Mindy Shoss - US grants

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in unprecedented, nation-wide disruption of academic institutions. As a result, there is an urgent need to understand the acute effects of this disruption on undergraduate STEM education in the U.S. This project will examine experiences of faculty and students resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent institutional changes. Initiated during a time of uncertainty, this project will: (1) capture the ephemeral nature of undergraduate education experiences before national recovery milestones are achieved; and (2) inform efforts to adapt undergraduate STEM education during crises. The project team will collect data about institutional characteristics and crisis communication messages, as well as about experiences of individual faculty and students. These data will be analyzed to identify pathways through which the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced teaching and learning within undergraduate STEM education. The findings of this project will be used to develop actionable recommendations for institutions of higher education, including crisis communication strategies, guidelines for pedagogy in times of crisis, and checklists of resources. As the STEM workforce plays a critical role in the economic health of the U.S. in normal and disaster situations, this effort to rapidly collect data and learn from this situation will contribute to the security and well-being of society. It is expected that the results will also support a more resilient, globally competitive next generation of STEM workers.

The project?s specific aims are to: (1) examine teaching and learning experiences of undergraduate faculty and students in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) examine the effects of faculty and student reactions on undergraduate STEM teaching and learning; and (3) leverage findings to develop actionable recommendations for colleges and universities to best prepare and protect their faculty, staff, and students and the integrity of undergraduate STEM education. The goal of these activities is to answer key research questions: How do institutions? COVID-19 policies influence faculty and student attitudes, perceptions, and behavior related to STEM teaching and learning? What teaching and learning resources were most important for undergraduate STEM faculty and students? How do these effects on undergraduate STEM education develop over time? Given the rapidly changing nature of the situation, individual-level data that are needed to answer the research questions are inherently ephemeral. Faculty and students are unlikely to accurately later recall the extent to which they were able to adapt to changes, the extent to which changes created distress, and how they coped with events. Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, faculty and students from a stratified random sample of representative institutions will be recruited to participate in an online survey and semi-structured interviews conducted across three time points. Grounded in the research literatures of crisis communication, organizational science, and disaster management, this project addresses gaps in undergraduate STEM education research related to faculty and student reactions to disruptive contexts, characteristics of institutions that make them resilient toward disruptive contexts, and institutional learning from disruptive contexts. The findings will be disseminated to institutions of higher education and through a public web site relating to the resources most critical for fostering resilience among faculty and staff when adapting to a disrupted educational context. In addition, participating institutions and individuals will receive customized reports and resources. By evaluating the immediate impact of COVID-19, this project aims to enhance the undergraduate education infrastructure, improve the delivery of STEM education during and after disruptions, and help to protect the well-being of faculty and students collectively experiencing this crisis. This RAPID award is made by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program in the Division of Undergraduate Education (Education and Human Resources Directorate), using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Responses to the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) have led to a substantial number of employees working from home in an ad-hoc emergency fashion. This project examines the ramifications of temporary work-from-home environments for organizational cybersecurity. The project team is assessing organizational methods used to help secure temporary remote locations, examining the new workplace characteristics that employees encounter, and determining whether and how these factors influence the security of sensitive organizational data, information, and digital systems. Project findings will allow the research team to develop actionable recommendations to organizational leaders who rely on temporary, remote work locations for their employees in times of substantial uncertainty. This project will help guide the design and implementation of organizational cybersecurity policies, procedures, and other efforts relied upon during significant future crises?times when cybersecurity threats tend to be elevated and employees dispersed throughout numerous locations.

The research team is using a mixed methods approach to evaluate possible responses by employees to the unexpected work conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. These employees might exhibit increased resilience to cybersecurity risks due to the cooperative motivations that often follow disasters. On the other hand, stressors associated with working at home might lead employees to pay less attention to cybersecurity demands and to engage in shortcuts and workarounds. Thus, the project investigates the extent that organizational responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis lead individuals to protect their environments and their organizations from cybersecurity threats or by contrast to engage in behavior that constitutes threats to sensitive organizational assets and practices. In-depth semi-structured interviews and experience sampling assessments are performed using several samples of employees working at home. Daily surveys will be completed by a sample of participants over a two-week period to determine fluctuations in employee attitudes, emotions, and behaviors.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Telehealth is greatly affecting our nation’s healthcare system, economy, and workforce, including the training of healthcare professionals (i.e., physicians, residents). This project advances health, psychological, educational, medical, engineering, and computing sciences related to human-machine AI collaboration in delivering high-quality patient care and augmenting medical training and expertise development in telehealth. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF), along with hospital and educational partners from UCF’s College of Medicine, Orlando VA Medical Center, Nemours Children’s Hospital, and AdventHealth University, will augment healthcare-professional training, expertise development, and diagnostic reasoning using AI-based immersive technologies in telehealth. Given the transformative and disruptive impact of telehealth across all societal facets (e.g., racial disparities, economic burden on patients, organizational disruptions, lack of medical training in telehealth), this project assembles, connects, engages, and addresses current local, state, and national disparities by involving academics across disciplines and leveraging evidence-based research with a variety of stakeholders, including government officials, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals and patients, employers, and industry partners. The interdisciplinary research team and collaborating stakeholders work together in the design of a paper-based prototype intelligent collaborative immersive telehealth system for training healthcare professionals and interacting with real human patients, transforming current medical training, fostering expertise development, and significantly enhancing patient outcomes.

This planning grant has three goals. (1) To secure, engage, collaborate, and develop a network with stakeholders, academics, and industry partners across multiple sectors to advance understanding of workforce, health, economic, organizational, AI, technological, and social issues related to telehealth. (2) To test the effectiveness of existing telehealth technologies used by healthcare professionals to understand their impact on diagnostic reasoning by collecting multiple sources of data from healthcare professionals and patients to examine physiological-cognitive-affective-metacognitive-social processes during telehealth interactions. And (3) to design an intelligent collaborative virtual telehealth system prototype that supports healthcare professionals’ diagnostic reasoning, expertise development, and training that can be used in various healthcare scenarios. Intelligent collaborative immersive telehealth systems will augment and transform healthcare professionals’ education, training, and delivery of high-quality medical care. Such systems are key to addressing major societal, health, educational, technological, economic, organizational, and human challenges (e.g., quality of medical care, lack of quality telehealth education and training). The project’s immediate impact will be broadening participation across local, state, and national stakeholders in addressing major issues related to telehealth and how it will transform and disrupt society. Various data types collected from this project will provide evidence of the issues related to medical expertise, diagnostic reasoning, medical errors, and organizational disruptions, and new metrics for measuring the impacts of telehealth. Additionally, hundreds of community members from all sectors will participate in workshops, data collection, and design sessions where they explore current telehealth environments and design a paper-based prototype intelligent collaborative telehealth system to enhance medical education and training to accelerate expertise development, minimize medical errors, and deliver high-quality medical care while fostering the workforce pipeline in healthcare professions and AI in medicine. Additionally, these findings will be broadly applicable to training middle-schoolers and high-schoolers interested in STEM and healthcare professions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.