This work-in-progress research paper investigated where and how international students seek career support and perceived barriers. Existing literature has examined career readiness and preparation, particularly focused on international students' diaspora patterns and cultural adjustment, but lacks holistic insights into their career decision-forming and support systems from a mixed-method social network perspective. We employed a mixed-method research approach and leveraged data collected from the international undergraduate student body at a U.S. Midwestern university via interviews and surveys sequentially. This WIP paper primarily focused on the qualitative section of this project based on the data from the nine interview transcripts. The data were analyzed by both egocentric social network and thematic analysis. Our preliminary findings identified the most common source of support for international students. We also recognized barriers existing in multiple forms and dimensions and a lack of support in three major areas for international students, particularly access, human connection, and clarity. Our unique contribution in this study highlighted the interconnection among students' perceived (or lack of) career support and barriers from a social network perspective. Based on our preliminary findings, we offer suggestions to inform practices and policy change congruent to the actual needs of international students from multiple stakeholders, including, but not limited to, home institutions, faculty, and staff members.

The rapid development of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, has led to their increasing integration into the daily lives of students, including educational settings. Yet, understanding the extent and depth of university students' engagement with these resources remains a significant gap. This work-in-progress study seeks to examine psychological distance perceptions towards advanced technologies among university students. To address this question, we created a quantitative survey guided by the Construal Level Theory (CLT) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which included two detailed psychological distance factors: the social distance factor and the hypothetical distance factor. We examined 37 university students from a Western university in the United States through linear regression analysis. We found that demographic factors, including age, race/ethnicity, and academic majors, were the primary predictors of students' psychological distance from advanced technologies. In detail, students who majored in Biomedical Engineering negatively perceived these two technologies, which could be attributed to a perceived irrelevance of these technologies to their specific educational goals. These findings provide important insights into the associations of student backgrounds and psychological distance to advanced technologies in the university setting and suggest ways to create an inclusive, equitable, and future-oriented university learning environment.

Monitoring perceived psychological safety in engineering project teams helps instructors better manage student teams to lead to students’ positive learning experiences and outcomes, especially for teams with minoritized and culturally diverse students. Teams with diverse backgrounds are found to experience reduced cohesiveness and more interpersonal and task conflict as people are less likely to work well with self-identified out-group members. Meanwhile, teams with diversified members have the potential to benefit from a richer pool of resources and experiences to produce more creative and higher-quality outcomes. Thus, diverse team composition could carry both positive and negative influences towards student perceived psychological safety across the team life span. Using multilevel models of change, we investigate how the diversity at individual and team levels influences psychological safety across time for 1463 first-year engineering students in 390 teams conducting team projects. Future work will explore how students’ demographic and academic ability and the team composition affect perceived psychological safety to better inform engineering student team management for the instructors.

Understanding how psychological dynamics in teams influence the effectiveness of students' teamwork behaviors improves instructors' ability to manage student teams. This research study explored the relative importance of three measures of team dynamics in predicting five behavioral dimensions of effective teamwork. Data were collected from 1780 students in a first-year engineering course in Spring 2020, and 1638 students' data remained after removing multivariate outliers. Relative weight analysis via RWA-Web was conducted for this study as it revealed the pure and independent contribution of each predictor for criterion variables. Results showed that the combination of conflict ($\mathrm{R}2=0.00293,\ \mathrm{p} < .05$), cohesiveness ($\mathrm{R}2=0.00126,\ \mathrm{p} < .05$), and psychological safety ($\mathrm{R}2=0.00254,\ \mathrm{p} < .05$) explained 0.0067 of the variances in five teamwork behavior constructs. On the one hand, these results show that compared to psychological safety and cohesiveness, conflict was the most significant factor influencing teamwork behavioral effectiveness. On the other hand, the results also reveal that all three of these measures have extremely low predictive power. Therefore, while this work might suggest that instructors need to pay closer attention to monitor the conflict in student teams to improve their teamwork skills, the results are confounded by the low variability in ratings overall. Most teams report high ratings - a mean greater than 4 on a 5-point scale once the behavioral scale is converted to numeric values. Noting that our greatest concern lies with identifying and remediating dysfunctional teams, the RWA analysis will be repeated on a sample restricted to teams showing some evidence of dysfunction, which will be reported in the full manuscript.

This paper focuses on how a small sample of people with disabilities perceives the usability of web interfaces designed to meet current standards for people with disabilities. Developing accessible interfaces for online educational tools is necessary in providing an inclusive learning environment. Seeking the perceptions of people with disabilities is a logical design step, but it is even more critical due to the emerging evidence on the limitations of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard currently used in the design process. In this work, we report the perceptions of people with disabilities on an example web interface designed according to WCAG standards. In this work-in-progress, we employed 43 workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to compare the existing interface for CATME (an educational platform for team formation and peer evaluation) to an interface implemented according to web content accessibility guidelines while giving why they might prefer the features of either interface. The majority of the participants preferred the WCAG-compliant designs, a few participants provided useful reflections on their preference for the original interface. For example, WCAG criteria 1.4.11 require that hovering over a button results in a color change of the button from blue to white. Approximately half of the participants supported this feature, but the rest preferred a different method of highlighting a target button. We infer that WCAG criteria should be followed with continued reflections on user-centered design, particularly given that several WCAG criteria apply on a case-by-case basis according to the overall design of the web interface. In this paper, we perform a detailed analysis on the feedbacks and reasons given by the participants on the implementation of various accessibility criteria and examine their reasoning to understand the rationale of this small sample of people with disabilities in web designs. The input from this study will guide further exploration with a larger sample of participants. We hope that our research findings will provide further insights into the development of accessible educational tools.