Is MIDFIELD for me?
2021 Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference (Oct 13, 2021)
1 Introduction
1.1 Objectives
MIDFIELD—as of May 1, 2021—contains individual Student Unit Record (SUR) data for 1.7 M undergraduates at 19 institutions with ABET-accredited engineering programs. Of those, 302,631 students declared engineering as a major at some point in their undergraduate education. MIDFIELD is a comprehensive resource that includes demographic, enrollment, course performance, and graduation data. A total of 33 institutions have completed Memoranda of Understanding and are expected to be included in the next release.
At the conclusion of the session, participants should be able to:
- describe MIDFIELD and the data it contains
- describe student record data
- describe some key research results that have been obtained using MIDFIELD
- determine if MIDFIELD would be useful for their research
- outline process to access MIDFIELD
- plan for future workshops if interested in learning more about MIDFIELD
1.2 Description
This special session introduces participants to the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD includes longitudinal, whole population data for multiple institutions. This enables researchers to examine student characteristics such as race/ethnicity, sex, or age and curricular pathways,including coursework, by institution and over time. Because the data set contains records of all students matriculating over a period of time, researchers can study students in all disciplines, not just engineering.
1.3 Agenda
| Min | Topic |
|---|---|
| 10 | Session introduction |
| 15 | Key research results using MIDFIELD |
| 35 | Finding stories in the data |
| 25 | Resources to facilitate use of MIDFIELD |
| 5 | Wrap-up |
1.4 Facilitators
- Susan Lord
Director of the MIDFIELD Institute and Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ASEE. Dr. Lord has considerable experience facilitating workshops including the National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI) and special sessions at FIE. (slord@sandiego.edu)
- Matthew Ohland
MIDFIELD Director and Principal Investigator. He is Professor and Associate Head of Engineering Education at Purdue University and a Fellow of IEEE, ASEE, and AAAS. Dr. Ohland has considerable experience facilitating workshops including the NETI and CATME training. (ohland@purdue.edu)
- Marisa Orr
MIDFIELD Associate Director and Associate Professor in Engineering and Science Education with a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University. She received the 2009 Helen Plants Award for the best nontraditional session at FIE, “Enhancing Student Learning Using SCALE-UP Format.” (marisak@clemson.edu)
- Richard Layton
MIDFIELD Data Visualization Specialist and Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He is the lead developer of the R packages used with the MIDFIELD practice data sets. Dr. Layton has considerable experience facilitating workshops, including FIE workshops on data visualization (2014) and midfieldr (2018). (graphdoctor@gmail.com)
- Russell Long
MIDFIELD Managing Director and Data Steward. He developed the stratified data sample for the R packages used in this workshop. Mr. Long is a SAS expert with over twenty years of experience in institutional research and assessment. (ralong@purdue.edu)
1.5 Licenses
The following licenses apply to the text, data, and code in these workshops. Our goal is to minimize legal encumbrances to the dissemination, sharing, use, and re-use of this work. However, the existing rights of authors whose work is cited (text, code, or data) are reserved to those authors.
1.6 Acknowledgement
Funding provided by the National Science Foundation Grant 1545667 “Expanding Access to and Participation in the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development.”
