Professional writing skills are essential for crafting job application materials where applicants showcase their qualifications to recruiters and employers. Lettersmith is a digital tool that supports writing through scaffolded annotation, an instructional approach combining an expert-informed checklist, annotated examples, and self-tagging. We evaluated the efficacy of the instructional mechanisms that make up scaffolded annotation, as well as the use of ChatGPT, in facilitating writing cognitive processes and writing quality. Through a lab experiment with 146 first-year college students writing and revising a cover letter, we found that the combined mechanisms of scaffolded annotation within Lettersmith promoted a stronger understanding of the writing genre. Specifically, the use of a checklist combined with another writing support, like an example or self-tagging, was particularly effective for improving writing quality. Unstructured use of ChatGPT did not improve writing cognitive processes or writing quality more than Lettersmith.

In 2016, a curricular information service was launched on the main campus of the University of Michigan. Through course guide entry links, students could view five-year historical summaries of various course properties. In subsequent years, the service expanded to share more elements of the academic landscape, including recent information on instructors and degrees. Rebranded as Atlas and positioned as an aid to improving academic decisions, this local campus innovation has scaled to be used by 99% of undergraduate students, with more than 54,000 unique users in calendar year 2022. A schedule builder feature and the ability to create and share collections have driven user growth and offer unique research windows into student academic preferences and decisions. As Atlas pivots from sharing passive historical views to more actively guiding students' academic pathways, the faculty and staff team behind the service continue to experiment with community building, translational research, and maintaining innovation at scale. Here, we review the growth and evolution of the service and share the experience of innovating at scale at a major American research university.

This full paper sets out a methodological protocol for conducting a scoping review of literature relating to teamwork effectiveness and equity. The goal of the study is to understand how academic discourse over the five-year period prior to the study being carried out has conceptualized teamwork success in educational and professional contexts, and to what extent equitable team practices are embedded within such conceptualizations. In line with ongoing initiatives to promote transparency in research, this protocol paper is intended for dissemination prior to the conduct of the study itself. The research context, questions, and rationale are set out, and a detailed methodology described, outlining procedures for data retrieval, screening, extraction, and analysis. The paper concludes with an outline of intended reporting methods for the study, including the reporting of deviations from the procedures set out herein. This paper contributes to the scoping review methodology, and especially its application in the field of engineering education research and education research more broadly.

It is difficult for instructors, and even students themselves, to become aware in real-time of inequitable behaviors occurring on student teams. Here, we explored a potential measure for inequitable teamwork drawing on data from a digital pedagogical tool designed to surface and disrupt such team behaviors. Students in a large, undergraduate business course completed seven surveys about team health (called team checks) at regular intervals throughout the term, providing information about team dynamics, contributions, and processes. The ways in which changes in students’ scores from team check to team check compared to the median changes for their team were used to identify the proportions of teams with outlier student scores. The results show that for every team size and team check item, the proportion of teams with outliers at the end of the term was smaller than at the beginning of the semester, indicating stabilization in how teammates evaluated their team experiences. In all but two cases, outlying students were not disproportionately likely to identify with historically marginalized groups based on gender or race/ethnicity. Thus, we did not broadly identify teamwork inequities in this specific context, but the method provides a basis for future studies about inequitable team behavior.

Large courses act as gateways for college students and often have poor outcomes, particularly in STEM fields where the pace of improvement has been glacial. Students encounter barriers to persistence like low grades, competitive cultures, and a lack of motivation and belonging. Tailored technology systems offer one promising path forward. In this observational study, we report on the use of one such system, called ECoach, that provides students resources based on their psychosocial profile, performance metrics, and pattern of ECoach usage. We investigated ECoach efficacy in five courses enrolling 3,599 students using a clustering method to group users by engagement level and subsequent regression analyses. We present results showing significant positive relationships with small effect sizes between ECoach engagement and final course grade as well as grade anomaly, a performance measure that takes into account prior course grades. The courses with the strongest relationship between ECoach engagement and performance offered nominal extra credit incentives yet show improved grades well above this “investment” from instructors. Such small incentives may act as a catalyst that spurs deeper engagement with the platform. The impact of specific ECoach features and areas for future study are discussed.