OBJECTIVE: Heightened muscular effort and breathlessness (dyspnea) are disabling sensory experiences. We sought to improve the current approach of assessing these symptoms only at the maximal effort to new paradigms based on their continuous quantification throughout cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET). MATERIALS AND METHODS: After establishing sex- and age-adjusted reference centiles (0-10 Borg scale), we developed a novel algorithm (AI-Techniques Loss-Based Algorithm for Severity Classification [ATLAS]) based on reciprocal exponential loss for CPET data from patients with chronic obstructive lung disease of varied severity. RESULTS: Categories of dyspnea intensity by ATLAS-but not dyspnea at peak exercise-correctly discriminated patients in progressively higher resting and exercise impairment (P < .05). DISCUSSION: This new AI-techniques approach will be translated to the care of disabled patients to uncover the seeds and consequences of their activity-related symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: We used innovative informatics research to change paradigms in displaying, quantifying, and analyzing effort-related symptoms in patient populations.

In this innovative practice, work in progress paper, we examined the degree of constructive alignment in a pilot course informed by service-learning. Constructive Alignment refers to the degree of alignment between an instructor’s intentions and students’ experiences of a course. Data for the study were derived from a narrative constructed from the instructor’s reflections, describing intentions and experiences, coupled with thematic analysis of a transcript of a class discussion in which students were prompted to express their expectations for the course and their experiences of it. The instructor’s intentions were to take students through the experience of doing a real-world engineering project with community impact. Students had signed up for this course with expectations reasonably aligned with this plan. What they did not expect was how open-ended the engineering process would be, how it would demand intrinsic motivation for them rather than focusing on grades, and the degree to which the process would rest on communication skills, with substantial in-class discussion.

This work in progress paper describes preliminary results of a methodology used at three different universities to explore students’ perceptions of engineering through drawings. One of the primary objectives of introductory and foundational engineering courses is to help students develop a sense of identity and belonging within the field of engineering, and understand basic engineering knowledge and skills. Hence, it is crucial to understand students’ preconceptions of the engineering discipline when they start their academic program. However, many students entering the program have narrow preconceptions or limited knowledge about the field. One challenge instructors face is how to facilitate students’ thinking about their own perceptions of engineering in a meaningful way. A typical activity to help the students understand their perceptions of the engineering discipline is to ask them, "What is engineering?" However, instructors have been frustrated by the lack of depth in students’ responses. This paper explores a different methodology to understand students’ perceptions of the engineering discipline by taking an arts-informed approach; instead of writing down their perceptions or talking with a peer, students are asked to draw a response to the question "What is engineering?" Data were collected and analyzed using an arts-based open-coding approach. Initial results provide a representation of students' preconceptions about the discipline in terms of human, technical, process-based, and holistic/global aspects, which provide further evidence that arts-based methods are effective in capturing student deep perceptions of the engineering discipline.

This full paper reports on students’ experiences after working on a first-year engineering design project with a real client. The instructors partnered with a Children's Museum in the local area, and students were tasked with developing prototypes of potential exhibits. The purpose of this paper is to present results on students’ perceptions of their experience working with a real client, developing a prototype, and having to interact with project stakeholders (e.g., children). The course design was based on problem-based learning (PBL) and data were collected from 169 first-year engineering students who anonymously filled out an exit survey. Responses were coded and emerging themes are presented. Natural processing language techniques were also used to analyze the open-ended responses.