WIP: Studying the resource networks of first-year engineering students: Establishing a data collection method

This work-in-progress paper describes our process for developing a data collection method to study the resource networks students use to complete engineering homework problems through network analysis. Network analysis is the study of connections between objects or people. Networks are composed of nodes and edges, where nodes are objects or people and edges represent the connections between nodes. There have been multiple education studies within and outside of engineering that use network analysis to understand peer connections within a course. However, there are few studies that have applied this method to study how students use resources within a course. The goal of our larger work is to examine the use of resources by first-year engineering students in order to understand what resources they use, when they use particular resources, and how they use the resources to complete homework assignments. To begin addressing this goal we needed to establish a method to collect data that allows us to create and analyze time-series problem-solving processes. The methods used to collect this data must include survey items which allow researchers to capture the resources students use (e.g. instructors, teaching assistants, peers, class notes, online sources, textbooks, and discussion boards) and the order in which they use these resources.