Impact of out-of-class science and engineering activities on physics identity and career intentions

The number of physics bachelor’s degrees that are awarded in the United States annually is small compared to most other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, and only about one-fifth of these degrees are awarded to women. Understanding the influence of students’ science and engineering experiences on career choices is critical in order to improve future efforts to increase the number of physics majors and the participation of women. In this work, we use a physics identity framework to examine the impact of out-of-class science and engineering activities on three identity dimensions and the relationship between these dimensions and physics career choice. Through structural equation modeling of survey data from 5541 college students, we find that out-of-class science and engineering activities have the largest influence on physics performance/competence beliefs, but the association of performance/competence beliefs to overall physics identity and physics career choice is primarily mediated through recognition beliefs and physics interests. Furthermore, out-of-class science and engineering activities have a larger effect on recognition beliefs for men than for women, which is a challenging finding in light of the fact that recognition beliefs are the most influential identity dimension for women. The results of this work begin to highlight the need for out-of-class science and engineering activities that focus on not only enhancing students’ performance/competence beliefs but also students’ interests, particularly those students not previously interested, and women’s recognition beliefs with respect to physics

Understanding Female Engineering Enrollment: Explaining Choice with Critical Engineering Agency

One path to increasing the diversity of the engineering workforce is to understand the affective self-beliefs of women who choose engineering and how those beliefs change over time. By understanding these self-beliefs, educators can help to empower women to identify with engineering and see its potential to make change in their world. Rigorous research in this area is needed and could have significant positive impact on the engineering workforce. This research builds on critical agency theory by validating and refining the frame-work of Critical Engineering Agency (CEA), though which students’ interest in engineering is enhanced when they see opportunities to make change in their world. This framework has been developed by drawing from prior qualitative research and through a quantitative national study. Structural equation modeling was used to understand the connections be-tween the constructs of CEA. Additional work was conducted to understand other factors that influence students’ choice of engineering. A pair of qualitative follow-up studies to this work were conducted to understand the reasons why students develop CEA and choose engineering as a career. The qualitative phase added explanatory context and interpretive power to previously identified relationships through open-ended surveys and a longitudinal case study. The results highlight the salience of the CEA framework, indicating that recog-nition beliefs are the most important piece of identity development and holding agency beliefs about the positive impact that engineering and science can have on the world is more important for women than men in affecting their engineering choice. Qualitative results illustrated how identity and agency beliefs form and how the connection between Communities of Practice and identity through agential bridging occurs. The results from an in-depth case study demonstrated how CEA is developed through constructed hybrid spaces and practically plays a role in engineering decisions and identity formation within an engineering Community of Practice. Students’ identities and agency beliefs provide insight into why students choose and persist in areas related to engineering, how professors might develop students’ internalization of recognition in the classroom, and how this CEA framework might provide a lens for future research. Providing high school and college faculty, admissions and recruitment staff, and college administrators with research-based strategies to increase female students’ personal engagement with engineering is an important step towards diversifying engineering

Efecto de la confianza en la lealtad y el eWOM en las comunidades virtuales de marca.

La confianza en la marca y en la Comunidad Virtual de Marca (CVM) pueden contribuir a la generación de lealtad a la marca y eWOM positivo. Sin embargo, no han sido muchos los estudios empíricos que han incluido ambos tipos de confianza en la evaluación de los resultados de las CVM. Por lo tanto, este trabajo tiene como objetivo explorar cómo la confianza en la marca y la confianza en la comunidad influyen en la lealtad y en el eWOM. Para ello se emplearon datos procedentes de una encuesta realizada a usuarios de CVM que fueron analizados mediante la técnica PLS. Los resultados confirman que la confianza en la marca influye en la lealtad y en el eWOM tanto directamente, como indirectamente a través de la confianza en la CVM. Además, la lealtad favorece la generación de eWOM. Las implicaciones para la práctica de marketing son comentadas.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Consumption authenticity in the age of the sharing economy: the keys to creating loyal customers who love your brand

Airbnb has gained popularity as an alternative to hotels, with the authenticity of the consumption experience being a critical differentiating factor. However, the hospitality and tourism literature has not fully explored how Airbnb and traditional hotel brands are facilitating authentic travel experiences and the impact of these experiences on brand love and brand loyalty. In this study, we explore three elements of consumption authenticity and examine their how they interact in the context of an accommodation brand. Second, we compare the components of consumption authenticity across hotels and Airbnb, and examine their relative impact on brand love for these two segments of the accommodations industry. We found that hotels and Airbnb draw upon different sources of authenticity to create brand-loving customers. Our results indicated that Airbnb leverages brand, existential, and intrapersonal authenticity in creating brand-loving and brand-loyal customers, while hotels utilize only brand authenticity. Thus, the keys to creating customers who love and are loyal to the brand differ between hotels and Airbnb. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and areas of future research are identified.Accepted manuscrip

Leveraging a Relationship with Biology to Expand a Relationship with Physics

This work examines how experiences in one disciplinary domain (biology) can impact the relationship a student builds with another domain (physics). We present a model for disciplinary relationships using the constructs of identity, affect, and epistemology. With these constructs we examine an ethnographic case study of a student who experienced a significant shift in her relationship with physics. We describe how this shift demonstrates (1) a stronger identification with physics, (2) a more mixed affective stance towards physics, and (3) more expert-like ways of knowing in physics. We argue that recruiting the students relationship with biology into experiences of learning physics impacted her relationship with physics as well as her sense of how physics and biology are linked

Consumption authenticity in the age of the sharing economy: The key to creating loyal customers who love your brand

Airbnb continues to gain popularity as an accommodation alternative to hotels, with the authenticity of the consumption experience being a critical differentiating factor. However, the hospitality literature has not fully explored whether and how brands in the sharing economy as well as traditional hotel brands are facilitating authentictravel experiences and the impact of these experiences on brand love and brand loyalty. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, we develop a model of consumption authenticity in the accommodations industry and identify, operationalize, and measure its components. Second, we examine the impact of consumption authenticity on brand love and brand loyalty in both hotels and Airbnb accommodations. By surveying 1,256 American participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, we found that Airbnb leverages brand, existential, and intra-personal consumption authenticity in creating brand-loving and brand-loyal customers, while hotels utilize only brand authenticity. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and areas of future research are identified

Inferring stabilizing mutations from protein phylogenies : application to influenza hemagglutinin

One selection pressure shaping sequence evolution is the requirement that a protein fold with sufficient stability to perform its biological functions. We present a conceptual framework that explains how this requirement causes the probability that a particular amino acid mutation is fixed during evolution to depend on its effect on protein stability. We mathematically formalize this framework to develop a Bayesian approach for inferring the stability effects of individual mutations from homologous protein sequences of known phylogeny. This approach is able to predict published experimentally measured mutational stability effects (ΔΔG values) with an accuracy that exceeds both a state-of-the-art physicochemical modeling program and the sequence-based consensus approach. As a further test, we use our phylogenetic inference approach to predict stabilizing mutations to influenza hemagglutinin. We introduce these mutations into a temperature-sensitive influenza virus with a defect in its hemagglutinin gene and experimentally demonstrate that some of the mutations allow the virus to grow at higher temperatures. Our work therefore describes a powerful new approach for predicting stabilizing mutations that can be successfully applied even to large, complex proteins such as hemagglutinin. This approach also makes a mathematical link between phylogenetics and experimentally measurable protein properties, potentially paving the way for more accurate analyses of molecular evolution

Energy demand models for policy formulation : a comparative study of energy demand models

This paper critically reviews existing energy demand forecasting methodologies highlighting the methodological diversities and developments over the past four decades in order to investigate whether the existing energy demand models are appropriate for capturing the specific features of developing countries. The study finds that two types of approaches, econometric and end-use accounting, are used in the existing energy demand models. Although energy demand models have greatly evolved since the early 1970s, key issues such as the poor-rich and urban-rural divides, traditional energy resources, and differentiation between commercial and non-commercial energy commodities are often poorly reflected in these models. While the end-use energy accounting models with detailed sector representations produce more realistic projections compared with the econometric models, they still suffer from huge data deficiencies especially in developing countries. Development and maintenance of more detailed energy databases, further development of models to better reflect developing country context, and institutionalizing the modeling capacity in developing countries are the key requirements for energy demand modeling to deliver richer and more reliable input to policy formulation in developing countries.Energy Production and Transportation,Energy Demand,Environment and Energy Efficiency,Energy and Environment,Economic Theory&Research