Debra M. McCallum - US grants

Intellectual Merit: Career choices are the result of a complex process and are influenced by a myriad of factors: 1) social-contextual influences such as classroom environment and culturally shared gender stereotypes, 2) person-attribute characteristics such as math and science ability and personal gender schemas, and 3) life goals, especially those related to work, marriage, and family. The individual making a career decision must integrate information from all three areas, yet researchers rarely reach beyond constructs in their own research paradigm. This hinders the development of an explanation of why some capable girls choose science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers and others do not. This research integrates the three broad areas of research (social-contextual, person-attribute, and life goals) by systematically assessing the relative importance of these factors in career choices during four key educational transition points: Transition from grade school to middle school, transition from middle school to high school, at the end of high school, and at the start of college. Existing classroom programs are then mapped on to the research findings to identify strategies for promoting interest in STEM careers that are likely to be most effective at different points in education.

Broader Impacts: Research focusing on educational and developmental transitions especially benefits STEM education programs by matching these programs with the interests and needs of girls at different time points in schooling, connecting classroom practices to eventual STEM career choices. A main goal of this project is to inform educators about which classroom strategies and extracurricular programs are most effective for enhancing STEM career choices at different time points in education. With the assistance of an advisory panel, the research plan calls for the creation of a compendium that translates the research findings into key issues for supporting interest in STEM careers at different educational time points and identifies resources to address these issues. The end product is presented in the Classroom Connections Guide: Closing the Gender Gap that will be widely disseminated through professional development programs, teacher training, presentations at national professional meetings as well as to STEM college professors, deans, and administrative staff at the University of Alabama and other universities.

This project is developing a set of learning materials and laboratory modules in tele-healthcare to be used in undergraduate electrical and computer engineering curricula. The materials are organized into five project-lab trees and ten topic-subject trees that are self-contained and that may be used in any order. Specific topics covered by the new laboratory materials include design project in cardiac monitoring, mental health monitoring, medical security and long-distance medical transmission. The learning materials are being developed using a four-dimensional pedagogy that engages students with different learning preferences and allows for asynchronous delivery. The project includes rigorous formative and summative evaluation plans with both qualitative and quantitative components coordinated by an experienced independent evaluator. The evaluation plan is designed to establish the quality of the materials and to ensure the project goals are met. The projects results are being disseminated through conferences and journal publications and through direct contact with four other institutions of higher education with diverse student bodies. The materials developed in this project are being placed in the NSF sponsored National Science Digital Library.

This project establishes a multimedia-based virtual classroom with a virtual lab teaching assistant for the education of cyber physical system (CPS) security. Such a virtual classroom helps college students in resource-limited rural areas to learn the latest CPS security knowledge via an on-line peer-to-peer learning environment with other students from larger schools. This project includes three novel contributions: (1) all learning materials embrace an application-driven learning approach, with examples from diverse areas such as healthcare, renewable energy, and industrial controls used as the basis for CPS attack analysis; (2) with the help of a multimedia company, the project is building interesting virtual classroom lectures; and (3) to meet the open access lab requirements, the project is building interactive virtual lab helper software to enable remote students to conduct virtual hardware lab experiments and obtain help using multimedia tools. The design encourages innovative learning in several ways: developed labs require an iterative process with idea incubation to force students to follow a more mature creative design process; all labs intentionally include some ambiguity to encourage the search for multiple answers to a single problem; and the 3E (Explain-Exploit-Explore) based pedagogy is adopted for all CPS security labs/projects. The basic level labs emphasize concept explanations. The intermediate level senior projects require students to exploit previous knowledge to perform a multidisciplinary CPS security task. The advanced-level labs require independent exploration to reach creative solutions. The resulting teaching methodologies can be extended to other rural colleges and this project uses a proactive dissemination plan to achieve this aim.

The University of Alabama (UA) Tuscaloosa project titled "Preparing Engineering Students for Three Gateway Courses" leverages S-STEM scholarships to increase the number of graduates in selected engineering disciplines using an approach referred to as Learning in Advance (LIA). In the LIA approach, special preparatory courses are offered for selected courses (gateway courses) identified as key attrition points in engineering programs. Each preparatory course is taken the semester before the corresponding gateway course. A subset of the students who successfully complete the preparatory course will be selected to receive a scholarship based on academic potential and demonstrated financial need.

The gateway courses identified at the institution include: Circuit Analysis, Data Structures /Algorithms and Statics. LIA introduces key concepts targeting common misconceptions before they become impediments to learning. The LIA program embodies three principles: (1) partnership with students after their freshman year; (2) preparation of students for critical gateway courses prior to their enrollment in those courses; and (3) mentoring of students during those critical courses and beyond. The intellectual merit of the project lies in the development and implementation of three preparatory courses to improve student retention in an array of STEM fields: Electrical, Computer, Aerospace, Civil, Construction, and Mechanical Engineering as well as Computer Science. The potential broader impacts of the project include increasing the number of graduates in targeted majors by a total of 35 per year and providing scholarships to 40 diverse students who demonstrate academic talent and financial need. A social science study set within the framework of the theory of embeddedness will be implemented in order to investigate the factors linking program components and student persistence in engineering.

Big data applications are widely utilized today in a variety of scientific and social studies. The International Data Corporation (IDC) reports that more than 50% of all big data business revenues originate in the United States. Big data requires "bigger responsibility" in terms of protecting the storage, sharing, and access of the privacy-sensitive data. In today's higher education, there are limited big data security (BigSec) educational activities that target comprehensive and profound understanding of BigSec attack models, as well as defense solutions, at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Some available BigSec training materials are mostly online, used for short-term training, and only cover general concepts from a business management viewpoint. The nation is currently experiencing a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, including the experts in big data security. The goal of this project from the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa is to utilize new pedagogy, called Captivology-Stimuli-based Learning (CAPITAL), for active education and training on big data security and privacy.

This project will make two significant contributions to enhance BigSec education. The first is the development of a new series of BigSec course materials, including an undergraduate course, CECS 400/500 Big Data Security, which targets fundamental knowledge of big data security issues, as well as a graduate course, CECS 600 Advanced Topics on Big Data Security and Privacy, which aims to enhance the cybersecurity research skills of graduate students. The second is the implementation of CAPITAL pedagogy in BigSec education. This includes implementation of the flipped classroom model, Virtual Reality based security games, Capstone design showcase, student cybersecurity design competitions, and patent-targeted thesis projects. This project will conduct the pioneering "active" education to train a BigSec-literate workforce. All the BigSec created education materials will be disseminated to other schools.