The Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) supports RAPID projects when there is a severe urgency with regard to availability of, or access to, data, facilities or specialized equipment, including quick-response research on natural or anthropogenic disasters and similar unanticipated events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The project at Bethune Cookman University seeks to investigate the effects of two educational interventions on the robust learning measures of long-term retention or desire for future learning of COVID-19 knowledge. It will produce designers of effective, efficient, and engaging distance learning while equipping undergraduate students and informal learners with relevant skills and competencies to contribute transdisciplinary solutions to the current COVID-19 and future disease outbreaks. Undergraduate students are involved as researchers in this project.
The goal of the project is to understand how to optimize the successful learning of knowledge content types such as procedures for data associated problem solving activities, especially in the circumstances of mandatory remote education. The abundance of data resources resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic presents unique conditions suitable to design and develop educational technology interventions for learning procedures to solve data challenges in areas of data flow, data curation, and data analytics. The research is guided by the Knowledge-Learning-Instruction theoretical framework for producing robust student learning. Two online educational technology interventions will be developed and investigated among cohorts of designers of learning experiences on generating knowledge from complex data resources on COVID-19 pandemic, and among informal learners of the genomics and environmental survival of coronaviruses. An “in vivo†experimentation approach will be implemented that combines causal principles and real online instructional events with or without an ecological control group. The transactions and artifacts of learning events will be analyzed to detect features that predict robust learning and the performance of complex cognitive activities. Post-educational intervention assessments will capture academic and professional success measures including satisfaction with the learning process, self-confidence to work effectively with complex datasets, desire to pursue data careers, and involvement in developing data-driven solutions to COVID-19 pandemic.
This RAPID award is made by the Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Undergraduate Program in the Division of Human Resource Development, Directorate of Education and Human Resources, 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.
