Research

One way to make students feel more welcome in a class is to learn their names.  In large classes or classes that meet infrequently, it can be difficult to learn names.  Some laboratory settings can make that more difficult because you generally approach students from the side or behind making it harder to recognize physical traits that may help an instructor recall their name.  

As part of my Engineering Unleashed Fellowship project, the student team suggested using name tags in the laboratory to help students and staff learn names. We explored many different name tag designs, including traditional paper tents and magnets.  Since the shelves above the bench surface are metal, we opted for name tags that were magnetic on one side and had a whiteboard on the other side.  This makes them reusable and easy to swap between sections.  The lockers that students store their equipment in during the semester are also metal.  Therefore, they can store their name tags on the front of their locker between sections, so they double as locker labels as well.  These name tags can be found at your favorite office supply or big retailer for a reasonable price.  We found a set with 96 2"x 4" name tags that we plan to start using in the spring 2024 semester, see photo above.

In 2023, I was named as an Engineering Unleashed Fellow.  This fellowship is sponsored by the Kern Family Foundation to support engineering educators to allow them to work on an educational project of their own design.

Innovation in Instructional Laboratories (I² Lab) is a research group led by Dr. Rebecca Reck at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  The goal of the lab is to make instructional laboratories accessible and inclusive spaces for all students, allowing them to learn from hands-on STEM experiences, by creating resources for lab instructors that are informed by rigorous research in all aspects of laboratory course design.

In our current project, we are evaluating the instructional laboratory space, content, and experience for students enrolled in BIOE415 or ECE415.  This work is supported by the Kern Family Foundation.  We also collaborate on other projects, to learn more see the Current Projects list on the right.  Recent publications and updates are highlighted below.

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I have recently been exploring ways to adopt second brain techniques to manage and organize my research.  At the ASEE 2023 conference, I shared a tips and tricks paper in the NEE division.  The full paper is available in the ASEE archive.

At WE19 I collaborated with Yanfen Li and Nicole Jackson to facilitate a flipped session on applying for academic jobs.  The slides and additional details from the session are provided here for reference during and after the session.

At the 2017 Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, I published the results of a comparison of lab kits using the control systems laboratory framework (CSLF) that I published earlier this year in the IEEE Transactions on Education. The paper also includes a suggested process for using the CSLF in new laboratory development (see photo above).  The full paper can be accessed in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

At the 2017 Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, I published a paper about teaching assistants (TAs). The observations about the influence of TAs in the laboratory emerged from the laboratory equipment study that I conducted during my dissertation. Based on student comments during the original study, the TAs had an impact on the learning environment in the laboratory.   The full paper can be accessed in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

During my dissertation, I surveyed control systems faculty, laboratory staff, and industry professionals to determine common aspects of undergraduate control systems instructional laboratories. Through two different survey techniques, I defined the most common learning objectives, concepts, and components of a laboratory apparatus. The results of this study were recently published in IEEE Transactions on Education. The full paper can be downloaded from IEEE Explore.

At the 2017 SWE Annual Conference (WE17), I presented a session that included strategies for using technology to organize your artifacts for promotion and tenure.  My presentation was based on data collected in a survey of other faculty members and my own experience. 

The technical details of my laboratory kit for control systems were published in the Raspberry Pi special edition of Electronics.  This article also includes the newly added Furuta Inverted Pendulum attachment for the kit.  The open access paper can be found on the Electronics website.

I created a video demonstration of my control systems laboratory kit to help expand the reach of the new possibilities of instructional laboratories with low-cost hardware.

At the 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education conference, I presented the preliminary analysis of the quantitative data we collected about a laboratory kit during the 2014-2015 school year.  During both semesters, half of the GE 320 laboratory sections used our new kit (treatment) and the other half used the existing equipment (baseline).  In this preliminary analysis, we determined that we could not detect a difference in performance on exams between the treatment and baseline groups.  The full paper can be found on the IEEE Explore website.

The first phase of my dissertation research is to create a laboratory kit that can be used in the introduction to controls course in General Engineering (GE).  I have included a description of the course, the existing equipment, the contents of the kit, and a comparison of the laboratory exercises below.

Each year the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers Grants for the Advancement of Teaching Engineering (GATE).  Professor Sreenivas (my advisor) and I were awarded funding use the GE320 laboratory kit in the fall semester of 2014.

This will give us the opportunity to conduct a quasi-experiment in GE320 laboratory sections this fall.  The control group will be four of the scheduled lab sections of GE320 in the fall semester of 2014.  These sections will use the lab equipment that is currently being used in the course.  The subject group will be the remaining three of the laboratory sections.  These sections will use a laboratory kit instead of the existing equipment.  Even though the kit is designed to be portable, in this study the kit will be used during schedule laboratory sessions in the same room as the other sections.  The laboratory experiments in this course are designed to reinforce topics learned in lecture and give students the opportunity to practice what they have learned.  I will measure how well each group achieves the course objectives to ensure the kit helps the students at least as well as the existing equipment before proceeding with further development of the kit.

All GATE recipients for the 2014-15 school year

This year I applied to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.  I received an honorable mention in the field of engineering education.  The reviewers provided some very positive and supportive comments on my research proposal. 

News story on Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering website

All 2014 awardees

My first peer-reviewed publication will be a poster at this summer’s American Society of Engineering Education Annual conference in Indianapolis, Indiana.  The poster covers the content and development of the GE320 kit.

At the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Region H Conference this year I was able to present my dissertation research for the first time.  Graduate Student Rapid Fire pretentions comprised one session of the conference and gave five graduate students the opportunity to present their research to a diverse audience and receive feedback.  Members of the audience, including professors from Michigan Tech (the host school), SWE Leaders, and other interested volunteers were provided feedback forms to give to the presenters at the end of the session.