https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/news daily 0.75 2023-04-26 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/news/welcoming-summer monthly 0.5 2023-04-26 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/news/fall-2022-news monthly 0.5 2023-04-26 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/news/regular-updates-are-hard monthly 0.5 2022-09-26 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/news/post-3-lyge9 monthly 0.5 2021-08-24 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/contact daily 0.75 2023-04-18 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/home daily 1.0 2024-09-23 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/my-team daily 0.75 2024-10-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/1625071453110-ZSSFCSD2QD79LDDX8VA0/Mallouk_Kaitlin.JPG Team - Dr. Kaitlin E Mallouk I am an Associate Professor in Experiential Engineering at Rowan University and also serve as the Provost Fellow for Faculty Development. Prior to my current role, I was a tenure-track instructor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Rowan. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/1654700985613-77SWL3D96LIO45VABMUN/riley_darby.jpg Team https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/7a3bca05-084d-4966-82a2-ebae4b24de37/Matt.png Team https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/publications daily 0.75 2023-04-18 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/network-analysis daily 0.75 2023-04-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/1634224600643-F28HPEDJI1CRINE71WQ6/social+network+fie.PNG Network Analysis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/1634225049644-4P30WSBL5B9BU2H12GWG/resource+network+fie.PNG Network Analysis https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/resource-networks daily 0.75 2023-04-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/c474aaa1-a272-4ef0-a4d2-0ad41fc6b387/luis-villasmil-mlVbMbxfWI4-unsplash.jpg Resource Networks - Understanding Stress and Relief: How Engineering Graduate Students Experience and Cope with Stress To be presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference Darby Riley and Kaitlin Mallouk Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/46e45e4e-27a1-4506-9f31-dd50bb9a2b1e/Overall+PSQ.png Resource Networks - Analyzing Engineering Students’ Stress and Coping Mechanisms with Relationship Maps and Statistical Analysis Study conducted as part of Rowan Engineering’s Junior/Senior Engineering Clinic in 2023 David Myers, Tyler Garrett, Luke Stockl, Nolan Pickett, Darby Riley, and Kaitlin Mallouk The students attempted to answer the following research questions: What coping mechanisms are most effective and why? What coping mechanisms do students perceive to be effective? They found that negative coping mechanisms have a greater (negative) impact than positive ones have at all, specifically self-blaming and obsessing are results found to be statistically significant. They also found that some coping mechanisms can be positive or negative, depending on how they’re used and with what other coping mechanisms, such as napping, verbal distress, and humor. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/03b324d6-0864-466d-933e-d4f05c3384ec/resource+network+-+visualizing.png Resource Networks - Visualizing Stress and Relief: How stressors and coping mechanisms interact in engineering graduate student experiences Presented at the 2022 ASEE Annual Conference Darby Riley, Kaitlin Mallouk, and Jacob Troutman Graduate students are poised in a unique place in life, facing the challenges of being full-time students while also maintaining independent, adult lives with the responsibilities that accompany both roles. As such, it is no surprise that graduate students report experiencing a significant amount of stress. For some students, this stress can serve as motivation. For other students, though, this stress can overwhelm and debilitate, causing students to struggle academically, develop mental health problems, or be at higher risk of disease. Though each individual’s response to stress is different, numerous stressors have been identified that are common to the graduate education experience (e.g., classes and grades, research appointments, etc.), as have the various coping mechanisms (e.g., peers, mindfulness-based stress relief, exercise, etc.) that students use. While these individual stressors and coping mechanisms are important, it remains unclear how these different stressors and coping mechanisms might interact to compound or diminish student stress. The combination of stressors experienced by graduate students, as well as the combination of coping mechanisms used by graduate students can be characterized using resource networks, similar to social networks created for understanding interactions among people. The major aim of this project is to increase the understanding of the stress and coping mechanism networks of graduate students, as well as how these two different networks interact. The results will facilitate the development of better support programs for graduate students. In this paper, we seek to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the primary stressors and coping mechanisms of current graduate students, and (2) What are the major differences between coping networks of students who are able to successfully manage stress versus those who are not able to? To answer these questions, we surveyed graduate engineering students at a mid-sized Mid-Atlantic institution. The survey consists of three major sections: (1) the Perceived Stress Questionnaire (S. Levenstein, et al. J. Psychosom. Res., vol 37, no. 1, pp. 19-32, 1993.), which is a validated instrument that assesses an individual's perceived stress level, (2) a section for respondents to identify and rank major sources of stress, and (3) a section for respondents to identify and rank major coping strategies. The survey identified research, grades, and issues relating to mental health as major stressors for all groups, and people, including friends, family, and significant others, as the primary coping mechanisms used by students. Resource network analysis confirmed that these primary stressors and coping mechanisms often appeared together in responses. When results were sorted by ability to manage stress, it was found that students who were poorer at managing stress often had more sources of stress, and that these sources were not always related to their responsibilities as graduate students. Poorer stress managers also tend towards more passive coping mechanisms, such as watching TV/movies or eating food. These results indicate that struggling students may have trouble finding healthy coping mechanisms in their home lives, and so might require extra recognition and support from their faculty advisors and peers. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/a7031654-19a2-4fe8-98a0-20c23393150b/All+Responses.jpg Resource Networks - Student Resource Networks: Seeking Help and Use of Faculty Study conducted as part of Rowan Engineering’s Junior/Senior Engineering Clinic in 2022 Hannah Corbin, Grace Culley, Nolan Pickett, Jacob Willetts, Darby Riley, Kaitlin Mallouk We sought to address the following research questions: (1) How do student characteristics affect their use of resources when they need academic help? and (2) How does a student’s perception of their relationship with their faculty influence how they use faculty as a resource? The results suggest that student use of office hours is not connected to academic success or lack thereof. The results of the survey show that a student’s use of faculty as a resource can be affected by the professor’s approachability and is not singularly dependent upon a student’s need for academic help. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/c08b69f2-084c-49fb-a940-e8159be03f09/Q12.png Resource Networks - Adoption of Pedagogical Innovations: Resource Networks of Engineering Education Guilds Presented at the Frontiers in Education Conference in October 2021 Darby Riley, Kaitlin Mallouk, Alexandra Coso Strong, and Courtney Faber This Full Research paper uses resource network analysis to explore what resources faculty use when they make changes to their pedagogy, and how an engineering education “guild” is situated among those resources. The process of influencing pedagogical change can be understood as lying along a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is the dissemination model, where research is simply made available and instructors are expected to seek out new tools. On the other end is the propagation model, where researchers, developers, and instructors work as one cohesive team to get innovative tools into classrooms. While each of these models and the instructor resources associated with them have been separately studied and defined, approaches on the spectrum between them remain understudied. Engineering education guilds employ an approach that falls along the dissemination-propagation spectrum; they use both dissemination and propagation techniques to influence pedagogical changes. Despite lack of formal research on the subject, engineering education “guilds” have become an increasingly popular vehicle for pedagogical change in engineering education classrooms. One such engineering education guild is the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), which is focused on integrating entrepreneurial mindset (EM) into engineering curricula. By constructing resource networks for educators who have been exposed to KEEN, we aim to understand the role of KEEN among the myriad resources used by engineering educators when they integrate EM-related content into their classrooms. Results suggest that engineering education guilds are central to the resource networks of faculty looking to innovate their pedagogy, with the most popular resources all falling under the guild’s umbrella. These resources are also strongly interconnected, especially during the integration process. However, the resources networks of those who saw successful, complete, sustained adoption reached beyond the guild’s umbrella, forging connections with a variety of other materials from different sources. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1927268. https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/social-networks daily 0.75 2023-08-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/2bda2dde-4642-4bf4-956e-80183f417e2e/Screenshot+2023-08-28+at+9.17.54+AM.jpg Social Networks - The Social Nature of Instructional Change - The Case of Engineering Unleashed Faculty Development (EUFD) Workshops Since 2019 the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) has been offering professional development workshops to engineering (and adjacent) faculty to support the development of entrepreneurial mindset in the faculty participants and their students (Engineering Unleashed Faculty Development workshops - EUFD). Connection is one of the primary features of EUFD workshops, which were intentionally designed to foster engagement between participants and facilitators/coaches and among participants themselves. Using community as a change mechanism is well-supported by the literature with examples including Communities of Practice (Cross 2021) and models such as Making Academic Change Happen (MACH). In this project, surveys and interviews of EUFD participants will help better understand the role of connection and community in their workshop experience and subsequent implementation of workshop learning objectives. Our research questions are: How do the EUFD workshops establish a community of practice for fostering an entrepreneurial mindset in participants and their students? What are the characteristics of the informal social structures formed during EUFD workshops? In what ways do those structures facilitate or hinder implementation of Entrepreneurially Minded Learning (EML) innovations? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/940bbd84-6832-4787-8d4a-6effe3a7f879/Screenshot+2023-08-28+at+9.05.31+AM.png Social Networks - The Effect of a Collaborative Environment on Engineering Students' Social Networks Presented at the 2023 American Society for Engineering Education Conference Hannah Corbin, Noor Aulakh, Alex Herrman, Conor Peterson, Shahir Shariful Mollah, Darby Riley, Kaitlin Mallouk The results of this study indicate that, in instances where students perceived that their instructors implemented collaborative learning more often, a student’s social network became more densely interconnected. Additionally, the number of friends a student chooses to work with is positively correlated to how often said student works or studies in a group setting. We also found a correlation between social connectedness within a department and the competitiveness of the department. These findings can be used to inform instructor’s pedagogical approaches and provide additional support for the benefits of collaborative learning. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/f5bbc796-f476-4da4-a19c-5d9d9252ea1b/EgoNetwork_Node32_Gender.JPG Social Networks - Social Network Analysis This research study aimed to answer the questions: 1) how does a mechanical engineering student’s first-year living situation affect their social connectedness within their major/year, and 2) do engineering students tend to work with other students of the same gender or the opposite? We used a survey pre-populated with the names of all of the Mechanical Engineering seniors and asked participants to identify who they knew, how well they knew them, and in what ways they worked together. We also asked participants their gender identity and their first year living situation (Engineering Learning Community (ELC), other dorm, commuter). Our results showed that students who were in the ELC as first-years had networks that were made up of an average of 46.36% ELC students. Only 19% of students were participants in the ELC; therefore, it can be concluded that the ELC is effective in creating close interpersonal relationships between program participants. These relationships are also found to be long lasting, having persisted through four years of college. Additionally, on average each mechanical engineering student’s personal network is composed of 12.12% female students (the fraction expected due to a given person having no preference in the gender of who they connect with). In contrast, the networks of female students were found to consist of a much larger portion of female students; on average female students had ego networks made up of 37.35% female students. https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/entrepreneurial-mindset daily 0.75 2023-04-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/1654715560297-2LVJ41ONOB9A0KWJR5YU/Screen+Shot+2022-06-08+at+3.12.27+PM.png Entrepreneurial Mindset https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/1654715953265-YO3YGEVSHKEJS7Q6KY67/jason-goodman-Oalh2MojUuk-unsplash.jpg Entrepreneurial Mindset https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/reflection daily 0.75 2023-04-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/74de0532-7c62-4bc3-a02c-7756d1d00e10/alexis-brown-omeaHbEFlN4-unsplash.jpg Reflection - How First Year Students’ Reflections on Themselves as Learners Change Over Time Presented at the American Society for Engineering Education Conference in 2020. This work was conducted as part of Rowan University’s Junior/Senior Engineering Clinic Program Abigail Brown, Barbara Cerefin, Lauren Gallo, Sarah Ramsey, Kaitlin Mallouk First-semester, first-year engineering students at a mid-sized, Mid-Atlantic public university are required to take a multidisciplinary introduction to engineering course that is offered in sections of 20-24 students. Approximately ⅓ of these students are members of the Engineering Learning Community (ELC), which provides housing in a common location as well as additional supports in the form of weekly group meetings with a student mentor and access to tutoring. Another ⅙ of students were in sections designated as Honors. In Fall 2017, weekly reflections were implemented in this course as a way of encouraging students to explain past experiences and learn from their mistakes. In Fall 2018, the weekly reflection prompts were reduced to biweekly reflections, the first and last of which required students to reflect on themselves as learners. This study used provisional and in-vivo coding to analyze paired reflections from 116 students. Ten total themes were identified and used to characterize each reflection, with interrater reliabilities (quantified by Cohen’s Kappa) of 0.564 and 0.668 for the two pairs of researchers who analyzed this data. The top three themes for each group of students (ELC, Honors, and Non-Honors & Non-ELC) were determined and the representation of this data discussed. Results showed for the beginning of the semester, “Learning” was the top theme for all three groups of students. At the end of the semester, the top theme for all groups was “Time Management Balance”. Through this study, the change of students’ perceptions of themselves as learners at the beginning and end of their first semester was analyzed and is illustrated by, among other things, the change in the top theme highlighted above. Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/26dd3929-8881-408d-9ea2-76aab57fc8f3/mohammed-idris-djoudi-IgOvxnXESJU-unsplash.jpg Reflection - First-Year Students’ Conceptualization of Entrepreneurial Mindset Through Reflections Linked to Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value Published in Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy Darby Riley, Hayley M. Shuster, Courtney LeMasney, Carla Silvestri, Kaitlin Mallouk This study was conducted to examine how first-year engineering students conceptualize the Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) and how that conceptualization changes over the course of their first semester of college, using the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN)’s 3Cs as a starting point. Students enrolled in an introductory, multidisciplinary design course responded to biweekly reflection prompts on their educational experiences (either in high school or as a first-year college student) and related this experience to one of the 3Cs of EM: Curiosity, Connections, or Creating Value. Results indicate that students’ conceptualization of the 3Cs often align with definitions of EM from KEEN, as well as foundational works in the entrepreneurship field, and that their interpretation of each of the 3Cs does change during their first semester in college. For instance, students were less likely to write about curiosity and more likely to write about creating value at the end of the semester compared to the beginning. https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/classroom-projects daily 0.75 2023-04-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/851607ae-e270-4433-86d2-67df391e16a7/KeenLogo.jpg Classroom Projects - Check out EngineeringUnleashed The innovative classroom projects I have worked on are documented at EngineeringUnleashed.com where you can find many resources for integrating Entrepreneurial Mindset into your classroom. https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/faculty-development daily 0.75 2023-04-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/448983ff-90fe-4528-9d84-928a8b7601eb/unsplash-image-2rJ7ZZPyJT8.jpg Faculty Development - KEEN Faculty Impact Study Presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference Darby Riley, Cayla Ritz, Cheryl Bodnar, and Kaitlin Mallouk This work in progress paper explores the effect of entrepreneurial mindset (EM) professional development workshops on the social networks of faculty members. While there exist many research communities dedicated to developing innovative pedagogies, few of these pedagogies are successfully adopted into classrooms. One such pedagogical innovation is the incorporation of entrepreneurial mindset into engineering education. EM is a set of skills which help individuals recognize and take advantage of opportunities to innovate. At one Mid-Atlantic research university, faculty who participated in University-sponsored and Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) sponsored EM professional development opportunities were surveyed to better understand the social networks that facilitate integration of entrepreneurial mindset in their engineering classrooms. This study investigated the effect of EM-focused faculty professional development by answering the following question: what types of connections are developed in a social network through EM professional development within a single institution? Initial findings for this study indicate that many faculty members surveyed at this institution have social network connections that hinge upon EM professional development workshops, or are strengthened through attending these workshops. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/448983ff-90fe-4528-9d84-928a8b7601eb/unsplash-image-2rJ7ZZPyJT8.jpg Faculty Development - How Engineering Education Guilds are Expanding our Understanding of Propagation in Engineering Education Published in Journal of STEM Education: Innovation and Research Kaitlin Mallouk, Alexandra Strong, Darby Riley, and Courtney Faber The National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations have spent millions of dollars each year supporting well-designed educational innovations that positively impact the undergraduate engineering students who encounter them. However, many of these pedagogical innovations never experience widespread adoption. To further the ability of innovation developers to advance engineering education practice and achieve sustained adoption of their innovations, this paper focuses on exploring how one community-based model, engineering education guilds, fosters propagation across institutions and individuals. Engineering education guilds seek to work at the forefront of educational innovation by creating networks of instructor change-agents who design and implement a particular innovation in their own context. The guilds of interest are the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN). With these guilds as exemplars, this study’s purpose is (1) to articulate how the approaches of engineering education guilds align with existing literature on supporting sustained adoption of educational innovations and (2) to identify how these approaches can advance the STEM education community’s discussion of propagation practices through the use of the Designing for Sustained Adoption Assessment Instrument (DSAAI). The DSAAI is a conceptual framework based on research in sustained adoption of pedagogical innovations. It has previously been previously used in the form of a rubric to analyze dissemination and propagation plans of NSF educational grant recipients and was shown been shown to predict the effectiveness of those propagation plans. Through semi-structured interviews with two leaders from each guild, we observed strong alignment between the structures of CRPEE and KEEN and evidence-based sustained adoption characteristics. For example, both guilds identified their intended audience early in their formation, developed and implemented extensive plans for engaging and supporting potential adopters, and accounted for the complexity of the higher education landscape and their innovations in their propagation plans. Our results suggest that guilds could provide another approach to innovation, as their structures can be aligned with evidence-based methods for propagating pedagogical innovations. Additionally, while the DSAAI captures many of the characteristics of a well-designed propagation strategy, there are additional components that emerged as successful strategies used by the CPREE and KEEN guild leaders. These strategies could and should be considered as educational innovators work to encourage adoption of their innovations, including having mutual accountability among adopters and connecting adoption of innovations to faculty reward structures in the form of recognition and funding. https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/projects daily 0.75 2023-04-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/1634225049644-4P30WSBL5B9BU2H12GWG/resource+network+fie.PNG Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/fe273f7f-6285-41ef-b043-c93b6dad3441/IMG_2560.JPG Research https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/f6dc6da6-6da1-43b4-91d2-f4bda449fcff/rohan-makhecha-jw3GOzxiSkw-unsplash.jpg Research https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/about daily 0.75 2023-04-26 https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/thrive daily 0.75 2025-10-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/e8bf10d1-c429-4c80-b9d7-02cb7936b96f/DarbyNoorASEEAward.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/ff7576bd-4b26-4e63-b6b0-10307e54dbf3/StephanieSavanna.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/e5afd0e8-ddca-4fc0-aa73-b9e8039b783b/Fall2024PhDStudents.jpg https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/thrive-stem-projects daily 0.75 2024-09-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/efb8a9e2-dfee-4ea3-87d6-05445acd9d50/thisisengineering-zl8CGxoIF_A-unsplash.jpg THRIVE STEM Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/d3767fb7-5416-48cf-9e4c-117eb3d4be43/christina-wocintechchat-com-FPQlXQtjkqU-unsplash.jpg THRIVE STEM Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60c228e589b46025be7def4d/414f8361-ad33-40d7-a778-621513034420/exeed-teaching.jpg THRIVE STEM Projects https://www.kaitlinmallouk.com/thrive-stem-rubrics daily 0.75 2024-10-01