2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Recent studies show that, while 58% of White students persist in earning a STEM degree, the percentage of Latinx students who persist is only 43% [1]. This NSF-funded project takes place at New Mexico State University (NMSU), a Land-Grant and Space Grant Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) that enrolls a large Latinx and multicultural student population including 58% Latinos, 27% whites, 5% nonresident aliens, 3% African Americans, and 2% American Indians [2]. In particular, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students are a student population that needs to grow, as ECE students represent 2% of the total NMSU student population [3] despite the importance of this field in our modern society. This project is a work in progress whose research goal is to develop and evaluate iteratively an online mixed-reality (MR) wisdom community (ECE-WisCom) to support resilience in ECE students.

The Wisdom Communities (WisComs) Framework for distance learning generates growth of the learning community in online programs [4]. Each learner has unique knowledge, needs, experiences, culture, and expectations that, when shared, can broaden others’ perspectives and knowledge bases while they benefit from those others [5]. Learners with diverse levels of competence learn from one another and their instructors. In a WisCom, learners collaboratively follow an inquiry cycle of learning challenges, exploration of possibilities and resources, continuous reflection, negotiation among fellow participants, and preservation of their new-found knowledge.

To address a better integration of key elements in ECE students’ education and socialization, an online MR platform will be created, where human and virtual pedagogical companions interacting with each other can facilitate the development of the ECE-WisCom. Three hypotheses are to be probed as follows: (i) the diverse knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of a multidisciplinary group of faculty and students will enhance student’s sense of belonging in a learning community, identity development, critical thinking, and academic performance, (ii) the ECE-WisCom will encourage faculty to become naturally involved in pedagogical efforts tailored to a broad student body with particular needs, (iii) this framework will foster a variety of co-mentoring relationships and thereby increase communication and social networking within the ECE department and with the broader ECE community.

A mixed-methods approach will be used to evaluate the efficacy of the ECE-WisCom MR platform. This will result in a thorough analysis of the attributes of the ECE-WisCom platform that attract faculty participation and have the largest effects on ECE students’ community development, identity development, critical thinking, and academic performance all the while considering participants’ intersectionalities.

In the Fall 2023 semester, the ECE student recruitment process started along with conversations among the faculty and graduate research assistants from Engineering and Computer Science about the components needed to create the MR platform. Selected ECE students will be invited to participate in a couple of sessions to provide feedback on the design of the MR platform.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation through the HSI - Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Program.