Muhsin Menekse

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Purdue University West Lafayette

This study primarily investigated the role of interactional factors in an unstructured face-to-face collaborative learning environment with challenging engineering activities. We explored dialogue patterns in terms of quality of interaction, students’ scaffolding instances, and discourse moves for productive interactions of collaborative dyads in t...

This study addressed the role of the reflection-informed learning and instruction (RILI) model on students’ academic success by using CourseMIRROR mobile system. We hypothesized that prompting students to reflect on confusing concepts stimulates their self-monitoring activities according to which students are expected to review their understanding,...

This study explored the relative effectiveness of generic versus specific reflection prompts on engineering students’ academic performance and engagement with four scales (i.e., behavioral, emotional, social, cognitive). The sample consisted of 208 engineering students in two sections of a required first-year engineering course. By using a quasi-ex...

Background Understanding the nature of engineering is important for shaping engineering education, especially precollege education. While much research has established the pedagogical benefits of teaching engineering in kindergarten through 12th grade (K–12), the philosophical foundations of engineering remain under-examined. Purpose This conceptu...

Recent calls for reform in K‐12 science education and the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century emphasize improving science teaching, students' engagement, and learning. In this study, we designed and implemented a curriculum unit for sixth‐grade students (i = 1305). The curriculum unit integrated sc...

Background Achievement goal theory is a popular motivational theory within education and psychology, with several review papers summarizing the extensive work done in these fields. Although reviews exist in these specific fields, none exists within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This is a considerable gap in our...

This study explored the effectiveness of scaffolding in students' reflection writing process. We compared two sections of an introductory computer programming course (N = 188). In Section 1, students did not receive any scaffolding while generating reflections, whereas, in Section 2, students were scaffolded during the reflection writing process. S...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution: The study provides empirical evidence and a deeper understanding of COVID-19’s impact on first-year engineering (FYE) students’ learning experiences and motivation while accounting for gender and race/ethnicity-based variations. Backgrou...

This complete research paper emphasizes the importance of students’ engagement from two perspectives. These perspectives vary based on students’ interaction with learning activities or content and their interaction with the educational applications introduced in the class. This paper examines the relationship between these two engagement perspectiv...

The aim of this work-in progress study is to explore the impact of digital nudging strategies on the students’ app engagement while using an educational application (i.e., CourseMIRROR). CourseMIRROR prompts students to reflect on their learning after each lecture and uses natural language processing algorithms to generate summaries of those reflec...

This study describes Natural Language Processing (NLP) and rule-based algorithms used to assess the students’ written reflection quality. We used the CourseMIRROR application to gather student reflections from 120 engineering students and converted the reflections into an equivalent quality score using human coders and algorithms. We used Cohen’s k...

Introduction/Significance: This work in progress (WIP) paper highlights the efforts of a systematized literature review surrounding the use of achievement goal theory (AGT) in STEM education. AGT is one of the most popular motivational theories used by educational researchers, accounting for both internal and external factors to shape motivational...

The current study explored the relationship between engineering students' study strategy use and their academic performance in an introductory engineering course. Mediation analyses informed by preceding correlational analyses were conducted on data emanating from 179 engineering students. The results revealed that problem set performance functions...

This study explored the prediction of undergraduate engineering students' mid-college academic performance by their perceived needs as they relate to science, technology, engineering and mathematics content, professional skills, and support service. To this end, hierarchical multiple regression analyses were employed controlling for college admissi...

Prior research studies have extensively used different classroom observation protocols to identify the characteristics of the lecture and instructional methods used by course instructors, to observe student and instructor behaviours, to evaluate the fidelity of certain implementations, and to understand classroom dynamics. This systematic review pr...

Prior literature in engineering education has focused on student-centered learning by utilizing active, constructive, and interactive instructional strategies. However, most research focused on evaluating the effectiveness of these instructional strategies by comparing them with traditional approaches, which typically placed students in passive rol...

Purpose This study investigates computer science (CS) students' perceived needs for support in an array of academic and nonacademic areas prior to entering college and relates these findings to their subsequent performance in the core CS curriculum. This study specifically explored how students' perceived needs vary by gender and residency and how...

There has been a steady increase in the number of studies investigating educational robotics and its impact on academic and social skills of young learners. Educational robots are used both in and out of school environments to enhance K–12 students’ interest, engagement,and academic achievement in various fields of STEM education. Some prior studie...

Background Being an effective team member is one of the key twenty-first century skills and a fundamental proficiency required for jobs and work settings in an increasingly global economy. Collaborative problem-solving in team settings is a critical practice in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields as an effective teaching method...

Mobile devices and applications have reshaped daily lives of people of all ages. One outcome of these technologies is increased access to small, powerful computers, wireless communication, and unlimited access to information at any time. These technological innovations are influencing students’ learning outcomes and engagement behaviors in and out...

Prior studies have shown that students' achievement goals play a key role in their learning strategies, decision-making processes, and learning outcomes. However, a majority of these studies were conducted with undergraduate psychology students. Thus, there is a need to explore the role of students' achievement goals on their reflection behaviors a...

This work in progress paper is to investigate the relationship between two self-regulation strategies as self-reflection and collaborative working in teams. Effective instructors employ various strategies to enhance students’ learning outcomes in engineering classes. The primary goal of these strategies is to involve students in the learning proce...

Background: Working effectively in teams is an important 21st century skill as well as a fundamental component of the ABET professional competencies. However, successful teamwork is challenging, and empirical studies with adolescents concerning how the collaboration quality of team members is related to team performance are limited. Purpose/Hypot...

Engineering educators often experiment with various teaching methods to figure out which methods most effectively improve learning. A common research design uses a pairwise comparison – pitting one pedagogical method against another method and comparing the results. Often the two methods compared are traditional lecture versus active learning. Thes...

We present the iterative design, prototype, and evaluation of CourseMIRROR (Mobile In-situ Reflections and Review with Optimized Rubrics), an intelligent mobile learning system that uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance instructor-student interactions in large classrooms. CourseMIRROR enables streamlined and scaffolded reflec...

While there has been a remarkable interest to make computer science a core K-12 academic subject in the United States, there is a shortage of K-12 computer science teachers to successfully implement computer sciences courses in schools. In order to enhance computer science teacher capacity, training programs have been offered through teacher profes...

This study investigated the relationship between robotics team members' collaborative behaviors, communication and coordination in particular, during hypothetical challenges and their teams' actual performance during physical robotics challenges. Dataset included robot performance, robot design, research project, core values, and collaboration qual...

Interactions between students and instructors are crucial to the success of learning and teaching. However, such interactions are limited in large classrooms (e.g. STEM courses and MOOCs). We present CourseMIRROR (Mobile In-situ Reflections and Review with Optimized Rubrics), a mobile system that prompts students' self-reflection and in-situ feedba...

Interactions between students and instructors are crucial to the success of learning and teaching. However, such interactions are limited in large classrooms (e.g. STEM courses and MOOCs). We present CourseMIRROR (Mobile In-situ Reflections and Review with Optimized Rubrics), a mobile system that prompts students' self-reflection and in-situ feedba...

Although interview formats support rich data collection in conceptual change studies, interview formats limit sample sizes. This study explores the possibility of using constructed-response formats as an alternative or supplement for collecting similarly rich data across larger pools of subjects in conceptual change studies. While research in physi...

Substantial variation has been observed across an international series of studies examining the consistency of students’ explanations of force and the most common meanings of force apparent in those explanations. On the surface, the variations among studies might be attributed to differences at the national level, but the studies also demonstrate d...

Background: Similar to other domains, engineering education lacks a framework to classify active learning methods used in classrooms, which makes it difficult to evaluate when and why they are effective for learning. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study evaluated the effectiveness and applicability of the Differentiated Overt Learning Activities (DOLA) f...

The national science standards call for increased focus on scientific argumentation in the classroom, and researchers have developed sophisticated online science learning environments to promote and support student engagement in scientific argumentation. Assessing the quality of scientific dialogic argumentation­ in these environments, however, has...

The purpose of this teaching experiment was to give fifth grade students activities using simple machines to see how they would use proportional reasoning to mathematize those activities. We chose a series of activities using two types of levers, because of their experiences with seesaws and because this combined mathematics with science. We hoped...

A workshop held at the National Academies in the United States in 2007 highlighted five broad categories of skills that appear valuable across a range of jobs for people working in modern global economies. Engaging students in scientific argumentation can support the development of these 21st century skills. Unfortunately, opportunities are rare in...

What are Turkish pre, elementary, middle, and high school students' force ideas? And, how do Turkish students' non-normative force ideas differ or be similar to the well-known force misconceptions reported in the literature? Students have false and persistent beliefs about the physical world and they struggle with challenging misconceptions based o...

Collaboration scripts can facilitate argumentation in online settings by grouping students with other students who have expressed differing perspectives on a discussion topic. This general scripting approach is referred to as a “conflict schema.” Prior studies suggest that a specific conflict schema script known as personally-seeded discussion is m...

This international comparison investigates students' knowledge structure coherence in physics across five countries. In particular, this study investigates two possible hypotheses explaining the conflicting results obtained by Ioannides and Vosniadou (2002) and diSessa, Gillespie, and Esterly (2004) about students' understandings of force in Greece...

This interactive poster session features seven research groups exploring how interactive, dynamic visualizations impact student learning. Six empirical studies report on promising designs for visualizations. These studies use logs of student interactions and embedded assessments to document the quality and trajectory of learning and to capture the...

Technology-enhanced learning environments offer a range of features to facilitate active learning through evidence-based argumentation (e.g., Fabos & Young, 1999; Kollar et al., 2005; Marttunen & Laurinen, 2001; Pea, 1994; Roschelle & Pea, 1999; Schellens & Valcke, 2006). This chapter examines the affordances of these environments, the research beh...

A workshop held at the National Academies in the United States in 2007 highlighted five broad categories of skills that appear valuable across a range of jobs for people working in modern global economies. Engaging students in scientific argumentation can support the development of these 21st century skills. Unfortunately, opportunities are rare in...