This study explores students' initial engagement with ill-structured problems before and after the introduction of engineering problem typology as a framework for problem engagement and reflection. Using problem discussions, debrief interviews, and qualitative analysis of written artifacts, we considered observed changes to students' initial…

Classification, a fundamental data analytics task, has widespread applications across various academic disciplines, such as marketing, finance, sociology, psychology, education, and public health. Its versatility enables researchers to explore diverse research questions and extract valuable insights from data. Therefore, it is crucial to extend…

The research in this dissertation consists of two parts: An active learning algorithm for hierarchical labels and an embedding-based retrieval algorithm. In the first part, we present a new approach for learning hierarchically decomposable concepts. The approach learns a high-level classifier (e.g., location vs. non-location) by separately…

Problem- and project-based learning (PBL) is often highlighted as a valuable approach for addressing the need for interdisciplinarity in engineering education. However, studies indicate that applied projects in engineering education tend to be limited to a single discipline. This article presents a new project typology which can be applied in…

Algorithm design is a vital skill developed in most undergraduate Computer Science (CS) programs, but few research studies focus on pedagogy related to algorithms coursework. To understand the work that has been done in the area, we present a systematic survey and literature review of CS Education studies. We search for research that is both…

'Group work' is a vague description of an instructional activity, because many factors shape its character and effect on students. One important factor is group formation, that is, how groups are formed by the instructor. In this paper, we sought to better understand the variation of group work with respect to group formation by addressing: How do…

In spring 2018, an inquiry-oriented differential equations course was offered at the Lebanese American University. This paper highlights students' comprehension of some qualitative aspects of differential equations, namely their understanding of the equations and their solutions. It also explores the students' success in moving between the…

Automating the classification of instructional strategies from a large-scale online tutorial dialogue corpus is indispensable to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Despite many existing studies employing supervised machine learning (ML) models to automate the classification process, they concluded that building a…

In this dissertation I explore instructors' work with instructional tasks as they plan to introduce various representations of derivatives. Drawing on the notion of "framing" from sociology, I adopt a situative lens to study calculus instructors' planning of instructional tasks. I rely on Herbst and Chazan's (2012) notion of…

This study builds on a recent systematic mapping of computing education literature by conducting an in-depth qualitative analysis of selected studies on group work in Project-Based Learning (PjBL), published between 2010 and 2021. We examined how prominent theoretical frameworks are used in this context. We found that frameworks were often applied…

In this article, we suggest incorporating visual images into peace education through "interactive peace imagery" (IPI). We will show, and illustrate with examples from our work, that interactive teaching creates a space for students to reflect upon their socializations, including visual ones, without which image interpretation cannot be…

Support vector classifiers are one of the most popular linear classification techniques for binary classification. Different from some commonly seen model fitting criteria in statistics, such as the ordinary least squares criterion and the maximum likelihood method, its algorithm depends on an optimization problem under constraints, which is…

ICAP is a framework that classifies learning processes based on students' explicit behaviors. The framework is developed for testing the hypothesis that interactive exercises are better than constructive exercises, and active exercises are better than the passive exercises for higher cognitive engagement and better learning outcomes. The ICAP…

Interactive simulations allow students to independently explore scientific phenomena and ideally infer the underlying principles through their exploration. Effectively using such environments is challenging for many students and therefore, adaptive guidance has the potential to improve student learning. Providing effective support is, however,…

Active learning is becoming more widely accepted in mathematics as a superior teaching method for student learning and, as a result, faculty are increasingly convinced of the benefits. Our study was designed to close a research gap by determining how to support mathematics faculty in transforming their instruction to active learning. We…