The 2020 global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has forced higher education institutions in the United States to immediately stop face-to-face teaching and transition to virtual instruction. While this transition has not been easy for any instructor, the shift to online learning has been especially difficult for students in STEM courses, particularly engineering, which has a strong practical/laboratory component. This project investigates how the pandemic is impacting students historically underrepresented in engineering. There is an urgency to collect this data in the midst of the crisis. Through the use of an online data collection platform, SenseMaker, short stories will be collected from underrepresented engineering students to describe how they are experiencing the COVID-19 crisis during the transition to online learning. These stories will be used to help provide institutions with tools necessary to ensure minority students are not left out of decisions made with the majority in mind. This RAPID project will adopt the SenseMaker approach to investigate how underrepresented college students cope in times of crisis. This study builds on a previous investigation of community experiences in a crisis context; namely the SenseMaker approach was used to investigate how stakeholder groups in Puerto Rico adapted in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria
- Focus: Undergraduates
- Team: Racheida Lewis rslewis@uga.edu (Principal Investigator), Nicola Sochacka (Co-Principal Investigator), Trina Fletcher (Co-Principal Investigator)
- Award Number: 2029564
- Amount: $152,514.00
- Contact: Trina Fletcher (trfletch@fiu.edu) www.trinafletcher.com