Carolien Van Soom

• Ph.D. Science
• Head of Department at KU Leuven

The societal demand for graduates with expertise in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) stands in contrast with prevalent issues of diminished interest among high school students in STEM subjects and low completion rates in STEM academic programs. In the Flemish educational context, heterogeneity in STEM preparedness of incomin...

In Flanders, open admission into higher education has led to heterogeneity in academic preparedness of incoming STEM students. Higher education institutions offer low stakes positioning tests to these students in order to help them assess their level of starting competences. Due to the unique nature of these tests, little can be inferred about stud...

Scientists and engineers end up in a wide variety of professional positions. Research emphasises the need for supporting students to explore the broader work field and to enhance professional role awareness. Within the European PREFER project a professional roles model for engineers has been developed and implemented in education thanks to associat...

In trying to understand women’s underrepresentation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), most existing research focuses on one STEM-field or collapses across all STEM-fields. However, these fields differ vastly in female representation: women tend to be most strongly underrepresented in technological and computer science univers...

To start medical or dentistry studies in Flanders, prospective students need to pass a central admission test. A blended program with four Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) was designed to support those students. The logs from the platform provide an opportunity to delve into the learners’ interactions and to develop predictive models to forecas...

When students enter higher education, they can encounter the feeling of unpreparedness. In fact, students who lack the appropriate prior education are less prepared. Therefore developing and implementing appropriate interventions for incoming students is important. This study examined the effectiveness of two new interventions at the Faculty of Eng...

A plethora of studies have shown that procrastination is associated with deleterious consequences. Recently, some authors argued that for some students, purposefully delaying tasks might be a beneficial strategy that is positively related with desired outcomes. To measure purposeful delay, the Active Procrastination Scale (APS), developed by Choi a...

In recent years, Learning Analytics (LA) is finding more and more practical adoption, alongside of continued research interest. However, questions about the impact of LA applications and their underpinning in educational science are still being raised, impeding viability of some LA projects at larger scale. Within this paper we describe two example...

The demand for engineering graduates is so high that employers struggle to fill the vacancies [1], [2]. The number of engineering students is increasing and due to a more flexible higher education system even more students can gain access to an engineering program. Although it can be applauded that more students can enter higher education, the ques...

Our work focuses on a multi-institutional implementation and evaluation of a Learning Analytics Dashboards (LAD) at scale, providing feedback to N=337 aspiring STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students participating in a region-wide positioning test before entering the study program. Study advisors were closely involved in th...

Although the number of engineering students is increasing, dropout rates remain high. This problem is also present in the Faculty of Engineering Technology (FET) at KU Leuven, Belgium, which resulted in the need for an in-depth analysis of the academic achievement of the bridging students there. This study examines the contribution of a range of pr...

To stimulate a flexible lifelong learning system students can enter university via lateral entry. Unlike traditional first-year students, lateral entrance students are not well-studied. Therefore this study focuses on comparing first-year students with a specific group of lateral entrants, namely bridging students at the Faculty of Engineering Tech...

Against the background of the increasing need for skilled scientists and engineers, the heterogeneous inflow of incoming students in science and engineering programs is particularly challenging in universities with an open-admission system. The prime objective of the present study is to determine the main academic and non-academic determinants of s...

The readySTEMgo project is a collaboration between six European universities: KU Leuven (Finland). The prime objective of the project is to identify students with an increased drop-out risk before the start or throughout the course of the first-year in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) study programmes. Before providing an ov...

This paper explores the confidence freshman engineering students have in being successful in the first study year and which study-related behaviour they believe to be important to this end. Additionally, this paper studies which feedback these students would like to receive and compares it with the experiences of second-year students regarding feed...

Learning Analytics Dashboards (LAD) provide a means to leverage data to support learners, teachers, and counselors. This paper reports on an in-depth analysis of how learners interact with a LAD. N=1,406 first-year students in 12 different study programs were invited to use a LAD to support them in their transition from secondary to higher educatio...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the potential of “small data” to complement research in learning analytics (LA) and to share some of the insights learned from this approach. Design/methodology/approach This study demonstrates an approach inspired by design science research, making a dashboard available to n =1,905 student...

In the transition from secondary to higher education, students are expected to develop a set of learning skills. This paper reports on a dashboard implemented and designed to support this development, hereby bridging the gap between Learning Analytics research and the daily practice of supporting students. To demonstrate the scalability and usefuln...

Entering a STEM study programme at university can be an overwhelming experience. Therefore several studies aimed at composing/implementing tests that focus on possible study success predictors. These tests can be a tool to select or help first-year students to position themselves before or at the beginning of the academic year. An optimized, non-bi...

The transition from secondary school to university still is a quantum leap for a substantial number of science and engineering students. This paper explores differences in the learning and study skills of 3,391 incoming science and engineering students in the STEM faculties of three European universities: Budapest Institute of Economics and Technol...

A new battery of positioning tests for Science and Engineering was broadly implemented in Flanders in the summer of 2013. The goal of the non-mandatory and non-binding positioning test is to allow future students, with a clear choice for engineering or science, to position themselves with respect to the required prior knowledge and skills and to st...

In Belgium students can choose, without admission restriction, between a professional and an academic bachelor’s degree. The purpose of a professional bachelor’s degree is to prepare the student for a professional occupation. An academic bachelor’s degree on the other hand is intended to acquire all the necessary knowledge and skills to start a mas...

The low success rate of first-year college students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs has spurred many academic achievement studies in which explanatory factors are studied. In this study, we investigated from a person-oriented perspective whether different motivational and academic self-concept profiles could be...

At the transition point from secondary school to university, initial autonomous motivation and academic self-concept levels are not related to subsequent academic achievement in STEM programs, when cognitive and background characteristics are taken into account. After one semester at university, early academic achievement is significantly and posit...

Two packages of adaptive computer-assisted instruction (CAIs), both offering questions and subsequent feedback, were compared in terms of amount of feedback offered, learning efficiency and appreciation. Feedback was either barely more than knowledge of result ('minimal') or consisted of a complete additional learning path ('elaborate'). The CAIs d...

For O-antigen lipopolysaccharide (LPS) synthesis in bacteria, transmembrane migration of undecaprenyl pyrophosphate-bound O-antigen oligosaccharide subunits or polysaccharide occurs before ligation to the core region of the LPS molecule. In this study, we identified by mutagenesis an ATP-binding cassette transporter in Rhizobium etli CE3 that is li...

The Bradyrhizobium japonicum hupT gene was sequenced, and its gene product was found to be homologous to NtrB-like histidine kinases. A hupT mutant expresses higher levels of hydrogenase activity than the wild-type strain under hydrogenase-inducing conditions (i.e., microaerobiosis plus hydrogen, or symbiosis), whereas in noninduced hupT cells, hup...

NifA protein activates transcription of nitrogen fixation operons by the alternative sigma 54 holoenzyme form of RNA polymerase. This protein binds to a well-defined upstream activator sequence (UAS) located at the -200/-100 position of nif promoters with the consensus motif TGT-N10-ACA. NifA of Azospirillum brasilense was purified in the form of a...

Bradyrhizobium japonicum forms nitrogen-fixing nodules on the roots of its host plant, soybean. During symbiotic nitrogen fixation, hydrogen is produced as an obligate byproduct of the nitrogenase reaction. Some rhizobia possess an hydrogen-uptake (Hup) system that re-oxidizes the hydrogen in nodules. In Hup+Bradyrhizobium japonicum strains, hydrog...

A chromosomally integrated Bradyrhizobium japonicum hoxA mutant is unable to oxidize hydrogen in free-living conditions. Derepressing conditions that induce hydrogenase activity in free-living, wild-type B. japonicum cells cannot induce expression of the hydrogenase structural genes in the hoxA mutant. The DNA-binding capacity of HoxA at the hup pr...

Nucleotide sequence analysis of Bradyrhizobium japonicum chromosomal DNA, 9 kb downstream of the hup genes (hydrogenase structural genes), revealed one incomplete and three complete open reading frames. These were designated as hypD’, hypE, hoxX and hox A, respectively, based on the strong homology of the deduced amino acid sequences with those enc...

The nucleotide sequence of a 2.2 kb region downstream of the hydrogenase structural genes in Bradyrhizobium japonicum was determined. Four genes encoding predicted polypeptides of 27.8 (HupC), 21.4 (HupD), 10.6 (HupF) and 15.8 (HupG) kDa were identified, of which the first three probably belong to the same operon as the hup structural genes, hupS a...

A region of 15 kbp DNA located on the chromosome of Bradyrhizobium japonicum is essential for a Hup(+) phenotype and contains the hydrogenase structural genes. During the last few years, other genes with various functions related to hydrogenase oxidation, such as Ni(2+) incorporation into the hydrogenase enzyme, electron transport from hydrogenase...

In Bradyrhizobium japonicum, Tn5 insertions in a particular chromosomal DNA fragment result in a Hup- phenotype in free-living conditions without affecting hydrogenase (Hup) activity in the symbiotic state. By determination of the nucleotide sequence of this region, we were able to identify the nature of the inactivated genes. The fragment is locat...

We have determined the nucleotide sequence of IS427, an insertion sequence from Agrobacterium tumefaciens T37, IS427 is 1271 bp long, contains 16-bp imperfect terminal inverted repeats, and generates a 2-bp target sequence duplication. It is present at three sites in the pTiT37 plasmid and is absent from the chromosome of A. tumefaciens T37. Each o...