WIP: Investigating the relationship between FYE students’ reflections and academic performance across gender

Reflection is an important skill and is a practical learning tool to engage students in learning tasks. In the context of first-year engineering (FYE) students, studies have emphasized the importance of the reflection activities as it facilitates the students’ learning process by engaging them with the learning contents, specifically with threshold and conceptually challenging concepts. Considering that the national average of male and female student population in the USA in FYE programs is disproportionate, students may experience varying impacts on their learning across gender. Consequently, this work in progress contributes to the literature by exploring the role of gender-based variations in the relationship between students’ self-reflection and academic performance in FYE students. Specifically, this study is guided by a research question: Do students’ self-reflections have a varying effect on the students’ academic performance between gender groups? We collected the data from 120 FYE students enrolled in a required FYE course at a large Midwestern University. We focused on a first-year programming course to evaluate the impact of reflection across gender groups and students’ performance for conceptually challenging concepts. We collected the data on gender, course reflection, and academic performance. In the data collection process, students self-reported their gender information. To collect students’ reflections, we used CourseMIRROR mobile application. This application prompted students to reflect on the interesting and confusing aspects of the lecture after the end of each lecture throughout the semester. We used the reflection specificity score (i.e., the quality of the reflection) to measure students’ ability to reflect, calculated by the application using NLP algorithms. Further, the instructional team provided the data on students’ performance through their exam scores. To inform our study, we will conduct multiple regression for each set of reflection questions (i.e., confusing and interesting aspects of lecture), where the dependent variable is the students’ exam score, and the independent variables are the average specificity score of students’ submitted reflections, and their gender. The draft paper will present the preliminary results across gender groups, implications, limitations, and future directions.