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To gain a deeper understanding of the career decisions of undergraduate engineering students, this research paper explores the differences between students who show a high degree of career certainty and those who are rather uncertain about what their professional future should look like. These analyses were based on a dataset from a nationwide survey of engineering undergraduates (n=5,819) from 27 institutions in the United States. The survey was designed with an interest in understanding engineering students' career pathways. For the purpose of this study, students were designated as either "career uncertain" or "career certain" according to their survey answers. Those two groups were then compared against a variety of background characteristics, past experiences and personality variables. The results suggest that career uncertain and career certain students do not differ on background variables such as gender, age or family income. However, when it comes to students' past experiences, the percentage of students who had already gained internship experiences during their time in college was significantly higher among career certain students as compared to career uncertain students. As expected, seniors were more certain about their professional future than juniors. Similarly, a higher percentage of career certain students reported talking about their professional future with other students or faculty members more frequently. Furthermore, career certain students were significantly more likely to show a higher level of innovation self-efficacy and engineering task self-efficacy. In addition, career certain students were more likely to have career goals that involved innovation and they also considered several job characteristics as more important than did uncertain students. On average, career certain engineering students were also more certain about staying in engineering one, five and ten years after graduation. Overall, the results of this research suggest that more hands-on experiences and fostering stronger beliefs in their engineering skills can contribute to undergraduates becoming more certain about their future professional careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress research paper explores faculty's experiences during their own undergraduate programs, as well as the role of health and wellbeing in their success as students. The culture of stress and hardship promoted in engineering education has been scrutinized as negatively affecting students, especially those from marginalized groups. However, little is currently known about the interactions among multiple actors in the engineering education ecosystem and their contributions to perpetuating such culture. Faculty directly impact students' experiences in engineering programs through first-hand interactions with students. These interactions can propagate professional beliefs and attitudes that our graduates instill and further propagate. Thus, faculty may be re-enacting attitudes that they learned through their own experiences as students. Therefore, their beliefs might bring insights into elements that have been persistent in the engineering education narrative. In this work in progress paper, we use the model of engineering thriving to analyze interviews with four engineering faculty and analyze the transcripts using inductive and deductive thematic analysis. This study is part of a larger project to contribute to the efforts to evolve engineering's current culture of hardship and suffering to one that recognizes health, wellbeing, and thriving permeating essential academic spaces like the classroom. In this project, we seek to understand faculty conceptualizations of health and well-being that developed through their undergraduate and graduate experiences. Our preliminary results show that the undergraduate experiences of faculty included elements of thriving and well-being such as self-knowledge and self-control. Some identified key turning points in realizing their best strategies to maximize their well-being and academic success, which enhanced their decision-making abilities. Furthermore, some participants achieved academic success despite poor well-being and thriving outcomes, which raises questions about the cultural and systemic factors that promote such dualism. In terms of the messages they received about well-being, faculty recognized the absence of explicit messages but acknowledged the existence of institutional structures that could support them if necessary (such as counseling services or professional societies). Finally, when comparing their experiences with those of current undergraduates, faculty identify issues with excessive technology, imposter syndrome, low extracurricular engagement, and low functionality among the elements against the newer generation's wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper explores engineering experts' perceptions of the most important factors of thriving for undergraduate engineering students. Faculty, staff, and members of the engineering education system play a vital role in creating environments, and forming relationships with students conducive to thriving. The study in this paper builds upon prior work on engineering thriving that identified 147 factors developed from a literature review, refined with expert consultation. Out of the long list of factors, little is known regarding the most important factors that can serve as a starting point for engineering experts with limited resources to create environments and relationships that support more thriving engineering students. In this paper, we analyze ranked order data to investigate the most important internal thriving competencies. Participants include 47 engineering experts i.e., engineering administrators, professors, staff, and advisers. To find which competencies were perceived as most important to engineering thriving, each expert was asked to generate and define up to ten competencies that they considered to be most important, then rank these competencies in order of importance. During data analysis, ranked competencies were scored on a reverse ordinal points basis, with the most important rankings receiving 10 points and the least important rankings receiving 1 point. Overall, the top five most important competencies were Communication/Listening Skills (overall score = 104), Help-seeking/Resourcefulness (overall score = 104), Teamwork (overall score = 97), Time Management (overall score = 96), and Resilience (overall score = 95). Findings from this study highlight the importance of intrapersonal, social, and behavioral competencies, providing a starting point for future work developing a survey of thriving for engineering students. Furthermore, these findings provide a greater insight into which high-impact competencies engineering faculty, staff, and administrators can focus on when creating environments conducive to student thriving and interacting directly with students when teaching, supporting, advising, and mentoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity plays an important role in engineering problem solving, particularly when solving an ill-structured problem, and has been a topic of increasing research interest in recent years. Prior research on creativity has been conducted in problem solving settings, predominantly focusing on undergraduate engineering students, including how faculty can foster creativity in engineering students, how engineering faculty perceive their students' creativity, and how to measure it. However, more work is needed to examine engineering faculty and practitioner perspectives on the role of creativity when they solve an engineering problem themselves. Since engineering students learn problem solving, at least initially, mainly from their professors, it is essential to understand how faculty perceive their own creativity in problem solving. Similarly, given that practitioners solve ill-structured engineering problems on a regular basis in the workplace and that most of the students go on to work in the engineering industry when they graduate and ultimately become practitioners, it is also important to explore practitioner perspectives on creativity in problem solving settings. As part of an ongoing NSF-funded study, this paper investigates how engineering faculty's and practitioners' creativity influences their problem solving processes, how their perspectives on creativity in a problem solving environment differ, and what factors impact their creativity. Five tenure-track faculty in civil engineering and five practitioners were interviewed after they solved an ill-structured engineering problem. Participants' responses were transcribed and coded using initial coding. This paper discusses their responses to semi-structured interview questions. The findings suggest that faculty and practitioners feel more creative when they are familiar with the subject area of a problem. If they are aware of a particular solution that has been developed and used before or have access to resources to look them up, they may not necessarily embrace creativity. The findings indicate differences not only across faculty and practitioners but also within the faculty and practitioner participants. Similarities and differences between faculty and practitioners in creative problem solving and the themes that emerged are discussed and recommendations for educators are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper describes a case study of the ways that engineering students demonstrate emerging engineering judgment as they make assumptions needed to model and solve an openended, ill-structured engineering science homework problem. Engineering judgment is the set of practices that engineers employ to develop mathematical models to solve the ill-structured problems encountered by professional engineers. Engineering science homework presents an underutilized opportunity for students to develop and rehearse mathematical modeling and engineering judgment by engaging with ill-structured problems. This study unpacks students' emerging engineering judgment as they identify, make, and revise assumptions to develop mathematical models to solve an ill-structured engineering science homework problem. This study asks: How do these students select, evaluate, and revise assumptions while they develop mathematical models? What do these students take into consideration as they make assumptions to develop mathematical models? We took a case study approach to look closely at the ways students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. This case took place in the context of a Statics course required of second-year engineering students at a large public university. Over fifteen weeks, the focal team of four students worked to model a swimming pool lift capable of assisting a swimmer to enter and exit the water. We identified moments in which students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. In this paper, we describe and present examples of the ways that these students selected, evaluated, and revised assumptions while solving this problem. Our analysis suggests that to make assumptions, these students considered ways to simplify the problem, the instructor's grading practices, materials availability, and system function. We conjecture that the open-ended nature of the focal problem scaffolded students to make assumptions, and that their assumption-making processes were shaped by their perceptions of the problem as both a "real-world" problem and a "school assignment." This study contributes to understanding the development of engineering judgment and points to the potential for illstructured engineering science problems to support students to develop and rehearse engineering judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Electrical Engineering (EE) program at the University of Washington (UW) Bothell, a weighted average score is used as admissions criterion for undergraduate electrical engineering students. The score comprises calculus, physics and chemistry grades, overall student GPA and a rating of the student's personal statement. This paper presents statistical data to show how well student success in electrical engineering is correlated with the admissions criteria. Results of regression analysis show that there is a positive correlation between sophomore-level electrical engineering course grades and the weighted average admission scores. The results also show that calculus grades are the strongest predictors, while the overall student GPAs are the weakest predictors, of electrical engineering courses GPA. The paper sheds light on the results of the study and makes recommendations for improved criterion for admissions in electrical engineering programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing the extent to which first-year undergraduate engineering students identify with engineering may help improve retention. Research suggests that the degree to which students identify with engineering is positively related to their decisions to continue in engineering as a major. Therefore, identity frameworks have proven useful for furthering understanding of engineering retention. However most of the studies examining engineering identity have been conducted using qualitative research methodologies. While qualitative studies provide rich insights into engineering identity, evaluating engineering identity for hundreds or thousands of first-year students requires a quantitative instrument. Therefore, a current project is the development of a quantitative tool for measuring engineering identity. It uses information from six scales to measure different aspects of engineering identity. The scales are: identification, selfassessment, engineering embeddedness, university embeddedness, satisfaction, and retention. Since all six scales are not assessed each time the tool is administered to students, the paper will describe the two given thus far to students in the project: identification and self-efficacy. Further, it presents results responses from approximately 2,000 first-year engineering students at a large public institution. The paper addresses two questions: 1) How do engineering students respond to two scales related to identity frameworks; and 2) What has been learned by giving these two scales to first-year engineering students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International experiences are viewed as important components of undergraduate engineering education. Yet little has been done to define global preparedness, specify alternatives for achieving it, or determine to what degree being globally prepared is the result of personal attributes, prior experiences (including pre-college), or specific educational experiences. A collaboration of investigators from four universities are investigating how the broad spectrum of international experiences both in and outside of formal curricula impact engineering students' global preparedness. Now in its fifth year of research, we have conducted three primary studies to learn more about global preparedness. The first was an extensive Delphi survey with subject matter experts. The second consisted of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of students at our four partner institutions. The third is a much larger survey of engineering students at 13 representative engineering programs across the U.S. This paper focuses on the results of the third study. At each campus we have obtained stratified random samples of freshmen and seniors; in the case of seniors we have subdivided the sample into two cohorts - those who had an international experience while an undergraduate student and those who had not participated in an international activity. All students completed a carefully tested instrument that captured their demographics, experiences and a measure of their global preparedness. To determine the latter, we utilized the nationally normed Global Perspective Inventory developed by Braskamp and colleagues. This has enabled us to identify changes in global awareness, knowledge and thinking over the course of the students' transition from incoming freshman to graduating senior. We report what we have learned from this extensive sample of over 2,500 students. The results of this third study and the two earlier linked studies have resulted in guidelines for engineering administrators and faculty interested in preparing students for the global economy. Similar to our earlier papers, we provide an overview of the updated results of this NSF funded research initiative that has investigated how the various internationally focused learning experiences within engineering (both curricular and cocurricular) impact students' global preparedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled people continue to be significantly underrepresented and marginalized in engineering. Current reports indicate that approximately 26 percent of US adults have some form of disability. Yet only 6 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in engineering programs belong to this group. Several barriers have been identified that discourage and even prohibit people with disabilities from participating in engineering including arduous accommodations processes, lack of institutional support, and negative peer, staff, and faculty attitudes. These barriers are perpetuated and reinforced by a variety of ableist sociocultural norms and definitions that rely on popularized tropes and medicalized models that influence the ways this group experiences school to become engineers. In this paper, we seek to contribute to conversations that shape understanding of disability identity and the ways it is conceptualized in engineering programs. We revisit interview data from an ongoing grounded theory exploration of professional identity formation of undergraduate civil engineering students who identify as having one or more disabilities. Through our qualitative analysis, we identified overarching themes that contribute to understanding of how participants define and integrate disability identity to form professional identities and the ways they reshape and contribute to the civil engineering field through this lens. Emergent themes include experiencing/considering disability identity as a fluid experience, as a characteristic that 'sets you apart', and as a medicalized symptom or condition. Findings from this work can be used by engineering educators and administrators to inform more effective academic and personal support structures to destigmatize disability and promote the participation and inclusion of students and colleagues with disabilities in engineering and in our academic and professional communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Summer Academy in Sustainable Manufacturing is an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site that offers unique summer undergraduate research experiences in the challenging field of sustainable manufacturing to national undergraduate students from two and four-year institutions. The objective of the REU Site is to introduce undergraduate students to the forefront of sustainable manufacturing research and to provide participants with the skills and pathways to pursue advanced degrees or careers in sustainable manufacturing. The intensive tenweek summer research and professional development experience hosts ten students per summer and addresses National Science Foundation priority areas such as advanced manufacturing and sustainability. Undergraduate research projects in the REU site address manufacturing process, manufacturing system, and fundamental sustainable manufacturing principles within continuous (e.g. chemical manufacturing) and discrete (e.g. automotive manufacturing) manufacturing systems. Projects are further associated with topics that cross cut the aforementioned thrust areas such as, emerging and environmentally benign materials manufacturing, sustainable process design and control, and life-cycle engineering and value recovery. Traditionally, this REU Site hosts in-person undergraduate researchers to undertake their research projects in a faculty mentor laboratory during the program. However, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated that the REU Site program be held virtually during the summer of 2021. This poster and summary paper detail the steps taken to transition REU Site program activities to a virtual environment and postprogram evaluation results of participant experiences. Evaluation results of the virtual program are compared to evaluation results of prior in-person Summer Academy in Sustainable Manufacturing programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineers in the workforce work in groups to solve complex problems. Effective leadership and soft-skills are necessary to coordinate group efforts in industry. As a result, technical proficiency is no longer the only mastery expected from engineers upon graduation. Unfortunately, most undergraduate engineering curriculums overlooks resources to teach and allow students to practice leading. Literature on engineering development agrees that leadership skills are an industry need for professional success, however it does not agree on a university teaching method. In the past decade various styles of leadership programs have developed to fill this gap. This synthesis paper will compare effectiveness of current published methodologies that colleges have used to develop STEM leadership courses. Of all programs analyzed, quantitative results show each method is successful in developing leadership skills of their students. A high amount of support exists for capstone design courses to improve leadership traits of engineers. However, due to lack of standardization when rating effectiveness of these programs it is difficult to draw a definite conclusion. Further research is needed to 1) understand what leadership qualities should be taught at the university and 2) fairly compare leadership programs to determine their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a pilot study of Context Evaluation using a self-developed questionnaire distributed among engineering undergraduates at a university under study. The study aims to validate the self-developed questionnaires used in the Context evaluation, a component in the CIPP Model. The Context evaluation assesses background information for needs, assets, problems and opportunities relevant to beneficiaries of the study in a defined environment. Through the questionnaire, background information for the assessment of needs, assets and problems related to the engineering undergraduates' perceptions on the teaching and learning of technical oral presentation skills was collected and analysed. The questionnaire was developed using 5-points Likert scale to measure the constructs under study. They were distributed to 100 respondents with 79 returned. The respondents consisted of engineering undergraduates studied at various faculties at one technical university in Malaysia. The descriptive analysis of data for each item which makes up the construct for Context evaluation is found to be high. This implied that engineering undergraduates showed high interest in teaching and learning of technical oral presentation skills, thus their needs are met. Also, they agreed that assets and facilities are conducive to their learning. In conclusion, the context evaluation involving needs and assets factors are both considerably important; their needs are met and the assets and facilities do support their technical oral presentation skills learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many definitions and theories of leadership that have evolved over the past few centuries. However, only recently has the term engineering leadership been introduced and there is a lack of a clear definition. A stronger understanding of the different perspectives of this term will help institutions to develop and improve engineering leadership education programs. The aim of this research project is to answer the following: from the perspective of engineering students, academics, and professionals, what is engineering leadership and what skills are required to be a leader in engineering? This paper provides a summary of the results from a pilot study conducted with a group of undergraduate students. Engineering students were surveyed to understand their perspective on engineering leadership as well as a self-evaluation of their own leadership skills. The engineering leadership definition responses were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Three main themes of engineering leadership were generated: Strong Character, Team Dynamics and Technical, and each of these three broad areas were equally emphasized by the students. The determined themes and the more detailed categories of engineering leadership could be used to develop and improve engineering leadership education programs. The self-evaluation results emphasized the need to teach leadership within an integrated learning experience, to help students have more confidence in the technical application of their leadership skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Engineering workplace, one must be able to negotiate many genres of writing: he or she must deliver updates, understand technical requirements, weigh project priorities, develop and carry out problem-solving techniques, all while using different forms of technical communication. Engineering work relies on the ability to flexibly transition between a variety of technical writing genres, while also navigating the broad array of technologies required to effectively complete these projects. However, the genres and types of writing present in the workplace do not always reflect the genres and types of writing undergraduate Engineering students complete during coursework. From a Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) perspective, this is a problem because genres are not preset templates but rather forms of social action and as such embody a community's way of knowing, being, and acting; therefore, a disconnect between genres indicates a disconnect between academic and workplace communities of practice, leaving undergraduates underprepared to meet the expectations of workplace communities. The purpose of the project discussed in this paper is to develop a heuristic of common workplace genres of regional workplaces and explore whether these genres are receiving coverage in the engineering courses at a southeastern, midsize research institution. This exploration emerged from a grant-supported, interdisciplinary faculty learning community consisting of faculty from the Department of English (with Technical and Professional Writing specialties) and different departments in engineering and technology. One of the primary tasks of this community, shaped largely from a Writing in the Disciplines (WID) approach characteristic of the institution's curricular and assessment bodies, was to map the current state of technical writing genres in engineering courses and to better understand the present gaps, if identified. This task was accomplished through workshop-based discussions and cross-disciplinary collaborative research. Based on the application of RGS methodologies to the interdisciplinary faculty learning community workshop, it is suggested that a genre-based categorization of writing tasks and projects in undergraduate engineering curricula is critically formative in working toward the holistic integration of writing across courses for the sake of preparation and conceptual-based student understanding of writing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the meaning and enactment of critical thinking for engineering and humanities undergraduate students. We address the following research question: What are the similarities and differences between humanities and engineering students in their perceptions and enactment of critical thinking? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four to five undergraduate Materials Science & Engineering and English students. Interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. English and Materials Science & Engineering students differed in the specific way critical thinking was viewed. A major theme that arose for engineering students was that critical thinking was often similar or equivalent to problem solving. However, English students saw critical thinking as a way of forming opinions, forming and defending an argument, and making connections. Common themes for both groups included aspects such as broadening ideas, needing deeper understanding, and needing reflection and metacognition. Both groups utilized the concepts common throughout their major classes as the physical representation of critical thinking. The embodiment of course concepts as critical thinking may be supported by the idea of engineering identity and self-efficacy. Students may choose engineering, and stick to it, because they relate to the concepts and to how engineers think. However, faculty may influence how students in either discipline comprehend the meaning of critical thinking. Thus, critical thinking style may be considered a part of engineering identity or may be influenced by faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finite element analysis (FEA) is a powerful tool that allows engineers to evaluate how well a structure can withstand a given loading environment. While commercial FEA software has a wide range of capacities, it requires substantial insight and a minimum requisite skillset in undergraduate mechanics to generate meaningful results. The purpose of an undergraduate finite element course is to build such insight within the minds of students. This is typically done utilizing both theory and practical application via commercial FEA software. Unfortunately, both the "user-friendliness" and generality of commercial software may make it more difficult for students to understand its inner workings (e.g., how geometrically assigned constraints are translated to nodal constraints). The work presented in this paper attempts to address this issue by having students contribute to their own 2D FEA code. This allows the student to see how concepts, such as 2D element quality checks, are integrated as each is brought in as an additional subroutine to the code. Also, writing one's own code allows one to showcase more easily where exactly simplified element formulations recover exact solutions from strength of materials, as well as idealized problems that unambiguously demonstrate how FEA is not always conservative as a design tool. MATLAB Grader is used to facilitate the coding process for students by allowing instructorguided scaffolding of the code, providing instantaneous formative feedback, and ensuring that their code runs as expected. The 2D FEA code could then be used for simple problems involving 1D beam and 2D plane stress elements with the intention of demonstrating practical aspects of FEA. This includes model development concepts such as the appropriate connectivity between different element types. It also addresses results interpretation, such as problems wherein analytical solutions used to validate FEA solutions are nearly always expressed in terms of specific stress components and not in terms of effective, e.g., Von Mises, quantities. The results from the 2D FEA code may also be compared with results from a commercial FEA program such as ANSYS Workbench to help the students directly see the integration of FEA theory in practice. A cursory assessment of the effectiveness of this process has been measured via a Qualtrics survey distributed towards the end of the term. The survey intends to gather the students' subjective experience regarding MATLAB Grader and the development and use of the 2D FEA code. Survey results are separated from any student identifiers and are not tied to student performance in the course. The authors intend to pursue a more rigorous assessment regarding the effect of this process on students' conceptual understanding in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A need exists to train undergraduate engineering students to indentify and solve healthcare problems of today and the future. A team of faculty has been contributing to that need by educating students in a summer Clinical Immersion and Team Based Design program at a mid-Atlantic University. The summer program involves the Biodesign Process, physiology basics, clinical immersion, intellectual property basics, regulatory basics, business perspectives, and development of best practices. The program participants' (or Scholars') deliverables included need statements, specifications, and guidelines to pursue as capstone design projects. A brief overview of the program content and structure is presented in this paper. Assessment of Scholar outcomes are also presented and discussed as well as future plans for the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering programs tend to follow common patterns for educating undergraduate students through the sophomore year. For instance, a portion of a common curricular pattern for electrical engineering involves the sequence: Calculus I → Calculus II → Differential Equations → Circuits I. In mechanical engineering programs the common curricular pattern includes the sequence: Calculus I → Calculus II → Differential Equations → Mechanics. The curricular patterns themselves are more complicated than these sequences, often involving additional pre-and co-requisite courses that must be passed in order for a student to progress through the curriculum. These patterns may be modeled as directed graphs, and the complexity of the pattern can then be characterized according to the delay and blocking factors present in the graphs. The key point is that failure to pass a course that occurs earlier in a curricular pattern, or the inability to start the pattern on schedule (e.g., due to math placement issues) will often necessitate a delay in graduation. Because these engineering curricular patterns are complex, they tend to produce a longer time-to-degree than other disciplines. A number of schools have implemented engineering curricular reforms that are aimed at improving on-time graduation rates. These generally involve modifying the patterns described above in some way that is meant to improve student success. We can think of curricular design patterns as being constructed so as to yield a particular set of student learning outcomes. In this paper we apply curricular analytics techniques to these patterns in order to quantify the extent to which particular reforms should improve graduation rates. Our work involves breaking curricular complexity into two components: (1) the structural complexity, which is determined by the manner in which the courses in a curriculum are organized, e.g., prerequisites, number of courses, etc., and (2) the instructional complexity, which is determined by the inherent difficulty of the courses in the curriculum, the quality of the faculty and academic support, etc. We then demonstrate how these measures can be used within a simulation environment to estimate the impact that particular curricular improvements will have on student outcomes. This will reveal that many engineering curricula have highly "sensitive" course patterns (and in some cases individual courses) that will yield large increases in graduation rates for small improvements in course success rates. Finally, we demonstrate how curricular analytics can be used to compare the complexities of similar programs at different institutions, as well as how these tools can be used to guide faculty discussions around curricular reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The benefits of undergraduate research programs have been well documented and are generally accepted within the engineering education community. Various survey instruments and metrics have been used to gauge the effectiveness of individual programs and undergraduate research programs in general. The current paper is a summary of an examination of the effectiveness of a three year NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates site focusing on Neuroengineering. Since one of the goals of this REU site, and all undergraduate research programs at our University, is to encourage students to continue their education at the graduate level, the Attitudes Toward Graduate Studies Survey (AGSS) was developed to measure changes in students' opinions about graduate school and their plans to pursue or not pursue graduate studies as a result of participating in an undergraduate research program. The survey has been validated and used for several years, both at this university and several other universities. The survey is administered pre-post, at the beginning and end of each undergraduate research program. Pre-post responses from students who participated in the Neuro-Engineering REU site over the last three years are compared to other measures, including program follow-up with students after their research experience and the nationally-available Undergraduate Research Student Self- Assessment (URSSA) survey, to identify areas of similarity and difference of results. A followup version of the AGSS survey was used with all students who participated over the last three years to gauge the longer term impacts of the program; for example, do students get a job in industry right away? Do they go straight to graduate school? Do they consider returning to graduate school if they work in industry? Additional post-graduation tracking is implemented to supplement the results of the follow-up survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Texas Pre-freshman Engineering Program (TexPREP), founded in 1979, is a 7 week-long, 4 year summer program that provides academic training, mentorship, and hands-on experience for middle and high school students that are interested in pursuing STEM careers. A series of new courses that are to be offered as standardized courses at participating TexPREP institutions throughout the state are being developed by undergraduate engineering students. Nine undergraduate students majoring in mechanical and civil engineering and computer science were hired to write the TexPREP course curriculum with the idea that students would be able to develop course content that the participants could easily relate to. Following development of the curriculum, undergraduate students actively participated in the implementation and review process. The primary teaching methodology of the courses is Challenge Based Instruction (CBI) because of its proven effectiveness over traditional lecturing. The course subjects developed included Water Science, Computer Aided Design (CAD), and Systems Modeling. All three courses were administered to returning TexPREP fourth year students. At the beginning of each course, students were given the challenges of building a Stirling engine using items that can be found at home, designing and constructing a solar car, and creating a water theme park for the Systems Modeling, Computer Aided Design (CAD), and Water Science courses respectively. They were then guided through a series of lectures, mini projects, and assessment exercises to help them obtain the necessary knowledge to complete their challenges. The interactive and appealing nature of the courses and their respective challenges was expected to result in increased participation, improved academic performance, and greater self-motivation of the participants compared to their overall performance during the prior three years of participation in the program. Students and instructor surveys were used to help determine the effectiveness of the curriculum and pedagogy. The paper discusses the impact on the TexPREP and undergraduate students involved in curriculum development and the process for successful implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capstone design courses are intended to provide a culminating experience for senior undergraduate engineering majors. Universities vary in how they implement the instruction and implementation of the design process in their capstone courses. For example, many have a separate class in design methods, followed by a one-semester capstone course where teams work on a "design, build, test" project. Other institutions teach design methodology incorporated into the capstone design project in what is often a two-semester capstone sequence. In the cases where design methodology is incorporated into a two-semester capstone course, it is possible that this is the students' first extensive exposure to design methods and process. In that case, students may be experiencing methods such as "Customer Needs Analysis", "Functional Decomposition", "Concept Generation", "Concept Selection" and "Prototype Planning" for the first time. From a constructivist educational standpoint, it can be problematic for students to apply these design techniques for the first time on what is often a complex, real world capstone design problem. One solution to this problem is to incorporate a short design experience at the beginning of the two-semester capstone course. This can allow the students an initial experience with the design methods that can provide a "learning scaffold" for their implementation of the full suite of design methods over the course of a two-semester project. For the last three years, we have implemented three versions of a short, introductory design project (i.e. designette) in our two-semester capstone design sequence. In our uses of the designette project, the suite of five core design methods mentioned above were taught in an abbreviated form. However, in one year the designette lasted ten class hours, the next year's designette lasted 14 class hours, and this past year's project lasted seven class hours. The longest designette allowed for greater depth in the initial coverage of the methods and also provided greater time for prototyping and testing. Of course this was at the cost of consuming a greater percentage of the overall time allocated for the actual capstone design project. This paper reports on the implementation details of the designette projects, focusing in particular on advantages and disadvantages of the different implementations in the most recent years. Faculty and student feedback indicated that the use of the designette does increase student familiarity with the design methods. However, more subtle questions such as the number of lessons allocated for the designette and the depth of coverage of the design methods have much more complicated assessment results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]