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
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.
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.
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.
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.