2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Identifying Student Profiles Related to Success in an Analog Signal Processing Course

Presented at Empowering Students: Self-Efficacy, Advising, and Transfer Success

Researchers in Engineering education are working to identify sets of student features that play a role in course performance with the goal of helping students improve their outcomes. Specifically, researchers identified motivation, certain study behaviors, sense of belonging, and growth mindset as important factors. This prior work mainly focused on introduction to programming courses. In this paper we focus on an important sophomore course in Electrical Engineering: Analog Signal Processing. A large portion of the course involves conceptual problem solving that requires students to think about a problem and conceptually understand it before starting to work on it. These study behaviors might be new to students. During Spring 2022 and Fall 2022 we surveyed over 600 students in two semesters of an Analog Signal Processing course in a large state university. Students answered a questionnaire with 60 questions taken from validated instruments related to the factors mentioned previously, and they also answered a short 2-3 question survey before/after each exam asking about the resources they used to study for the exam. We analyze interactions between all of these factors so that in future work, we can design interventions specifically tailored to such conceptual problem solving classes.

Authors

Dr. Juan Alvarez University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Juan Alvarez joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois faculty in Spring 2011 and is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at York University, Canada, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chemical Physics Theory Group at the University of Toronto, Canada, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Saskatchewan. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.S. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois in 2004 and 2002, respectively. He teaches courses in communications, signal processing and probability.
Dr. Jennifer R. Amos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9437-8201 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr Amos joined the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois in 2009 and is currently a Teaching Professor in Bioengineering.
Yael Gertner University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr Gertner joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois in 2020 as a Teaching Assistant Professor. She received her B.S. and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current focus is on broadening participation in Computer Science and Computer Science Education She has been developing materials and teaching for iCAN, a new program for broadening participation in CS for students who have a bachelor’s degree in a field other than computer science.
Benjamin Cosman University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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