NYUBIEs: NYU Brooklyn Interdisciplinary Exploration

Project Overview

Background

We have noticed a trend that work force employers are increasingly looking for 21 century soft skills when recruiting employees, instead of only strong professional skills. Our interview with NYU faculties shows that all the feedback they receive from internship companies for students strongly emphasize their soft skills such as communication, taking initiatives, and organization, however, those skills are not taught in our current curricula. Therefore, we seek to investigate whether there is a gap in students' experience, and if so, we shall look for a way to bridge the gap and help students to develop their 21 century soft skills.

As the research progressed, we found out that interdisciplinary learning and collaboration is a great approach for improving 21 century soft skills. Especially for NYU Brooklyn students who are in the design and technology fields, such as ECT, IDM, ITP, and game center etc, they will enter professions where interdisciplinary and diverse teams are the norm and where interdisciplinary communication and collaboration skills are increasingly valued. This thus shifted our focus to investigate the level of interdisciplinary collaboration on NYU Brooklyn campus.

We found out that, NYU Brooklyn offers lots of open interdisciplinary opportunities, however, students are not utilizing those opportunities. Despite acknowledging the benefits of interdisciplinary opportunities, students do not actively seek for those opportunities. They rarely attend any events or activities outside of their program, and rarely have chance to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Through our research, we identified many causes for students' underutilization of interdisciplinary opportunities, including unawareness of available resources, lack of motivation due to unawareness of the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration, and lack of time. Thus, we aimed to design a solution to improve students' level of motivation through design process in this project, hoping to raise students' awareness of available resources on campus and benefits of interdisciplinary resources, thus increasing students' level of participation in interdisciplinary opportunities, and improving their ability in soft skills including interdisciplinary communication and collaboration and becoming better competitive employees in a long run.

Team Members

Cass Scheirer

Research Lead

Kathy Xie

Project Management Lead

Sara Jakubowicz

Writing and Presentation Lead

Minhao (Jolie) Yang

Design Lead

Analysis Phase

What currently exists falls short because of the lack of:

Value for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Resource Accessibility

Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Sense of Community

Faculty and Administrative Leadership

Client, Participants & Stakeholders

NYU Brooklyn Graduate Students

Faculty

NYU Administration

Learning Goals

Design Phase

IRL Workshop with Six Essential Components

Introduction - 10min

Cognitivism

Card Game - 35min

Social Constructivism, Situated Learning, and Social Learning Theory

Spreadsheet

Cognitivism, Constructivism, Communities of Practice, and Constructionism

Scavenger Hunt - 30min

Embodied Cognition, Social Constructivism, Situated Learning, and Discovery Learning

Presentations - 30min

Communities of Practice, Active Learning and Social Learning Theory

Closing Discussion - 25min

Social Constructivism and Social Learning Theory

Evaluation Phase

More details on Evaluation Plan.

With this Evaluation Plan, we are able to answer all the important questions:

Evaluate issues

for the core activity, the Spreadsheet related to short-term outcomes (logic model)

- - Issue 1: How easy is it for students to use the materials?
    - Short-term outcome 1
    - goal: Students know where to find the NYU Brooklyn resources they need to do the things they want to do.
      - Objective: Students will be able to navigate and organize the resources that they need.
  - Issue 2: To what extent do students feel beneficial/engaged/motivated to interact with the learning materials we’ve designed for them?
    - Short-term outcome 2/3
    - goal: Students know what sorts of resources NYU Brooklyn has to offer.
    - goal: Students understand the value of interdisciplinary collaboration.
      - Objective: Students will be able to examine and evaluate the interdisciplinary nature of their own learning experiences.

Description of the instruction being evaluated

The main instructions of the Spreadsheet introduction have three steps:

- 1. Introduction to Resource Categories
  2. Spreadsheet Navigation and Data Entry
  3. Resource Identification

Usability testing

The methodology is delineated into four distinct tasks to measure user performance and better understand and empathize with our users:
- 1. 1. 1. Account creation
      2. Spreadsheet duplication
      3. Chart fill-in
      4. Find project-related resources using a filter

Instrument: User Observation Form

Audience

Participants - Students on the Brooklyn campus / potential workshop participants

- - N=2 students; an ECT graduate student and an IDM undergraduate student

Data Analysis

Task Analysis

Successful task completion rates
Errors/deviance rates. Identify locus point of errors and make modifications.

Qualitative Analysis

Grounded open coding of utterances (keywords)

Quantitative Analysis

Nominally code observations and use descriptive statistics, frequencies, and co-occurrences

Evaluation Results

Analysis and method:

Task Analysis:

Break down the spreadsheet tasks into smaller steps
Analyze efficiency and effectiveness of each step
Identify areas of interest and pain points in spreadsheet interface

Qualitative Analysis:

Review data from observations, interview transcripts, and open-ended survey responses
Grounded coding for data according to frustrations expressed
Identify recurring themes, issues, and user feedback

Quantitative Analysis:

Co-occurrence analysis: Location Marker x Error x Utterance Valence
Use to help identify areas of interest and pain points

Findings:

High Task Success Rate (100%) - Spreadsheet is intuitive - Task Analysis
1. - Fulfills short-term outcome of students being able to identify and track resources and related information
Participants displayed a high level of engagement interacting with learning materials - Quantitative Analysis
1. - Achieves short-term outcome we set of students understanding the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, navigating, and organizing resources

One participant double checked sources and modified accordingly after expressing uncertainty about putting information into proper box
Another participant described why they sorted categories from low to high priority.

Participants self-reflected, strategized/critically thought while using the filters and sorting mechanics for interdisciplinary resources within spreadsheet - Qualitative Analysis
1. - Met short-term outcome of students' ability to examine and evaluate the interdisciplinary nature of their own learning experiences.

One participant picked out several resources she thought would benefit her, e.g., maker space, library, and VIP. She said she did similar things by herself, and it would be better if she had found a spreadsheet like that when she entered the university as a freshman.
Another participant proposed that she’s looking for internship opportunities and likes that we mentioned Handshake.

References

Wickens, C. D., Hollands, J. G., Banbury, S., & Parasuraman, R. (2015). Engineering psychology and human performance. Psychology Press.

Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. (2015). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction. John Wiley & Sons.

Dix, A., Finlay, J., Abowd, G., & Beale, R. (2004). Human-computer interaction. Prentice Hall.

Kirakowski, J., & Corbett, M. (1993). Summative usability testing of software: some practical advice. In CHI'93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 23-26).

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101.

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook. Sage Publications.

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2017). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage publications.

Patton, M. Q. (2015). Qualitative research & evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice. Sage Publications.

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