Smith: But there is definitely quite a bit of literature out there about this idea of connectedness to nature and so what we wanted to look at our goals here to determine, you know number one of these changes and employment.
Tyler Smith: lead to changes and outdoor activity did that you know was there, increase or decrease in the amount of time people were spending outside.
Tyler Smith: Working on these various outdoor activities, whether those are running or.
Tyler Smith: You know hiking camping things of that nature, not just the things that we think of as outdoor activities, necessarily, but even gardening or golf or playing tennis things of that nature.
Tyler Smith: And then you know what are the changes.
Tyler Smith: In environmental risk perception that came from those increase or decrease in in outdoor activity time you know and are they associated.
Tyler Smith: with one another and then also the role of some other factors demographics worldviews and climate knowledge sort of as a proxy for environmental knowledge what you know, we want to look at the role of those other factors on environmental risk perception as well.
Tyler Smith: So our primary research questions number one are Americans spending more or less time outdoors as a result of these legislative orders and then you know what are the outdoor activities that residents are engaging in during the coven 19 pandemic.
Tyler Smith: And then number two How does that time or type of outdoor activity predict environmental risk perceptions and, thirdly, how do various additional variables like I said demographic climate knowledge climate risk predict the perception of environmental risk as well.
Tyler Smith: So the first thing we wanted to do was kind of develop a survey, to send out and collect some some information from us residents, we definitely pulled from.
Tyler Smith: A decent amount of literature, the first thing we did obviously was dive into the literature and find out what what had been done previously and what we could.
Tyler Smith: You know kind of gain knowledge wise from from that literature, and so we first found some papers involving environmental risk.
Tyler Smith: These three listed here and definitely pulled a few of our survey questions from those papers from that literature.
Tyler Smith: These are papers that have been previously developed and validated questions that have been validated by these authors, and so we felt fairly confident that they would perform quite well in our survey as well, and then climate knowledge items.
Tyler Smith: This paper Viola barking at all in.
Tyler Smith: Had a climate knowledge assessment of I believe about 25 questions and we pulled six of those questions, just as a kind of.
Tyler Smith: sampling of that climate knowledge assessment.
Tyler Smith: And then finally societal and environmental values from con at all 2012 and then stag it also from 2012 these are some just again societal values things like that that may help us understand the way that people think and and the connection to their their.
Tyler Smith: Their values to environmental risk and what kind of connection we have there.
Tyler Smith: In addition to questions we pulled from literature, we also came up with our own set of questions, including things regarding interest and concern concern for environmental topics.
Tyler Smith: Personal impacts of on employment and also on health.
Tyler Smith: We again took these outdoor activities we came up with a list of about 16 outdoor activities and then asked respondents you know what were their level of activity in these in these particular.
Tyler Smith: for participation in these particular activities before and then during these legislative orders.
Tyler Smith: And then to attention checks and you can see those listed here are shown here.
Tyler Smith: Those are really to kind of be sure that we are getting valid data that people are not just randomly going through our survey and clicking buttons that they're actually paying attention to the survey and answering truthfully and.
Tyler Smith: Completing the entire survey and so these are again a couple of the ones that we used in our survey.
Tyler Smith: In addition, we also gathered demographic and socio cultural information, including age education.
Tyler Smith: Gender things of that nature, but we also wanted to find out, you know if people were working in a stem or non stem stem field we wanted to understand the kind of the.
Tyler Smith: The overall religious activity that people were involved in if they were you know attending religious services weekly or or more often.
Tyler Smith: And then also political orientation.
Tyler Smith: And how those those things would impact environmental risk perceptions.
Tyler Smith: So what we did was use Amazon amazon's mechanical Turk service, this is a crowdsourcing service provided by Amazon that.
Tyler Smith: can be sent out there workers that do you know different types of tasks, for you know different amounts of payment.
Tyler Smith: So we used it to to ask people to complete our survey and it does offer the ability to kind of customize your survey parameters, so we used, we wanted to restrict our our survey to just people within the United States and that were 18 or older.
Tyler Smith: We initially sent out a pilot survey of 250.
Tyler Smith: In October of 2020 and then, once we got that back and kind of understood that that our questions were performing the way that we expected them to we sent out an additional to an additional 1000 him Turk workers for a total of.
Tyler Smith: 1200 and 50 that came back in December of 2020.
Tyler Smith: So one of the first things we did on our data when it came in was run exploratory factor analysis we first did it on the pilot study again to make sure that our questions were performing the way that we expected them to.
Tyler Smith: And then, once we got that back and sent out our our our additional thousand.
Tyler Smith: or send our survey out to an additional thousand workers, we got back the full set of.
Tyler Smith: In the narrow that down to 1200 and 10 after going through and excluding any questions that there any responses that did not meet the those attention checks that I mentioned earlier.
Tyler Smith: We were looking for loadings of somewhere over 0.3 in our factor analysis and what this does is show relationships between variables and show that these are our strong.
Tyler Smith: So we identified five different constructs that you can see here environmental risk risk perception the outdoor activity before and during.
Tyler Smith: pandemic orders societal values and measures of societal importance we did exclude one item from the environmental risk perception that was not performing like we thought it should and then two items each from before and during outdoor activities.
Tyler Smith: So, following that once we got all of our data back end we we ran a reliability analysis and it shows that.
Tyler Smith: Your data is consistently reflecting its measured construct and what we're looking for is krombach alpha values.
Tyler Smith: Over Point six is considered acceptable, but you can see here that four of the five of our constructs that we chose are well over point nine and the fifth one is that a value of over point eight so all of these performed very well and reliability analysis.
Tyler Smith: So, then, we took a look at distribution of ages, this is just some some preliminary results that that we've been working on.
Tyler Smith: You can see that we have a age range of 1896 years old, with a mean of about 39.4 years you can see, based on this graph here that it kind of skews over toward toward the younger end of things and so.
Tyler Smith: We can kind of take that and see what that means going forward, but this is just sort of a distribution of those those ages across the range that we have.
Tyler Smith: Some additional demographic information again, you know our in was about 1200 and 10 people took roughly 18.7 minutes on average for people to complete the survey, it was a fairly large survey, but it wasn't anything that was going to take you know.
Tyler Smith: An hour or anything like that to complete so we got a pretty good average completion time white males were the predominant survey respondents we did have a good majority of people here, you can see, with an education for your education or above.
Tyler Smith: A high number of majority of people working in the in the stem fields and then you can see, religious activity and political orientation listed here toward the bottom.
Tyler Smith: So, in addition, we also wanted to find out what kind of employment changes people were going through 66% of our respondents considered themselves to be essential workers.
Tyler Smith: During the pandemic identified themselves that way 62% or 62.6% did say that their their employment status was affected in some way.
Tyler Smith: Little over 50% were laid off or furloughed and then at point six transitioned into a work from home scenario.
Tyler Smith: We asked you know what kind of if people enjoyed spending time outdoors and we can see that a good amount here if we look at a moderate a lot and a great deal.
Tyler Smith: The vast majority, this is believe something along the lines of 87 point or 87% of respondents do enjoy spending at least a little bit of time outside.
Tyler Smith: And so you know this very possibly could kind of.
Tyler Smith: shows us a little preliminary.
Tyler Smith: evidence that this outdoor activity is.
Tyler Smith: Maybe, something that people are engaging in.
Tyler Smith: also looked at whether or not state and local parks were close this may have some effect on how much people were able to get outside.
Tyler Smith: And do things like camping and hiking and things of that nature, I know where I live, the state parks were closed our local parks are open here in Alabama.
Tyler Smith: or where i'm from I should say in Tennessee the state parks were closed but local parks were open, but here in Alabama or the state parks were open during the pandemic or during the early stages and legislative orders.
Tyler Smith: We also asked you know talking about the climate as climate risk.
Tyler Smith: perception is this idea of.
Tyler Smith: climate.
Tyler Smith: Risk as it relates to environmental risk perception, we asked you know how sure are you that climate change is happening, we can see a large number of respondents here are either very sure or extremely sure that this is taking place.
Tyler Smith: So this we think will play into.
Tyler Smith: into our final results in measuring environmental risk perception based around that that climate risk assessment that we that we used.
Tyler Smith: So you can see some environmental concerns we have.
Tyler Smith: Over 75% of our respondents are at least have some general interest in environmental topics very interested in extremely interested here.
Tyler Smith: A little less than 75% but still a large number are very have some concern for these environmental topics 55.3 are engaged in some sort of environmental organization, whether that is.
Tyler Smith: Greenpeace or the audubon society or something to that effect and then 67 point to engage in some environmental activity on a monthly basis or more, whether that be recycling or trash cleanup tree planting something of that nature.
Tyler Smith: These measures of societal importance, this is the you can see these listed across the bottom here, these were measured on a one to 10 scale from not at all important to extremely important.
Tyler Smith: And there are some in here that that revolve around a little bit around are related to the earth sciences and environmental.
Tyler Smith: ideas such as respect for earth, environmental protection, pollution prevention things of that nature, you can see that all three of those measured, you know have fairly high means.
Tyler Smith: On this this particular scale and so we're kind of again starting to see this at least visually this trend of some concern for the environment and and thinking about the environment.
Tyler Smith: This environmental risk paper by Larkin at all or it's a climate risk assessment from the barking at all, we used five of those.
Tyler Smith: In our our survey, to look at risk due to climate change, nuclear power agricultural substances water pollution and air pollution, and you can see the means of these answers listed here, this was another one to 10 scale with one being no risk and 10 being an extreme risk to the environment.
Tyler Smith: So again, these are all.
Tyler Smith: preliminary data, there are no plans going forward to to run confirmatory factor analysis on this data and then also regression analysis to kind of see.
Tyler Smith: The connection between outdoor activity and environmental risk perception climate knowledge and environmental risk perception and really dig into this data quite heavily and see what we can come up with.
Tyler Smith: Here in the next.
Tyler Smith: few weeks to months.
Tyler Smith: And then potential related studies something i'm interested in and would like to kind of think about going forward is similar to the climate risk perception.
Tyler Smith: tool that Dr the barking.
Tyler Smith: implemented in her study, I would like to come up with something that's a little more abroad, a little bit more of a full environmental risk perception or environmental knowledge.
Tyler Smith: tool and measure that to look at that to understand a little bit more about environmental risk perception I think that's something that is lacking in literature, right now, and I think that would be something worthwhile to dig into down the road.
Tyler Smith: And with that I will take any questions that you all may have, thank you very much.
karen McNeal: Great job, and there is a question in the chat Kelly, if you wanna.
Kelly Lazar: yeah and so lily asked says and fantastic project and presentation, I wanted to ask about the predominantly white cool respondents because that's an issue i've encountered in a survey project i've been working on to do you think it's because of the digital nature of the survey.
Tyler Smith: That is a really good question I think it's very possible that that.
Tyler Smith: That has something to do with it.
Tyler Smith: But it again it's something that i'm interested in it's something that we noticed kind of initially and have been thinking about and it's something i'm definitely interested in trying to find a little bit more about.
Tyler Smith: But I don't know the answer to it right off the top of my head honestly I don't have a definitive yes or no, for you.
karen McNeal: I have a question Tyler when you've been exploring the data have you gotten to look at the hen house i'm working with you on the project, but I am curious if you've gotten to explore some of the activities people reported on doing.
karen McNeal: The either before or after and if you have any initial ideas as to whether those started to change.
Tyler Smith: I looked at a little bit of that it's it's so it's not really numerical data so it's hard to get means and stuff like that or anything.
Tyler Smith: But I have kind of briefly looked into it and tried to compare a few different things in it honestly it looks things look pretty similar from before and during they don't look like there's a ton of change there is some here and there, but it's not a not a lot.
Kelly Lazar: awesome thanks Tyler absolutely.
karen McNeal: All right, right on time Okay, so our next speaker is Dr Athena nagel Athena you can go.
karen McNeal: ahead and share your screen.
karen McNeal: As I introduce you.
Renee Clary: So i'll i'll be sharing the screen for the presentation if that's okay.
karen McNeal: yeah no problem go ahead, Dr clary.
karen McNeal: The title of our next presenter presentation is broadening participation through online introductory geology courses challenges from the global pandemic so right in line with our previous presentation, as we talk about the impacts of coated.
Renee Clary: how's that.
karen McNeal: We can see it, and we see your presentation view.
Renee Clary: Oh no really.
karen McNeal: No, we were seeing the correct one i'm sorry.
Athena Owen Nagel: Not anymore, it was there yeah.
Renee Clary: yeah I flipped it so yeah.
karen McNeal: Perfect mark.
Okay.
Athena Owen Nagel: I guess we're ready, then.
Renee Clary: we're ready.
Athena Owen Nagel: um so i'm audio and nagel and doctor and a clear he's also co author on this and she'll be jumping in at a couple points in our presentation here, but I wanted to just.
Athena Owen Nagel: introduce our project here, initially in the first few slides what we're talking about our introductory geology courses, these are specific for a program that we have to nsf.
Athena Owen Nagel: For the state of Mississippi and so with that if you want to go to the next slide um So why did we want to set this up.
Athena Owen Nagel: For Mississippi, why was on these type of classes, important for the state and so Mississippi has a lot of things.
Athena Owen Nagel: kind of against it, a lot of times we have a lot of stereotypes facility, we have some data to back up and so Mississippi was ranked highest.
Athena Owen Nagel: In a priority needing to change because of the amount of Rule education that we had.
Athena Owen Nagel: We also have the highest population of African Americans and so that allowed this project to reach more minority groups and so that was a great thing for this particular project in our state.
Athena Owen Nagel: mississippi's K 12 also ranked 47th nationally, with the US news report giving us that number and then 46 in its overall aggregate score and 34th in the national assessment of educational programs.
Athena Owen Nagel: In 2018 Okay, so we have a lot of room for improvement here in the state of Mississippi what we wanted to do is brought in participation.
Athena Owen Nagel: Especially those minority groups in geosciences and especially in geology and so that is one of the reasons Mississippi was great for this particular project that we're doing.
Athena Owen Nagel: Right so geology course options in Mississippi are somewhat limited we do of course have them at the four year institutions but Mississippi itself has the oldest Community college system in the US, which I always think is kind of cool.
Athena Owen Nagel: And so we have 15 different Community colleges and you can see them here in this map.
Athena Owen Nagel: And the courses from those Community colleges transfer directly to the four year institutions Mississippi state Ole miss etc so it's it's really easy for those students to bring those credits to the four year universities and so.
Athena Owen Nagel: We wanted to really help those Community colleges, but the problem, we ran into was only one of those Community colleges of the 15 offer geology.
Athena Owen Nagel: So any students coming in that wanted to major in any of the geosciences but especially geology didn't have.
Athena Owen Nagel: The coursework that they needed to start as a junior because they wouldn't have had or science or science to at that point, so that was our plan was to kind of address this issue through this project.
Athena Owen Nagel: Alright, so what we did was we came up with a program called GEO spark which was funded through an nsf I use program and US mark stands for geosciences streamline.
Athena Owen Nagel: streamline pipeline research for Community colleges and basically what we set up with a partnership between our department Mississippi state geosciences and Jones college to help streamline.
Athena Owen Nagel: Community college students into for your programs, so what we wanted to do is develop these introductory courses that we could offer online and so through our program we've developed.
Athena Owen Nagel: goi 1111 which is physical geology lab goi 1113, which is the actual physical geology lecture series, as well as the historical lab 1121 and historical lecture 1123 so that gave these Community college students a chance to take these courses before they came to a four year institution.
Athena Owen Nagel: On the really cool thing about the Community college network and making these classes online is that the Community college network has this tool, called the Mississippi virtual Community college consortium.
Athena Owen Nagel: it's kind of a mouthful, but it makes any online course available to all the Community colleges so like our particular online course was offered through Jones college, but any of the other 14.
Athena Owen Nagel: Community college their students could also take the online class through this virtual tool and so it's been a neat way to offer these online courses to all of the the whole state Community college network.
Athena Owen Nagel: Right So how do we set the courses, how do we want to get the students to buy in, and so the first thing we wanted to do was to connect the students to their state.
Athena Owen Nagel: So we made up these units called in Mississippi, and this is a picture of Dr clary and I driving.
Athena Owen Nagel: to one of the sites, we we went in person to as many of them as we could get to you this is red bluff in Mississippi that our students actually told us about.
Athena Owen Nagel: We didn't know about this one in the first place, I mean the first time we offer the class, and so we would drive around, and we would offer.
Athena Owen Nagel: geology content in the field in video lectures for the students, and so this connected the students to physical and historical geology in a state that they were aware of.
Athena Owen Nagel: This supported the idea that students have greater interest in their local areas.
Athena Owen Nagel: And it really helped them by in It also builds on content that they already have and experiences they've already had, like many of our students had already been here to read left.
Athena Owen Nagel: So they knew more of what we were talking about because they could picture in their head as we went along we filmed these in the field lectures with gopro camera a lot like selfie mode, which I think the students also kind of connected to say, make a lot of their own videos that way.
Athena Owen Nagel: You know, and their social media and stuff we also film some stuff at the beaches, we looked at dunes.
Athena Owen Nagel: shoreline processes, we had an algal bloom in the year that we did this in the summer 2019.
Athena Owen Nagel: And so i'm that was awful but it kind of worked out to us that we didn't have any people on the beach shows really easy to show the shoreline processes and the other things going on.
Athena Owen Nagel: As well as a cautionary geology there, and so we came up with one at least one of these in Mississippi units little video segments, most of them are less than 10 minutes for each unit that we had in both of the classes.
Athena Owen Nagel: Alright, so the next thing, excuse me, the next thing we did was we wanted to get people to realize why.
Athena Owen Nagel: geoscience careers we're cool we're why they should want to participate in geosciences, and so one of the ways that we did that was we created a second little.
Athena Owen Nagel: Video segment and each unit called me to do, scientists and so Dr clearing I interviewed have.
Athena Owen Nagel: A diverse group of geoscientist and so here's a couple of them kalisa stamps is was a Grad student who'd work as an environmental scientist beforehand.
Athena Owen Nagel: And so we were trying to also represent you know the different types of geosciences field as well as different minority groups, women, etc, so that people.
Athena Owen Nagel: In our classes could see that Jesus is we're for everyone, we also got to interview on George Philips who's an alumni from our program he's now in the curator paleontology.
Athena Owen Nagel: And this gave us the option to interview people at different degree level so some some of the geoscientist suddenly had a bachelor's degree, while some of them had PhDs as well.
Athena Owen Nagel: So we had a couple other ones we did get branch outside of geology and so we've interviewed Dr Mike Brown, who is a state climatologist as well as the severe weather meteorologist and so that gave students.
Athena Owen Nagel: Some outside perspectives beyond geology for geosciences the pandemic made it a little more interesting and we started doing some interviews via zoom and so you can see, Dr clary and this side slide.
Athena Owen Nagel: I was gonna say to the right, but it may be few left on how your screen is.
Athena Owen Nagel: interviewing Thai food or who's a hydro geologists via zoom and so that gave us some other opportunities, where maybe we weren't worth it, with people, but we could still include them in our little vignettes.
Renee Clary: i'm going to talk a little bit about the program evaluation we built a really robust system to collect data and to to analyze the data.
Renee Clary: And one of the strongest pieces there is through our lds our longitudinal data system of Mississippi.
Renee Clary: So we have added in spark as one of our organizations and they can access all of those data from the Mississippi Department of Education.
Renee Clary: Unfortunately, the data are a year behind so our first in spark report last year only looked at our first classes, which were offered in right in 2019 the money.
Renee Clary: did not hit for this grant in time for us to offer the courses in the fall of 2018 so we could only look at the 2019 data and the Mississippi Department of Education has.
Renee Clary: specified that to protect anonymity, we only get numbers that are greater than 10 so all of our analyses were less than 10.
Renee Clary: Less than 10 now we have a way around that this year we have permission now from Jones college to use their data in numbers less than 10 for the analysis that is coming in in May.
Renee Clary: And we also have two years of data so hopefully we'll have something to report on that soon.
Renee Clary: We use pre and post surveys to look at students incoming knowledge and also they're exiting knowledge that has improved throughout the course.
Renee Clary: We have the end of semester anonymous surveys and of course we're looking at student exams and projects we want to focus here, though, on some of the successes that we have seen revealed through the content analysis of the student projects, as well as the surveys.
Athena Owen Nagel: yeah so our content analysis were for the 2019 and 2020 year now, obviously part of 2020 phil during coven and so we're going to talk about those issues and a little bit, but.
Athena Owen Nagel: A lot of what we were finding initially, of course, is that our online format as effective students are learning as I go through the the.
Athena Owen Nagel: Courses they know more when they end and when they start so we're glad to see that.
Athena Owen Nagel: Students also really enjoyed learning about the geologic history of their state it really helped him buy into the course material it really helped him realize how important this was.
Athena Owen Nagel: to learn, like the geology isn't just random rocks Why do I want to care about that so um that analysis was really great, and you know we of course felt like we knew that going in, but it was good to see the students also learning the same as we were.
Athena Owen Nagel: Okay, so here's some different comments that the students have made, and it was it was really fun to see the positive manner that the students related to the material.
Athena Owen Nagel: And the way that the class was set up in general, so we've had a lot of students, that said things like i've never taken an online class like this before.
Athena Owen Nagel: And they also enjoyed the projects and assignments that we had.
Athena Owen Nagel: With a hands on experience to go with the materials being learned so each of the units, we have a quiz where they cover the material and then they have some kind of little hands on assignment where they get to.
Athena Owen Nagel: to work with the material in a different way, besides just quizzes and exams so with the online courses it's more relaxed, because you can do the coursework during your.
Athena Owen Nagel: During the times that work best for your schedule, we did find that a lot of the students were working or they were parents or things like that, so the flexibility was something that they did deem as an advantage.
Athena Owen Nagel: Right so seeing something that we talked about in our class in our own State was awesome and that kind of goes with the connection of the state to.
Athena Owen Nagel: To the material and how students like that, and then other students said after taking this class I almost want to teach science and incorporate some of these lessons.
Athena Owen Nagel: or units into my future plans, so we a lot of the students are education majors that we've noticed coming in just, and I mean this is just kind of like eyeballing it we don't I don't have the exact numbers on that, but.
Athena Owen Nagel: Most of them are not geoscience degree seeking students in the courses, just to kind of keep that in mind.
Athena Owen Nagel: So the media geoscientist in the field investigations were always the highest ranked components of the class.
Athena Owen Nagel: So students didn't know how many fossils they could find just by looking in their backyard or their neighbor's yard.
Athena Owen Nagel: And it gave them a chance to learn more hands on and be more confident in identifying the fossils that they found in the future.
Athena Owen Nagel: They also really enjoyed the meat a geoscientist because it it helped him learn more about the field and to see that people could be God, you know, like anyone could be a geoscientist.
Athena Owen Nagel: Alright, so some of the most interesting things that Mississippi that students learn about Mississippi was that it used to be submerged in water.
Athena Owen Nagel: underwater and then they learned that Mississippi had fossil remains of different organisms in our State, so that the fossils were a big thing that a lot of students really enjoy.
Athena Owen Nagel: So some of the successes we've seen so far with our program was in the spring and fall of 2020 both the geology physical and historical geology classes, we were able to offer both of those we initially started off building just a physical geology and then went to.
Athena Owen Nagel: To building historical geology in a later semester.
Athena Owen Nagel: In the spring of 2019 through fall of 2020 students from three different Community colleges enrolled so we're starting to see numbers from some other Community colleges, besides Jones and then the online courses, especially the field excursions which we ran one field excursion for each.
Athena Owen Nagel: Each semester prior to Kobe was really well received the students really enjoyed them, they were optional of students couldn't make them because of the flexible nature of the course we gave them an alternative assignment.
Athena Owen Nagel: But a good majority of them did make the field excursions early on.
Athena Owen Nagel: Alright, so now we're going to look at some of the challenges so many of the students are unaware that the courses meet a physical science requirement on that and that they are available through the NSPCC.
Athena Owen Nagel: So one of the things we had come up with Dr clary and I to address this was we're going to do, Community college visits to the campuses and meet with the advisors or go on career day or revising day and help just raise awareness of the courses and what they could do for the students.
Athena Owen Nagel: In terms of science requirements and things like that.
Athena Owen Nagel: Alright, so many of the students were unaware of what course the course content covered.
Athena Owen Nagel: Or if the online classes would be engaging so some of them were a little bit hesitant to take online courses initially.
Athena Owen Nagel: And so we use the local field excursions to build the enrollment in those courses, of course, they.
Athena Owen Nagel: Most of the students had a great time and they went back and talk to their colleagues about it, and so, then they were interested in joining.
Athena Owen Nagel: The online class in the future, because they realized, it was more than maybe what a typical online class was or maybe how they had online learning in general built up in their head.
Athena Owen Nagel: right then Kobe hate and we all have had numerous challenges with that the students face challenges we as professors, of course, face challenges but.
Athena Owen Nagel: The challenges that i'm specifically talking about our for the program itself and so all the field experience had to be cancelled, and so we have been able to pick those backup yet so the current.
Athena Owen Nagel: spring of 2021 class that i'm currently teaching they didn't get to have the field excursions we did give the students again those self directed GEO caching or local field.
Athena Owen Nagel: Investigation assignments, for them to do on their own, when it was safe or However, it was safe based on whatever laws they were governing them at the time in the county where they're located.
Athena Owen Nagel: All the recruiting trips, of course, we're also cancelled, we weren't able to do that Dr cleary and I also couldn't.
Athena Owen Nagel: Go and fill more of the in in the field vignettes we had some plans for that.
Athena Owen Nagel: And so we feel like the lack of onsite field excursions and the reach out events really impacted our ability to enroll to build the enrollment in our courses, especially outside of john's college, because we had planned to go to several other Community colleges, to help raise awareness.
Athena Owen Nagel: Alright, so this semester, only the physical geology courses were offered we didn't have enough enrollment in historical geology classes and again a vast majority of those students are getting from Jones college so we're not.
Athena Owen Nagel: we're not getting that diversity that we really wanted to see from the other 14 colleges.
Athena Owen Nagel: Right, so the implications that we're seeing from this for our project and for going forward is that the local dissemination of course information on the Community college campuses was really vital to the course awareness and the enrollment.
Athena Owen Nagel: That was originally anticipated the face to face field excursions also seemed to really help on generate interest in the course and to get students more interested in geosciences and i've been really sad to see that go away, I hope we can bring that back soon.
Athena Owen Nagel: Alright, so our process was funded through nsf and here is our word number, so if you guys have any questions i'm happy to discuss them with you.
Kelly Lazar: Great Thank you to both of you that was really great to watch.
Kelly Lazar: There are there is a comment in the chat from Sharon, I appreciate short 10 minute videos for online courses I cheated, a friend last last semester waco Texas here.
Kelly Lazar: Who was taking an online geology course and the 30 to 45 minute videos from the course were difficult for her access to technology and and non native English speaker.
Kelly Lazar: And so comment about the short length of the videos and then Karen asked.
Kelly Lazar: The videos are wonderful highlighting women and people of color in the geosciences is an area that geosciences can continue to improve on based on recent literature, are these videos of those in the field publicly available, or are there plans for them to be post project.
Renee Clary: I can answer that as far as publicly available, so they belong to Jones college.
Renee Clary: What what we did, and in this project, actually was the idea of Theresa gamble you know she said why don't you build online courses.
Renee Clary: And we thought that would be a conflict of interest and we we asked really can we do that, and she said, if nsf pays your time, yes, you can do that.
Renee Clary: So we thought this was right up our alley, by the way, Dr niggles never going to say this, but she's the national winner of the online teaching award this year, the upc EA online teaching award.
Renee Clary: yeah she's awesome so you know we we figured we could do this and Mississippi state approved us to do this, but everything belongs to Jones college.
Renee Clary: They have been willing to share some of these media geoscientist videos.
Renee Clary: With us at Mississippi state so we're also looking at maybe expanding that a little further, because we agree, you know that we really want to make sure that students see someone who looks like them.
Renee Clary: In the videos and and Dr nagel was the one who pointed out that you know after we had sort of taken over our colleagues office to.
Renee Clary: five minute videos she said, you know, we should get some people out of academia.
Renee Clary: So that's how that all started.
Kelly Lazar: Right, thank you and I think we'll move on to our last Lindsey.
Kelly Lazar: Here you did.
yep.
Lindsay Maudlin: Alright, so for our last talk, we have Dr Ken.
Lindsay Maudlin: mcneil from the Department of geosciences.
Lindsay Maudlin: At auburn university.
Lindsay Maudlin: And she will be speaking to us about supporting under represented undergraduate students and the geosciences their partnerships between university housing and academic.
karen McNeal: Thank you, hopefully, you all can see my screen.
karen McNeal: Oh, I forgot to share that's kind of important.
karen McNeal: Now, you should be able to see my screen.
karen McNeal: Yes, it looks like it okay oh you think, by now, we get the zoom thing taken care of um Anyway, thank you guys for attending this session.
karen McNeal: And i'm going to you know wrap it up here with this presentation, which I think fits the theme of the previous presentation and supporting under represented undergraduate students in the geosciences in our case.
karen McNeal: We develop the partnership between university housing and academics at the University of South Carolina, and this is an sm nsf stem project and the API was Dr Claudia nice Nelson from usc and a Co GI Joe Jones and I served as the external evaluator of the project.
karen McNeal: And maybe will advance there we go i'm just for some context, since this project focuses on both first generation students and.
karen McNeal: ethnically underrepresented students in the geosciences just for some context first Generation Students actually make up a large proportion of.
karen McNeal: Students that are seeking undergraduate degrees in the United States shown in this figure we can look at.
karen McNeal: First 10 students versus continuing Generation Students, and when I talk about first gen students, those are students who do not have a parent that has a bath athletes degree Okay, and so we can see that.
karen McNeal: A lot of students are in this category, but when we look at continuing Generation Students versus first gen students, we see that we have more first gen students in the black and Latin X.
karen McNeal: categories and we have more continuing students in in the white populations and when we talk about first gen students why they're important obviously we want to offer.
karen McNeal: college education to everybody, as many people as possible, so this is one important aspect, but also in supporting their pathway through school, we have to realize that they could be coming with some.
karen McNeal: Cultural deficits, because they don't have a parent in the household to kind of help them navigate the College experience, but we also don't want to just focus on those.
karen McNeal: deficits that students from first gen backgrounds also come with strengths, with their social capital and the networking and the relationships and the various skills that they have as well, so we don't want to just focus on.
karen McNeal: The things that they don't have because they do come with a lot of things they're just different than perhaps some of our continuing Generation Students.
karen McNeal: Also, when we look at the geosciences in as far as our ethnic diversity these graphs I know there's several of them here, but if you focus on the red line.
karen McNeal: That represents the geosciences over the last decade or so and we can see that as compared to other stem fields and we look at we look at bachelor's and master's degrees, the geosciences are is much.
karen McNeal: lower than the other fields, as far as the ethnic diversity and enrollment of bachelor's and master's degrees so obviously this is something that the geosciences needs to work on.
karen McNeal: And unfortunately various literature that has come out in the last couple of years has pointed to the fact that we haven't made a whole lot of progress in diversity within the geosciences, notably in.
karen McNeal: This came out in nature geoscience no progress on diversity in 40 years and in response to that and various professional societies such as the American geophysical Union, as well as the GSA put out diversity inclusion strategic plans and.
karen McNeal: And, and since.
karen McNeal: May and the social unrest that we've experienced in the last year, additional efforts have been put into place, I think, humanity wide and here's one.
karen McNeal: that he has done in the voices for diversity and here's a opinion piece that came out in ios recently just.
karen McNeal: A couple months ago about raising our voices to increase diversity in the geosciences and then also I was a Co editor of a special issue in the journal to your science, education in.
karen McNeal: Where we were asking for the peer reviewed scholarly community to put in submissions.
karen McNeal: About work that has happened within the field since the last time this special issue came out in 2007 so we were looking at what had occurred.
karen McNeal: Since then, and specifically looking at the types of papers that were submitted to this special issue I broke them down by topic, and we had around I think 20 ish submissions and you can see, the various topics that people were submitting on from.
karen McNeal: inclusive environments to training faculty three that I want to look at is mentoring so mentoring of students, the recruitment and perception of students, as well as the success of national programs, such as the opportunities for enhancing geoscience diversity which doesn't any longer.
karen McNeal: exists, as well as the gold program of course now as we just heard in the previous presentation has been replaced with GEO pathak program and i'm going to present today to you about the stem program impact.
karen McNeal: Or at least one project, so the project i'm going to talk to you about kind of hits on three of these areas, the start areas of mentoring student recruitment and perceptions of the geoscientist as well as the, given that it was an SDM project.
karen McNeal: And so the the project is called GEO scholars and again it's at the University of South Carolina it was funded in 2016 and it provided for years of support to usc undergraduates that were in financial aid.
karen McNeal: And that were either first generation students or minority students in the geosciences and they received at a stipend for all four years.
karen McNeal: To help offset educational cost of tuition and then they also receive a housing offset to leave it live at the green quad which i'll talk more about in a minute.
karen McNeal: And in addition they were provided one to one mentoring, with a faculty Member actually to faculty members which i'll talk a little bit about how that was structured and they all had to be within the school of earth ocean in the environment at the University of South Carolina.
karen McNeal: And the project was designed to basically bring partnerships between academics and the housing environment at usc.
karen McNeal: Or what i'm going to refer to as bringing prod, which is where our GEO scholars who stayed in their freshman year is a living and learning community and.
karen McNeal: It has, I guess, one it's affordable and and we made it more affordable, by providing some offsets for housing.
karen McNeal: costs and also within the green quad there's Tutoring spaces for Tutoring there's.
karen McNeal: Some of the university one on one course that they are required to take is held their their their study groups and seminar available, so they have they don't have to leave their space to get some academic support.
karen McNeal: there's also programming around sustainable living and there has been previous literature, or at least you know usc that the.
karen McNeal: Data to support that these living and learning communities can benefit retention and GPA of students, which is why we embedded it into this program.
karen McNeal: The academic side of things included the university one a one course that I mentioned, as well as introductory courses that are GEO scholars were enrolled in the major including.
karen McNeal: introductory to marine science or introductory to environmental science or geological sciences, depending upon their major.
karen McNeal: And then, as I mentioned the one to one mentorship so they had a faculty mentor on the academic side of the API which was Dr Claudia enemies Nelson.
karen McNeal: She really provided the mentorship for the students to on the academic side and then Dr.
karen McNeal: Joe Williams, provided a his his office was located within the housing unit itself so that outside of academia, the students had somebody that they can refer to as well, so when they were in their dorm they had a full time.
karen McNeal: person that they could go to.
karen McNeal: So our goals were to increase the number of academically talented and low income minority and first Generation Students that pursued and completed an undergraduate degree.
karen McNeal: In the geosciences and, of course, share the strategies that were we were using with others.
karen McNeal: And we have so far five cohorts with 21 students supported within the range of major stated here 14 females and seven males seven black or African American students three Hispanic next one, a native American and 10 white students of which 16 or first 10 students.
karen McNeal: And, as I said before, my role was evaluating the efficacy and effectiveness of the Program.
karen McNeal: So I asked two main questions, how will GIs scholars students be impacted as a result of participating in the Program.
karen McNeal: Where I was specifically looking at their knowledge attitudes and perceptions about the geosciences what their perceptions of supports our barriers.
karen McNeal: Were and their perceptions of housing and whether what their sense of belonging and grit was during the Program.
karen McNeal: And if there were any differences between this group of students and those with similar backgrounds, or those that were also majors in the at usc in the school of earth ocean in the environment.
karen McNeal: So this is a little bit of the design of the project, as I said, we had this GEO scholar group.
karen McNeal: I implemented pre and post surveys with them, I also conduct this annual site visits and focus group interviews and then the three other groups, including.
karen McNeal: A comparison group of trio students trio is a program that exists that helps support low income students in their graduate or in their undergraduate programming.
karen McNeal: and gives them some professional development skills on their way so that they are more successful in in college.
karen McNeal: And then we also had a group of the those that were enrolled in those introductory courses within the school of earth ocean and environment there were also majors.
karen McNeal: So we pre post surveyed these folks as well and and or the survey we use.
karen McNeal: had five scales, including sense of belonging geoscience self efficacy attitudes and career interest perceived supports embarrassed barriers their perceptions of their residence hall in a grid scale.
karen McNeal: I utilize questions from literature as much as I could, but I did have to develop to have the new scales can.
karen McNeal: Including perceived support and barriers and perceptions of their residence Hall, you can see the reliability each of these scales, with the number of items in each scale the sense of belonging scale is the only one that really didn't perform very well.
karen McNeal: And we use it just because it has been used in the literature before, but you know, keep that in mind when you see the results.
karen McNeal: And then we looked at the pre post results are real constant ring sign analysis, which is a non parametric analysis or within in between subjects.
karen McNeal: And here is the results of the sense of belonging, you can see that there was no significant differences between our studio scholars and the other groups, they all were about mid.
karen McNeal: range and their sense of belonging and the geosciences and this didn't really change that much before after after the other things that did not change much where the barriers are support.
karen McNeal: The grid or participation and I didn't differ between groups i'm not going to show you those results because they were all not statistically significant from here on i'm just going to show you the scales that were statistically significant.
karen McNeal: And so, do you science attitudes did change and we're different in between groups so at the pre Jewish scholar started higher than trio and environmental students.
karen McNeal: But we're similar to msci meaning the Marine Science one on one class we did have you know some marine science majors energy or science group that could contribute in part to it.
karen McNeal: However, post your scholars made greater gains than trio and msci students and they were significantly different than trio students.
karen McNeal: And also thing to note is that the environmental students, although they started out much lower than the Jewish scholar students and.
karen McNeal: They made up that difference quite a bit, and so one class actually can make a difference in changing do your science attitudes and I think that that's something that it can is important to note.
karen McNeal: um so perceptions of housing GEO scholar students has significantly higher views of their housing situation than the non Jewish scholars students.
karen McNeal: And some of these non Jewish scholar students did live in green quad others lived in other campus and.
karen McNeal: communities and some didn't live on campus at all, but in general the two years fellow students because of that living and learning Community seem to have higher views of their housing situation.
karen McNeal: And when we dig deeper into those that lived in green quad and those that did not lived in on campus residence halls.
karen McNeal: We see that the attitudes of those that lived in green quad were much higher than those that did not.
karen McNeal: But that also seemed to reflect in their geoscience attitudes were again there geoscience attitudes were systematically significantly higher than those that did not live in green quad which is interesting.
karen McNeal: And if we dig into this a little bit more, there was an open ended question that asked them about whether their housing experience supported their academic.
karen McNeal: trajectory more or less it wasn't raised that way but that's more or less what we were getting at.
karen McNeal: and any qualitative score as we qualitative look look at these we score them and fair positive we gave them a score of one if they were negative we gave them a score of zero.
karen McNeal: And what we found was that those that lived in green quad had a much, much higher positive.
karen McNeal: perspective about their living environment than those that did not live in green quad but still lived on on campus in a residence Hall, and nearly the highest scores one and nearly the score was very close to one for those that lived in green quad so i'm.
karen McNeal: So, like I said, the green quad seems to be doing something with students perspectives and, lastly, the last quantitative analysis, we did was a correlation analysis.
karen McNeal: Looking at just Jesus followers relationships of some of those scales that I showed you and so those that had higher sense of belonging also had higher attitudes that was statistically significant about the geosciences those that felt more supported also had a higher.
karen McNeal: Greater more positive perspectives of their housing and those that felt more supported also participated more in college activities university wide.
karen McNeal: So these are just some relationships to keep in mind not predictors but just relationships of various ways to support students.
karen McNeal: And like I said I interviewed some of the students and the Jewish scholars and I.
karen McNeal: Put the results into four things the first theme is that obviously the geo scholars program has provided students with opportunities to attend usc that they went, have had it, this is mostly related to the scholarship aspect.
karen McNeal: The theme that was really kind of like the big one was this faculty mentorship they mentioned it over and over again that potting Joe were very important to them.
karen McNeal: That they've saved them many times that they expose them to resources and it's nice to know someone is on your side.
karen McNeal: And the third theme is other living and learning Community made a big difference to their students, at least in their freshman year.
karen McNeal: oftentimes after freshman year they would move off campus or do other things, but the freshman year, this seems to be very important and then lastly at.
karen McNeal: The Jewish scholar students also seem to be very involved on campus because they get that early exposure to various things are happening on campus they have it gets information up front and they're all sort of doing it together.
karen McNeal: or getting involved together and things like that So these are some of the things that they were invited, or that they were involved in so quite quite a list.
karen McNeal: And also, I could focus a lot on the things that they're doing during their undergraduate time, such as our us.
karen McNeal: Research with usc faculty members and make near program and other scholarships, but for this slide i'm focusing on what happens.
karen McNeal: Once they graduate and are we graduating them, are they graduating successfully so so far.
karen McNeal: We have 100% graduation rate with 80% of those immediately employed or placed in a graduate program so five of those that have graduated are in graduate programs, one of which has received and noise scholarship.
karen McNeal: To our nsf Dr P awardees and in yellow are some of the professional fields that these students have gone on to do.
karen McNeal: So, of the 10 that have graduated and a few that have already accepted positions that are graduating in May.
karen McNeal: And you can see a range of fields such as natural resources department efficient wildlife services Noah but then also some other fields such as pharmaceutical companies but tech and one working at Amazon.
karen McNeal: So in conclusion the Jews, the Jewish scholars program has successfully recruited and supported for students at the usc program largely through this partnership with university housing, the challenge, however, is continuing this really rich one on one mentorship opportunity with faculty.
karen McNeal: and continuing the financial support.
karen McNeal: That, in the future we're working on currently institutionalizing this across college of arts and sciences, not just in that one department at usc and, of course, developing the llc but really.
karen McNeal: Continuing to do that with the trio program that I mentioned earlier, we saw that some of those results for trio were a little lower we want to work on increasing that.
karen McNeal: The llc might be a good way to do that recommendations if you're looking at continue doing something like this is finding ways to reward faculty for their mentorship efforts I mean these efforts aren't trivial they take time.
karen McNeal: and creating partnerships with your on campus resources and programs, such as housing or trio or mcnair or whatever you have available.
karen McNeal: and finding ways to recruit information out there, this came up I think earlier in our conversation, the first year they relied on email, and they found that a lot of students and or their parents really weren't replying to email that mail outs were actually more.
karen McNeal: helpful in getting this information out to prospective students at this program exists and even phone calls.
karen McNeal: and obviously being evaluator i'm going to say, be sure to check your progress if you are doing such a program getting that information is really important, so I just want to acknowledge the nsf for supporting this program and all the other contributors to make this program possible.
karen McNeal: I think for something.
Kelly Lazar: Please carry the questions before we head into concluding remarks.
Kaelyn Tyler: I have a question if that'd be okay.
Absolutely.
Kaelyn Tyler: yeah so at i'm a an undergraduate at the College, because the GA and we have a program here that's called the stem mentor Program.
Kaelyn Tyler: And instead of relying on faculty members to be like mentors to the students, we do like a peer mentorship so it's juniors and seniors who talked to like.
Kaelyn Tyler: And I was assigned I think 18 freshmen this semester that bi weekly I check in with and then, as part of that, for the yearly time that I check in with them and do the mentorship I get $1,000 scholarship for my tuition.
Kaelyn Tyler: I was wondering if you thought about doing something more towards that, rather than relying so heavily in faculty.
karen McNeal: No, I think that's really smart we I didn't mention that but, so there are a's at the green quad.
karen McNeal: For time, those are a's became alumni of our alumni meaning finishing their.
karen McNeal: freshman year of our GIs scholars program so in a way we were embedding that as well.
karen McNeal: But I agree having those new your peer mentors is is a great way to get at it, I do think there's still need for faculty because of just the the connections that faculty can make with research and.
karen McNeal: networking and, but I also want to comment that a lot of times when I focus group interviewed the students, they talked a lot about how they shared scholarship resources that us as faculty may not know about so.
karen McNeal: Knowing that a scholarship exists, and you can share that with your colleagues that that in that you can apply for that there are things we don't know about that students can inform each other.
karen McNeal: So yeah thanks for that's a great idea.
Kelly Lazar: Other questions.
Kelly Lazar: minutes for more Jewish scholar here that's wonderful and the question that I had, I think you answered it at the very end and.
Kelly Lazar: was how to recruit GEO scholars, especially.
Kelly Lazar: If it's a if there are freshmen in the in recruited into the Program.
karen McNeal: You know yeah that's been a challenge so.
karen McNeal: And just you know from the guy's perspective on this program like I said in that first year.
karen McNeal: You know just emailing people who were potentially on a list of those who have inquired about the program or were had applied.
karen McNeal: Those emails just got lost, so it was really the need to do, mail out seemed to me they said seem to be more effective, but even phone calls if there's resources to do that, I think, made a bit it takes more effort.
karen McNeal: But that was noticed at the after the first cohort.
karen McNeal: That even some of the people who came into the program said, if it wasn't for that mailing that my mom got I wouldn't know about this now.
Kelly Lazar: Right other questions.
Kelly Lazar: Well, if there's any questions you can pop them in the chat when they sort of rise to the surface and Karen I want to move into concluding.
karen McNeal: yeah I think we only have a minute so I think i'm just going to thank everybody for their contributions today and hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and appreciate all the presenters so pause for everybody.
karen McNeal: Alright, have a great rest of the time, everybody.