The first study, led by Dr. Nicola Sochacka in collaboration with Drs. John Morelock, Racheida Lewis, and Joachim Walther, examined the impact of the pandemic on the College of Engineering at UGA. Data were collected at four different times from April to September 2020 (n = 149). Four interim briefs were written and shared with the entire college community.  We will discuss trends we identified in the data analysis, real-time recommendations and changes we made to improve participants’ experiences, and overarching lessons-learned about how to better prepare for and navigate such disruptions to higher education.

The second study, led by Dr. Racheida Lewis in collaboration with Nicola Sochacka and Dr. Trina Fletcher at Florida International University, investigated how underrepresented students across the United States experienced the sudden transition to online learning during the spring of 2020. A total of 500 stories were collected from June to July 2020. Data analysis for this study is ongoing. We will share some preliminary findings and invite the audience to participate in “making sense” of these data. We will conclude with methodological insights we have gained from using SenseMaker at these two very different scales.

Speaker Bios

Nicola Sochacka, Ph.D. is a research scientist and the Associate Director for Research Initiation in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) at UGA. She completed both her Bachelor of Environmental Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering Epistemologies at the University of Queensland in Australia. Her current research interests include scaling her and her colleagues’ pedagogical developments on fostering empathy in engineering to other instructional settings; increasing the capacity of technical faculty to engage with and conduct engineering education research; and exploring a how a novel methodological approach called SenseMaker® can be used to investigate and improve student experiences of studying engineering. Her work has been recognized through multiple best paper awards and keynote presentations at international and national conferences and workshops.

Racheida S. Lewis, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at UGA in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) and the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering. She has been recognized as a Gates Millennium Scholar, GEM Associate Fellow, New Horizon Scholar, and a 2019 inductee into the Bouchet Honor Society. She completed her doctoral work at Virginia Tech where she focused on the impact matriculation structures have on self-efficacy development in electrical and computer engineering students. She received a Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia, respectively. Racheida believes in creating a diverse engineering field and strives to do so through connecting with, teaching, and mentoring future engineers. She has devoted her life to this mission through her leadership and lifetime membership in the National Society of Black Engineers. Ultimately, Racheida aspires to bridge together research and pedagogy within the academy to improve engineering education within the field and across disciplines.