Lessons Learned from the NSF IGERT Program: Cultivating Student Motivation in the Interdisciplinary and International Contexts

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program: Global Traineeship in Sustainable Electronics” brought together an interdisciplinary group of students to study the environmental, economic, and societal aspects of the global electronics lifecycle. There were three cohorts altogether, but the dynamics of each group were substantially different. This third cohort actively sought additional experiences outside the original planned courses and trips. The aim of this work is to glean insight into what and how specific curriculum design may promote the learning experiences in which students take initiative beyond the scope of the programs. We identified four factors that might influence the experiential learning within a framework incorporating the self-determination theory (SDT) and the expectancy-value model: value, relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Utilizing a nonexperimental approach, we surveyed the last cohort to identify when and why they felt or failed to feel motivated during the program and what curriculum modules were most valuable for their learning experiences. We found that all four factors (value, relatedness, competence, and autonomy) grew throughout the program. In particular, the international workshop in India marks the point when students started to see shared values with their peers; the self-organized seminar course marks the point when students developed the feeling of autonomy. The most valuable aspects of the program were ranked to be international field trips, peers, and team projects. For the latter two aspects, defined in this work as the group dynamic, the most important factors for building a sense of community are group pro-activity, cohesiveness, and attitude. The emerging call for future engineers with global-citizen mindsets asks for a re-evaluation of current educational experiences provided in higher education. In the U.S., participation in studyabroad programs for students majoring in engineering has increased more than 50% over the past decade [1]. Study-abroad programs represent the general interest of exposing students to other cultures or environments so that they become competitive professionals in the globalized world [2], [3]. Specifically, this outcome was highlighted by the National Academy of Engineering, whose recently reported initiatives emphasize the importance of international learning experience [4]. Apart from international learning experiences, interdisciplinary curricular development in higher education has attracted many educators’ attention and was reported to be suitable for topics that require inputs from both STEM and non-STEM fields [5]–[7]. In light of this emphasis on expanding students’ education, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program was developed by the National Science Foundation as a traineeship that prepares graduate students to enter the workforce by focusing on collaborative, interdisciplinary training. A multi-year traineeship was established at Purdue and Tuskegee Universities and is focused on sustainable electronics. Graduate student trainees Introduction conduct research in fields relevant to electronics and sustainability and take four classes in addition to participating in annual workshops, domestic industry trips and an international trip to India. Of the three cohorts sponsored by the program, the final IGERT cohort went beyond the original programming of the curricula. For instance, when their final class was canceled due to a professor’s sabbatical, the class proposed a student-led seminar class in which the curriculum was designed to fill in the student-reported knowledge gaps from the cohort. This research will focus on the experiences of the third, final cohort from the IGERT ”Global Sustainability in Electronics Traineeship” which exhibited a high level of self-motivation throughout their tenure. Considering the international and interdisciplinary setting for the IGERT program, it is natural to assume the self-driven activities were related to this setting. However, few studies with similar learning settings reported how student motivation changed [8], [9]. With limited literature on interdisciplinary or international programs that affect student motivation, the teaching practices that led the third IGERT cohort to be self-motivated are valuable to identify. With an increasing number of engineering curricula being designed with interdisciplinary or intercultural settings, the aim of this work is to evaluate the influence of specific course design and implementation on students’ motivation in teaching practices, within a structured framework of self-determination theory [10] and expectancy-value model [11]. With the "NSF IGERT: Global Traineeship in Sustainable Electronics" as a suitable example, this paper is guided by two questions: "What kind of motivation were exhibited and changed throughout the IGERT program?" and "If changed, what projects or educational experiences triggered it?" Motivation theory provides the groundwork for learning and teaching for students and educators. Svinicki [12] and Perkins [13] extensively discussed how to develop curricula that foster the motivations of students. Motivation is studied with respect to learners, contexts, and cultures [14, Ch. 6]. We will use self-determination theory (SDT) as the main framework for this study. SDT applies to the topics of motivation, arguing that there are three key elements contributing to intrinsic motivation: autonomy (i.e., feeling one’s behavior is self-determined and fosters intrinsic motivation), competence (social-contextual events i.e. feedback and rewards that contribute to feeling qualified or skilled), and relatedness (a sense of security and connection in interpersonal settings). The expectancy-value-cost model [11] is used as a secondary framework to examine value as a factor in student motivation. Because the "expectancy" factor resembles the "competence" in the self-determination theory and the "cost" is oftentimes categorized into the "value" factor, only the “value” factor is incorporated into our theoretical framework. In conclusion, we identified the four factors in motivation theory, i.e., value, relatedness, competence, and autonomy, as the reference for guiding our research questions. Study Purpose Theory and Background Theoretical framework of motivation Relatively few studies are available where interdisciplinary and international elements were a part of the course design and student motivation was measured. However, publications can be found in either field (interdisciplinary or intercultural environment). For instance, McCormick et al. [15] examined a service-learning program at Tufts University which was deemed a valuable complementary resource to the conceptual knowledge taught in college-level courses.They observed that the experience could motivate students to self-develop a scaffolding approach to understand the practical constraints on real-life issues they confronted during the servicelearning experience. Johri et al. [9] re-designed a freshmen course focusing on developing partnerships between colleges and international organizations to provide a scaffolding learning experience to undergraduate students, in which the positive influence of student motivation was tied to contextualized real-life projects. However, interdisciplinary curricula or intercultural learning environments do not necessarily result in enhanced student motivation. For example, Wang [16] also reported that students’ learning motivation and professional skills can benefit from a course with combined efforts of multidisciplinary integration and problem-based learning implementation, which was supported by analytical results from pre-tests, mid-tests, and post-tests surveys. Though this project did include students from eleven countries, this intercultural learning environment was not considered as an asset contributing to the changes in students' learning motivation. Additionally, Zhu et al. [17] found no obvious impact of one multidisciplinary and cross-cultural course on students' motivation based on the analysis from the motivation survey. We should not assume a simple, certain, and direct relationship between the interdisciplinary or international elements and enhanced motivation. The key to raise student motivation likely lies in specific teaching practices or curricula design. This section provides an overview of the last cohort's experience in the IGERT program in sustainable electronics. The IGERT trainees were located at two different universities, separated by 670 miles. The trainees are required to take four classes that focus on sustainable electronics. The students in each university assembled in a classroom with at least one faculty member and the class was conducted through WebEx. The first two classes, Design for Global Sustainability I and II (DGSI or DGS-II), served as the foundation for learning; topics included sustainability, general processing and manufacturing knowledge of electronics, and policies and regulations for waste management. The third class on life cycle assessment (LCA) focused on understanding the environmental and economic implications of products by monitoring all inputs and outputs of a system. The final class focused on applying the knowledge of the previous classes to a research topic of interest. This class looked different depending on the cohort as cohort 3 created their own class. Since the third cohort’s experiences are the subject of the present paper, this topic will be discussed in depth in the subsequent section in Examples of Student-Driven Programming. NSF IGERT program in sustainable electronics Class structure Student motivation in an interdisciplinary and intercultural learning environment Early in the first semester of classes, the students and faculty from Purdue and Tuskegee Universities visite