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The ideology of depoliticization in engineering refers to the pervasive belief that engineering work is technical, should be carried out objectively, and should be devoid of social bias. This research paper offers a description of the development and validation of a survey instrument measuring the degree to which students believe in the ideology of depoliticization in engineering, a first step in understanding the role this ideology plays in teaching and learning, marginalization, and exclusion in engineering. I begin by describing the development of survey items related to the ideology of depoliticization in engineering. I also describe the process of establishing various forms of validity in survey design. During the scale validation process, 162 first- and second-year engineering students at a large, Midwestern research intensive institution completed online versions of the Depoliticization in Engineering scale. I used confirmatory factor analysis to establish construct validity for the scale. Results from the quantitative analysis indicate excellent model fit and offer support for the validity of the Depoliticization in Engineering instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant link between curricula and accreditation, there is limited research on engineering educators' perspectives on accreditation related to ethics and societal impacts. This full research paper addresses the following research questions: (1) What are faculty members' perspectives on the role of accreditation in engineering ethics education? (2) How, if at all, does accreditation influence their teaching practices? This research was designed to understand the influence that accreditation, as an external force, has on ethics education via the educators tasked with teaching it. This study employed an exploratory qualitative approach and drew on semistructured interviews that probed participants' ethics teaching practices and perspectives, including the influences and motivations related to their instruction. Interviews were completed with 20 engineering ethics educators who represented a range of engineering disciplines across 17 institutions in the United States. Inductive analysis of the transcripts indicated a bifurcated response to accreditation in the context of ethics and societal impacts education. On one hand, accreditation drove the integration of ethics in the curriculum and signaled its importance in engineering. On the other hand, accreditation was perceived to reduce ethics education to a matter of compliance, create an outsize pressure on those tasked with teaching ethics, and impinge academic freedom. The findings pointed to the varying and sometimes conflicting perspectives on accreditation. An understanding of how accreditation can either spur or stifle educators' engagement in ethics instruction has implications for faculty motivation. The findings also highlight the need to think beyond accreditation in justifying and supporting the inclusion of ethics and societal impacts in engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the mental health of science, engineering, and math (SEM) graduate students using quantitative analysis on the survey data provided by the Healthy Minds Network (HMN): Research on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health group, coined the Healthy Minds Study (HMS). The aim of the study is to answer the following research questions: (1) How has the mental health of SEM graduate students, measured by depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, and flourishing, changed over the past three academic years? (2) What role, if any, does the climate of SEM programs, measured by the proxies of campus environment, encouraging dialogue, prioritizing mental health, and receptive administration, have on SEM graduate students' self-reported mental health measures of depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, and flourishing, when accounting for students' gender, race, international student status, degree, and discipline? Attention to the mental health of students in higher education has grown in recent years. Prior work has shown that several factors can influence an individuals' mental health, including, but not limited to, a students' demographics, social factors, available resources, values, motivation, and more. The purpose of this study, however, is to focus specifically on how the culture of SEM programs influences SEM graduate students' mental health. In this context, mental health refers to one's mental and emotional well-being. Therefore, this paper will leverage previous work that has indicated the role of academic disciplines' cultures on mental health. SEM graduate students are of interest because they are understudied in the literature despite being more likely to report mental health problems. In addition, graduate students have a variety of academic and personal experiences that are different from undergraduate students due to their roles as students, instructors, and researchers, resulting in a different acculturation process. In addition, this process can impact students of diverse backgrounds inequitably, with minoritized students facing more negative mental health consequences and feeling like they are less supported than their non-marginalized peers. This study explored measures of program climate to assess how students' perceptions of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts impact SEM students' self-reported mental health. In this work, we performed a quantitative analysis on the Health Minds Network (HMN) data on SEM graduate students. We calculated bivariate statistics and developed regression models for each of the four outcome measures while accounting for relevant demographic measures. We first show that there have been changes in students' self-reported mental health, with the general trend of increasing mental health problems. In terms of program climate, our regressions found that students' beliefs about the climate had a statistically significant influence over their reported mental health measures, and that these experiences varied for different demographic groups. The results from our work highlight areas of focus for future research. Furthermore, this work can help enable SEM graduate students, faculty, and staff to reflect on the changes in the past years and to use these results to promote change at individual, program, and systematic levels to improve SEM graduate students' mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently and historically, women are underrepresented in engineering. Engineering education research (EER) has explored possible explanations as to why this phenomenon persists, including but not limited to hinderances to identity development, lack of belongingness, and the epistemological underpinnings that are fundamental to engineering education. In this paper, we will focus specifically on these epistemological foundations in relation to women's epistemologies and how different ideas about knowledge and learning relate to why women are underrepresented in engineering. In the space of engineering education, we strive to create an environment that fosters inclusive epistemologies for students to succeed. However, educational research suggests that women's epistemologies fundamentally differ from men's because of factors like socialization, cultural influences, and experiences of marginalization that are common for women. Because engineering began as an exclusively middle-class white male field and remains male-dominated, male epistemologies shape the default pathways to understanding in engineering education. Women's epistemologies may differ from fundamental ways of knowing that engineering education is built on. Based on this difference, we believe there is an epistemological mismatch between women and the engineering field. To begin to investigate this claim, we conducted a literature review as part of a larger study to understand what has been studied in EER regarding women's epistemologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the landscape of women's epistemologies in recent EER. Our guiding research question is: "How have women's epistemologies been studied in published engineering education research?". To begin this literature review, we searched through the ASEE conference proceedings database (also known as PEER) for student women's epistemologies from 2016 to 2021. We chose this time frame to focus on current research of epistemologies in EER. The keywords used in the search were "Epistemology + Women + Engineering." We focused on engineering students to highlight the epistemologies that relate to learning rather than teaching. Once a preliminary set of articles was identified, we performed secondary and tertiary rounds of exclusion to scope the range of articles included in the study that addressed the research question. We performed a categorical analysis to compare each article across multiple groupings of attributes. The result of this literature review was a table, in which we extracted information from the papers based on seven categories: framework, methodology, population, instrument, main result, related concepts, and unit of analysis. This table allows for easy access to each paper to understand the main points of the study and whether or not the authors related epistemologies to other concepts in EER, including student outcomes. A highlight of our results concerns the "unit of analysis" category, which shows how student epistemologies have been studied from a multitude of perspectives, including program-level effects on student epistemologies to individual-level epistemological differences between students. As a result, the single word of epistemology has come to possess a multitude of meanings in EER. Future work involves analyzing these units of analysis to create a unified language around student epistemologies in engineering to better the field's understanding of the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current and historical sociopolitical national events have brought diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to the forefront of discussion in academia. In response to this surge in social awareness of DEI, universities nationwide put forth plans and proposals for inclusive campus communities and initiatives to promote diversity. Educators, including engineering faculty, play a critical role in guiding students through these complex conversations. Based on this responsibility, we need to understand the state of faculty's knowledge levels and willingness to engage in these topics. The purpose of this study is to perform a systematic literature review of engineering education journals and conference proceedings to answer the research question: What themes emerge in current and previous EER on engineering faculty readiness to address DEI topics in their programs and classrooms? Our literature review consisted of a search through three conference-paper and five journalarticle databases for faculty beliefs about DEI from 2000 to 2021. Any student-centered studies and non-engineering faculty studies were excluded. Once a preliminary set of articles was found, we performed secondary and tertiary rounds of exclusion to compile a set of 22 articles that addressed our research question. This limited number of articles demonstrates that faculty beliefs about DEI are not commonly studied or discussed in engineering education research (EER). Because DEI is an essential topic in education and engineering, this result suggests a significant gap in EER community knowledge. With this gap in mind, we thematically analyzed the 22 articles that met the inclusion criteria to understand what faculty beliefs EER has focused on. The main result of this analysis was our proposed model, the Problematization-to-Action Continuum (PTAC), which highlights faculty's readiness to make change efforts toward promoting DEI. The PTAC model is a single-axis continuum that contains three defined points (each end and the center). On one end, engineering faculty do not acknowledge there are problems concerning DEI, and there are no actions taken toward bettering these issues. In the center, faculty acknowledge that there are problems but feel they lack knowledge to take actionable steps to alleviate them. On the other end, faculty recognize patterns of inequity and actively intervene to promote inclusive practices. The largest grouping of papers on the PTAC (N=11 of 22) was located at the center of the model, revealing that there is an acknowledgement of the need for increased DEI efforts, but little action has been taken toward these efforts. Overall, this literature review showed that there is an understanding of the responsibility to act regarding DEI efforts but a lack of knowledge or resources to execute and sustain DEI practices and policies. Future work involves investigating faculty's role in action plans for DEI policy change. By addressing faculty's role in these initiatives, we can support engineering faculty to engage in meaningful dialogue with all stakeholders and implement research-based strategies for improving DEI in their local academic institutions. The collective impact of strategically including faculty in DEI efforts will further the national conversation about the importance of DEI to make lasting change in our educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Complete Research paper describes a one-lesson instructional module introducing biogeotechnical engineering that has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of engineers and educators for use in freshman-level introduction to engineering courses. The primary aims in developing the module were to educate incoming engineering students regarding the field of biogeotechnics and motivate them to pursue it further. Expanding research and innovation in this emerging area requires providing students with an understanding of the principles of this new paradigm for developing sustainable solutions in geotechnical engineering applications. Field trials of the instructional module, which included pre-and post-assessments, were conducted in two sections of a freshman engineering course at a large southwestern university in the United States. Evaluation data were collected regarding student knowledge gains and attitudes. Both the overall gain in technical knowledge and positive attitudes toward the field of biogeotechnical engineering were reflected in participant responses. With the advent and development of this new field, this work represents a pioneering effort in the biogeotechnical engineering education space. Looking ahead, the study could contribute toward longitudinal research in understanding the best practices of interdisciplinary approaches to developing engineering instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratory notebooks have long been used as a tool to develop student documentation and technical communication skills in laboratory courses. Given the presence of social media as well as other methods of electronic communication, computer mediated activities provide an opportunity to educate students in a familiar setting. For this reason, we have pursued a study to measure the impact of electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs, LabArchives Classroom Edition) on the quality of upper-level biomedical engineering students' documentation and technical communication skills. A total of thirty-three ELNs submitted by students enrolled in a biomechanics lab course during autumn 2016 and thirty-three paper-based notebooks submitted by students enrolled in the same course during autumn 2015 were selected for this study. Notebooks were quantitatively analyzed against a rubric designed to measure how well the selected notebooks met assessment criteria in the categories of communication, documentation and presentation. Results showed significantly higher overall mean and category-specific scores for ELNs compared to paper-based notebook submissions (p < 0.05). It was concluded that lab notebook keeping in an electronic format may be an effective medium for aiding students in improving documentation and technical communication skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explored the demographic characteristics of the engineering faculty who offer and mentor Learning Through Service (LTS) experiences. Research has found a burgeoning interest in service; i.e., helping people, among engineering students, and it is important to understand how engineering faculty will help foster this desire and assist in retaining these students in engineering. The research explored how the number and type of engineering faculty who are active in LTS activities has changed over time. The research utilized a data mining approach, characterizing faculty active in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) around engineering education via the authors of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference papers. Author-supplied biographical information in the papers and online research was used to identify the demographic characteristics of interest, including rank, disciplines, institutional affiliations, and gender. The results identified over 500 unique engineering faculty who have authored papers on LTS at the ASEE annual conference from 1996 to 2014; the rate of new faculty joining the ranks of authors of LTS papers averaged 41 per year from 2003 to 2013. The ranks of these authors averaged 23% assistant professors, 33% associate professors, and 32% full professors. The percentage of non-tenured/tenure track (non-T/TT) engineering faculty among the authors of LTS papers increased from none in 1996-1999 to 23% in 2014. Compared to the disciplines of engineering faculty nationally, engineering faculty authoring LTS papers are over-represented in civil/environmental engineering, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering, and under-represented in chemical, electrical and computer engineering. The percentage of women among the authors of engineering LTS papers generally increased from 2001 to 2014. The authors of LTS papers were 20% women in 2001 and this increased to 50% in 2014; this includes co-authors who are students, staff, and non- engineering faculty. The engineering faculty authors of LTS papers were 15% women in 2001; this percentage increased to 39% in 2014. This is much higher than the percentage of women among engineering faculty (14% in 2013) and ASEE members (24% in 2013). Further, the engineering faculty authors of LTS papers represented 175 unique institutions; these were 36% Baccalaureate or Master's institutions and 26% research universities with very high activity (Carnegie RU/VH). This institutional representation differed somewhat from engineering faculty nationwide who were employed 16% at Baccalaureate or Master's institutions and 54% at RU/VH institutions. These data indicate the ways in which LTS faculty who are active in SOTL have changed over time and are different than typical engineering faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Engineering Research Centers (ERC) are required to develop and implement education and outreach opportunities related to their core technical research topics to broaden participation in engineering and create partnerships between industry and academia. Additionally, ERCs must include an independent evaluation of their education and outreach programming to assess their performance and impacts. To date, each ERC's evaluation team designs its instruments/tools and protocols for evaluation, resulting in idiosyncratic and redundant efforts. Nonetheless, there is much overlap among the evaluation topics, concepts, and practices, suggesting that the ERC evaluation and assessment community might benefit from having a common set of instruments and protocols. ERCs' efforts could then be better spent developing more specific, sophisticated, and time-intensive evaluation tools to deepen and enrich the overall ERC evaluation efforts. The implementation of such a suite of instruments would further allow each ERC to compare its efforts to those across other ERCs as one data point for assessing its effectiveness and informing its improvement efforts. Members of a multi-ERC collaborative team, funded by the NSF, have been leading a project developing a suite of common instruments and protocols which contains both quantitative and qualitative tools. This paper reports on the development of a set of qualitative instruments that, to date, includes the following: (a) a set of interview/focus group protocols intended for various groups of ERC personnel, centered around five common topics/areas, and (b) rubrics for summer program participants' verbal poster/presentations and their written poster/slide deck presentation artifacts. The development process is described sequentially, beginning with a review of relevant literature and existing instruments, followed by the creation of an initial set of interview questions and rubric criteria. The initial versions of the tools were then pilot-tested with multiple ERCs. Feedback sessions with education/evaluation leaders of those piloting ERCs were then conducted, through which further revision efforts were made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a national shortage of skilled technicians and engineers in the microelectronics industry, developing talent to fill roles in the workforce is critical for the U.S. national security and economy. Given this, a public-private-academic ecosystem was formed with the goal of further developing the U.S. microelectronics workforce. This Work in Progress Paper describes one of seven findings of a workforce needs assessment study completed by this group. Communication was a key finding of this assessment and was a link between the technical and professional skills identified. This finding guided the research questions for this paper: (1) What value do hiring professionals and supervisors in microelectronics engineering place on communication when hiring entry-level microelectronics technicians and engineers? (2) How do microelectronics industry professionals describe desired communication skills? Looking specifically at communication, the following sub theme was identified. Within microelectronics, effective communication among individuals and within interdisciplinary teams is necessary as it allows technical information to be quickly "distilled" and understood by management and other nontechnical stakeholders. However, participants shared that individuals often lack sufficient oral and written communication skills that allow them to quickly and succinctly articulate the "so what" to non-technical stakeholders. This paper includes detailed examples of how microelectronics professionals describe and value communication skills and identifies ways that focusing on communication as a professional skill improves student development, the associated student outcomes, and career readiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teamwork skills are increasingly gaining importance in graduates' qualifications in engineering programs. The interconnected systems of the workflow of engineering products and projects necessitate certain technical and managerial skill sets. The need for multifaceted professionals is highlighted further by the advancement of tools and methods for remote collaboration on projects. This study's objective was to explore students' perceptions of the different aspects of teamwork. The first phase of this study was conducted in Fall 2022, in which students in the Construction, Biomedical, and Mechanical Engineering Departments at Mississippi State University were recruited to participate in a survey on different aspects of teamwork. A quantitative approach was used to ascertain essential facets of teamwork and provide content for in-depth exploration. This paper contains two main result sections. The first one addresses similarities and differences between gender-based students' perceptions. The second section focuses on the perceptions of students from underrepresented groups and highlights distinctions among groups' responses. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by providing key aspects of teamwork that can be incorporated into engineering course layouts. Also, it reports on barriers and shortcomings in team-based practices and activities. The findings of this paper help engineering scholars and educators to design and develop opportunities to inclusively develop teamwork skill sets in engineering students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The underrepresentation of women in engineering is well-known and well-documented. Women have experienced harmful discrimination due to bias, stereotypes, and an overall lack of institutional support. This paper aims to provide a platform focused on educating to empower individuals to continue to address gender inequity in engineering and computer science in academia. A structured literature review was conducted to focus on the disparities that exist for women, explore why those disparities exist, and discuss solutions that could help close the gender gap. The results of the literature review are coupled with the discussion outcomes from a panel on gender and racial equity in engineering conducted at the 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. This paper is also meant to serve as a record of the panel and discussion that was generated. The panelist perspectives include faculty, administrative, and student roles in engineering at institutions of higher education who shared their experiences, insights, knowledge, and wisdom on what has contributed to the imbalance and what must be done to overcome it. The common thematic elements between the literature review and the panel are analyzed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the initial work of a recently funded NSF project on ethical and responsible research and practices in science and engineering. The objective of this research is to improve instructor training, interventions, and student outcomes in high schools and universities to improve awareness and commitment to ethical practices in STEM coursework. The project will generate a robust snapshot of the ethical knowledge, reasoning skills, attitudes, and practices of several thousand undergraduate engineering students. This snapshot will inform the development of a three-week enrichment opportunity for high school STEM teachers. Working with university faculty and graduate students, these teachers will develop learning modules on ethical issues related to their courses. The snapshot will also identify gaps and guide the creation of targeted interventions that will be used in second-, third-, and fourth-year engineering courses. This data-driven project uses a mixed-methods approach to generate a better understanding of the impact of ethics interventions at various points in a student's academic development by developing and using a set of instruments to measure cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of ethical competency and self-efficacy. To that end, a second snapshot will be taken by testing and surveying engineering students in their capstone courses to provide a broad overview of the competence and self-confidence that engineering students have in dealing with ethical STEM issues, to determine the efficacy of various interventions, and to improve future interventions. Utilizing repeated measures and possessing a longitudinal dimension, the project will generate extensive data about the development of ethical competency, ethical self-efficacy, and their relationship. The interventions designed for secondary and tertiary classrooms will build on best practices for micro-insertion of ethics content that are practical and help students understand how technical competencies fit within broader social, economic, and environmental contexts. The capstone snapshot will also provide some measure of the impact of other experiences (e.g., undergraduate research, internships, service learning) and courses (e.g., humanities, social science, and business courses) on development of ethical practices. This report marks the start of a fiveyear project; therefore, the results presented in this paper represent findings from the engineering ethics literature and baseline results from survey of engineering freshmen at Texas A&M University. The findings from the survey are being utilized in developing intervention modules that will be integrated in upper-level engineering courses and training materials for high school teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing prevalence of computer-based examinations in universities, the Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors (FEH) program at The Ohio State University conducted a study examining the effect of test mode on student exam performance. Computer-based exams have many advantages for the instructor over paper-based exams including automated grading, ease of distribution, reduced paper usage, and the ability to see student exam statistics instantly. This study was conducted during the fall semester and consisted of two midterm exams and a final exam. The exam questions being considered in this study included multiple choice, true/false, multiple select, and fill in the blank questions. For each exam, there were two parts (1 and 2), that each student took with separate modes, either on computer or on paper. The part (1 or 2) each student took in each mode was flipped for half the students. After analyzing the results, the exam score differences between computer and paper were not statistically significant in 5 out of 6 exam parts analyzed. While the exam scores displayed limited differences, the students reported an overwhelming preference for the paper exams (86%) over the computer exams (5%). These results indicate that even though computer exams have similar performance to their paper counterparts, the students prefer the paper exams. Therefore, because performance is similar, future studies should explore improving the student experience in the computer exam environment while still realizing the advantages of computer-based examinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This lesson learned paper describes the faculty development program conducted to implement active learning methodologies in basic science courses from engineering degrees in a Chilean regional university. Contextualized in an Institutional Improvement Project (IIP) centered on students' STEM skills, the program aimed to impact student learning by enhancing instructors' teaching practices. The faculty development program had a continuous collaborative approach, where methodological experts accompanied a faculty team before and during the execution of the courses. The coaching methodology had three pillars: a collaborative process of design and creation of coursework materials guided by methodological experts, classroom and virtual support, and weekly reflection. In parallel, a follow-up process was applied to evaluate the program's impact. In the article, we present three main lessons learned from our program: the importance of the regular attendance and engagement of the faculty members in the coaching activities, the commitment of the departments to support innovative practices, and organizational conviction to invest in the installation of active learning practices. The authors will present this paper in a Lightning talk to discuss the lessons learned from the experience with the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the research team will discuss the lessons learned from the design and creation of an Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) serious game intended to enhance the teaching of a Wind Turbine lab in an Introduction to Engineering class at a community college. The serious game was designed and written by four students at the community college as part of a summer research project under the leadership of two professors from two institutions: a community college, and a university. The students learned storyboarding, SketchUp, and Unity and applied these tools to create the serious game from scratch. In the serious game, future students will be able to engage in an immersive virtual reality environment, reinforce power equations discussed in class, and adjust the parameters of the wind turbines themselves to see the resulting power through a numeric display and the amount of light generated. The goal of this paper is to share the design choices and development of the IVR serious game for use in an Introduction to Engineering virtual classroom to enhance the teaching of wind energy conversion. Learned lessons will be shared to support other instructors that are planning on pursuing similar research and/or implementing innovative technology in their courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering education in Malaysia has been recognized by the Washington Accord (WA) since 2009. The International Engineering Alliance continuously updates the requirements for the Program Learning Outcomes according to the needs of the current and future global graduating engineers that member countries of the WA must fulfill. Recent requirements emphasize lifelong learning, complex problem solving, engineering activities, and computing and digital tools capabilities geared towards developing engineering graduates ready for 21st century challenges. When brought upon engineering educators, these increasing requirements posed a dilemma because most are not trained to educate students beyond what they have experienced in their previous formal learning processes, which may be irrelevant for today's learners. In a survey conducted by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, engineering knowledge and skills are the topmost needed challenges to meet the needs of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Thus, to transform engineering education in Malaysia, the gap between the needs of the current and future engineering requirements, with the current engineering education practices, must be determined. Hence, this study aims to identify the gaps in Malaysian engineering education towards preparing 21st century ready educators, study the transition of engineering educators in their attempt to implement innovative education, and finally develop a framework for transforming engineering education through the infusion of innovative teaching and learning to support the development of the future-ready educators. The study uses a mixed-method research design to identify the gaps through document analysis, interviews, questionnaire surveys, and focus group discussions (FGD) among engineering education providers and industry players. The data will be analyzed and triangulated to chart the gaps in engineering education toward preparing 21st century educators. Later, this result will be used to develop the directions, actions, and transformation framework. The findings from this study will be used to formulate Malaysian national policy for transforming future-ready engineering educators who can excel and be on the leading edge of knowledge, innovation, and humanistic values to develop quality engineers in the 21st century. In this work-in-progress paper, only the initial part of the research, which is part of the document analysis, under the training construct, is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examines students' productive beginnings of engineering judgement while solving open-ended problems in a second-year dynamics course. Undergraduate students are typically assigned well-structured textbook problems for homework, in which the systems have already been simplified and there are few, if any, open-ended decisions to be made. Therefore, students have few opportunities in class to practice their engineering judgment until capstone design courses. We have developed a framework of the productive beginnings of engineering judgment with data from open-ended modeling problems in statics courses. In this paper we investigate how the framework transfers to open-ended modeling problems in dynamics courses. This analysis suggests our framework is transferable to dynamics courses, with all fourteen types of judgement found in the dynamics data set and no additional ways of engaging in judgement were found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black men and women continue to be underrepresented and underserved in Engineering. In current engineering literature, the focus for Black students is primarily about preparedness, sense of belonging and motivation. Few studies explore the importance of racial identity and its impact on students as they matriculate through engineering programs. Researchers tend to focus on the importance of identity organizations but not the importance of identity in engineering culture. The purpose of this study is to understand the importance of racial identity on Black students matriculating through engineering programs. This paper explores a subset of questions that were asked during a larger qualitative study to understand how important racial and ethnic identity is to Black students in engineering. During semi-structured interviews, students were asked to rank distinct aspects of their identity. We found that 100% of the participants ranked their racial or ethnic identity as number one or two as their top identifier. This paper explores the differences between how Black men and women rank their identities. Of the eleven students that were interviewed in the study only one student mentioned engineering as an important identity metric. Our results suggest that engineering must do more to improve the racial climate and understand racial identity. Once engineering communities understand the importance of racial and ethnic identity the more inclusive the spaces can be that will help ensure participation and increase representation of Black students. [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]

Higher education institutions experience a paramount problem of enrollment, retention, and attrition, which is particularly acute within the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Based on the National Center for Education Statistics, 48 percent of bachelor's degree students who began STEM programs between 2003 and 2009 had left them by spring 2009, 28 percent switched to a non-STEM major, and 20 percent left the program and exited the educational institution without earning a degree. That said, nearly half of STEM students change majors to a non-STEM program, perform deficiently compared to their peers in other programs, or leave the educational institution before completing their degree and/or not earning academic credentials. Students' attrition occurs most frequently in the first and second year of their academic programs; in fact, more than 60 percent of dropouts occur in these years. These rates are especially troubling for undergraduate STEM students from historically marginalized communities. Several factors play a significant role in STEM undergraduate students' attrition, such as poor-quality teaching and advising, curriculum difficulty, lack of belonging, lack of interaction between students and faculty, financial difficulties, and lack of hands-on project activities. The goals of this paper are to (1) identify the main factors that hinder undergraduate STEM students' interest, success, and perseverance, particularly those from marginalized communities, which contribute to the change in their career path or them dropping out before earning their degree; and (2) identify the actions that can be taken by educational institutions to increase undergraduate STEM student's enrollment and retention while decreasing attrition. To achieve these objectives, this study: (1) identified the main factors contributing to these problems of utmost importance to academia from previous literature; (2) collected and analyzed enrollment and retention data from Florida International University (FIU), one of the largest minority serving institutions in the United States; and (3) identified strategies and best practices aimed at addressing these paramount difficulties within undergraduate education through literature review. The data collected regarding retention rates of STEM and Engineering and Computing students showed that approximately (a) 17 percent of students that started their programs between 2008 and 2014 were not retained after their first year, while 8 percent of students that started their programs on the following years were not retained after their first year; (b) 28 and 15 percent, respectively, after their second year; (c) 35 and 21 percent after their third year; (d) 40 and 22 percent after their fourth year; and (e) 41 and 22 percent after their fifth year. This research proposes several strategies and best practices including orientation programs, early academic advising, peer-to-peer mentoring and tutoring, math review sessions/courses, early warning systems to identify potential switch-outs or dropouts, equitable financial aid mechanisms, and creation of more hands-on project activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introductory engineering courses at large universities often number over a hundred students, while online classes can have even larger enrollments, significantly constraining instructors' ability to differentiate instruction or reteach challenging material. Especially in the case of large enrollment classes, homework assignments often evaluates if students have comprehended a concept through multiple-choice questions, which marking answers as right or wrong with little feedback, or by using online text-only systems. In these scenarios, however, the feedback is often a binary type (right or wrong) with limited constructive feedback to scaffold learning. Set in this context, there is a growing concern amongst engineering educators that student lacks critical sketching skills and the ability to idealize a real-world system as a free body diagram(FBD). A sketch-recognition based tutoring system can allow learners to hand-draw solutions just as they would with pencil and paper, while also providing iterative real-time personalized feedback. Sketch recognition algorithms use artificial intelligence to identify the shapes, their relationships, and other features of the sketched student drawing. Other AI algorithms then determine if and why a student's work is incorrect, enabling the tutoring system to return immediate and iterative personalized feedback facilitating student learning that is otherwise not possible in large classes. Preliminary results using Mechanix, a sketch-based statics tutoring system built at Texas A&M University suggest that a sketch-based tutoring system increases homework motivation in struggling students and is as effective as paper-and-pencil-based homework for teaching method of joints truss analysis. In focus groups, students believed the system enhanced their learning and increased engagement. This project will assess a range of engineering education research questions as well as have a broader impact through its positive impact on at-risk students. To observe the effectiveness of this system for this project, it has been implemented into various courses at three universities, with two additional universities planning to use the system within the next year. Student knowledge is measured using Concept Inventories based in both Physics and Statics, common exam questions, and assignments turned in for class. [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]

In January 2020, an S-STEM grant (Grant #1930497) was awarded to East Carolina University (Greenville, NC) in partnership with three local community colleges. The community college partners were selected to participate in this program based upon their geographic proximity to the university and their offering an Associate's in Engineering degree program. The purpose of this program was to support low-income students through scholarships and programming designed to help the community college students feel welcomed and part of the engineering program at the university before they transfer to the university. The project intended to recruit 80 total scholars in two cohorts of 40. Each cohort was to be comprised of 20 university students and 20 community college students. In-person recruiting events were planned in the service areas of each of the community colleges and in a 10-county region surrounding the university. The original plan for programming was to offer special events and speakers on each campus throughout the academic year so that all of the scholars could meet each other and learn more about the engineering profession. When events were held on the university campus, the goal was to showcase the laboratories and programs available once students complete their associate's degree and transfer and for them to begin developing relationships with the engineering faculty at the university. When events were held on the community college campuses, the goal was for the university students to learn more about the engineering programs at each of the community colleges and to develop relationships with the community college students. The global pandemic required significant pivoting from the original plan for activities and recruitment of students. This paper outlines the recruitment and retention of S-STEM scholars at the three partnering community colleges. In particular, this paper will discuss the three very different approaches each community college took to offering classes and activities on campus during the Covid-19 pandemic and how that impacted course offerings and program implementation. This works in progress paper outlines the activities done to this point in the project and the plans for future years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender disparities persist across traditional engineering disciplines such as mechanical engineering and electrical engineering in colleges. Participation in K12 educational robotics is a common precursor to enrollment in traditional engineering majors, however the gender gap in K12 competitive robotics perpetuates this gender disparity. We hypothesize that soft robotics, consisting of robots made from complaint materials that safely interface with the body, is a field that may appeal to female students' enthusiasm for bioengineering and healthcare applications of engineering. While much of soft robotics work exists in research laboratories, there are efforts to develop soft robotics curricula for K12 students. Our previous work has focused on middle and high school curricula. When we had the opportunity to bring our soft robotics curriculum to even younger students, we had the chance to think critically about project design and ease of implementation as well as preconceptions children hold of robots and roboticists at this age. Perceptions of who can participate in engineering are formed as early as elementary school for some students. In this work, we present three one-hour soft robotics lessons that were piloted with a first-grade girl scout troop in order to earn their Daisy Girl Scout robotics badges. The lessons include instruction on robotics and programming as well as hands on activities for students to design and build their own soft gripper. This paper details the soft robotics curriculum adapted for 6-8 year old children. These materials will allow other girl scout troop leaders to instruct similar lessons to earn these badges. We also present initial survey responses from the girl scout participants. Surveys captured the students' drawings and perceptions of robotics and who builds robots. Survey responses will inform the use of soft robotics in grades as early as elementary school. We aim to evaluate an alternative robotics curriculum that is specifically designed to create inclusive robotics spaces for girls with the goal of reducing the gender disparity in STEM and traditional engineering majors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work in progress paper describes the impact of using a coaching strategy to promote learning about engineering and funds of knowledge. Preliminary analysis of the data indicated that strategies used throughout the research were effective primarily because the teachers constantly received immediate feedback. In addition, recognizing teachers as experts was important for the development of productive and asset-based collaborations. Teachers indicated that they valued the tools provided to them, which served to mediate their learning of and about engineering. This research indicates that confianza is fundamental to create spaces that foster collaborative work with teachers' communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To efficiently create books and other instructional content from videos and further improve accessibility of our course content we needed to solve the scene detection (SD) problem for engineering educational content. We present the pedagogical applications of extracting video images for the purposes of digital book generation and other shareable resources, within the themes of accessibility, inclusive education, universal design for learning and how we solved this problem for engineering education lecture videos. Scene detection refers to the process of merging visually similar frames into a single video segment, and subsequent extraction of semantic features from the video segment (e.g., title, words, transcription segment and representative image). In our approach, local features were extracted from inter-frame similarity comparisons using multiple metrics. These include numerical measures based on optical character recognition (OCR) and pixel similarity with and without face and body position masking. We analyze and discuss the trade-offs in accuracy, performance and computational resources required. By applying these features to a corpus of labeled videos, a support vector machine determined an optimal parametric decision surface to model if adjacent frames were semantically and visually similar or not. The algorithm design, data flow, and system accuracy and performance are presented. We evaluated our system using videos from multiple engineering disciplines where the content was comprised of different presentation styles including traditional paper handouts, Microsoft PowerPoint slides, and digital ink annotations. For each educational video, a comprehensive digital-book composed of lecture clips, slideshow text, and audio transcription content can be generated based on our new scene detection algorithm. Our new scene detection approach was adopted by ClassTranscribe, an inclusive video platform that follows Universal Design for Learning principles. We report on the subsequent experiences and feedback from students who reviewed the generated digital-books as a learning component. We highlight remaining challenges and describe how instructors can use this technology in their own courses. The main contributions of this work are: Identifying why automated scene detection of engineering lecture videos is challenging; Creation of a scene-labeled corpus of videos representative of multiple undergraduate engineering disciplines and lecture styles suitable for training and testing; Description of a set of image metrics and support vector machine-based classification approach; Evaluation of the accuracy, recall and precision of our algorithm; Use of an algorithmic optimization to obviate GPU resources; Student commentary on the digital book interface created from videos using our SD algorithm; Publishing of a labeled corpus of video content to encourage additional research in this area; and an independent open-source scene extraction tool that can be used pedagogically by the ASEE community e.g., to remix and create fun shareable instructional content memes, and to create accessible audio and text descriptions for students who are blind or have low vision. Text extracted from each scene can also used to improve the accuracy of captions and transcripts, improving accessibility for students who are hard of hearing or deaf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, 64.9% of all engineering master's and 59.0% of all engineering doctoral degrees are awarded to international students [1]. These international students bring significant cultural and economic value to engineering education programs but face unique social, cultural, and academic challenges [27]. Therefore, we need to create more inclusive engineering education environments to enable international engineering students to overcome these challenges and to foster diverse perspectives among the engineering learning community. One way of moving towards more inclusive engineering education environments is to incorporate innovative lessons into engineering courses and curricula that consider effective instructional design principles. This paper presents the processes of designing and delivering an innovative instructional lesson to reach more diverse students to enhance the inclusivity and equity for international engineering graduate students. To this end, I developed, delivered, and evaluated instructional lesson on the topic "Traffic Signals Coordination along the Street" that engaged diverse engineering graduate students, domestic and international. The lesson contributes to addressing disparities in efforts (between domestic and international students) in navigating cultural differences, thus improving equity and inclusivity in engineering education. I developed this pilot lesson as part of an assignment in a graduate class where we were challenged to design and deliver innovative instructional lessons. Using this opportunity, I considered instructional design elements and modified Bloom's Taxonomy of cognitive learning theory [2] to create effective instruction that adds to the efforts to address equity and inclusivity in engineering education. The Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate (ADDIE) instructional design model [9] was used to frame the design of the lesson: identify needs, learners' characteristics and task analysis, delivery modalities, design of active learning strategies, and continuous assessment techniques. This paper shares the procedures I followed to design, deliver, and evaluate this more inclusive and equitable lesson for domestic and international students. In addition, two reviewer groups composed of four graduate students and three instructors conducted a summative evaluation of the delivered lesson. The feedback from the reviewers suggests that the lesson could help enhance the inclusivity and equity of education for international graduate students in engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we have examined a major focus area of engineering education research--engineering students' experiences and outcomes, or ESEO--through a targeted literature review of 121 selected articles published by the Journal of Engineering Education from 2011 to 2021. We drew upon a methodological taxonomy (Malmi, et al., 2018), literature on student development theories, and particularly an integrative ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1993), to guide our analysis. We have presented the findings with respect to engineering students' outcomes, and the contextual and individual factors in their learning experiences as exhibited in the selected articles, as well as the frameworks, methodologies and paradigms used by these studies. Based on these findings, we attempt to characterize ESEO studies in terms of topics, frameworks, methodologies and research paradigms. Our analyses have attested that student development perspectives in the field of higher education offer scholarly and useful insights to engineering education researchers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on faculty-student interactions in engineering education generally conceptualizes the function of these episodes to be supportive of professional development. In this paper, we examine the experience of professional shame amid faculty-student interactions. More generally, we examine the emotional significance of interactions between faculty and students and how such moments can affect how students cope with the experience of professional shame. Our findings are based on a thematic analysis that followed a broader qualitative mixed-method investigation of how engineering students experience professional shame. Specifically, we analyzed specific episodes of moments where the experience of shame was connected to faculty members within focus group transcripts (n = 10) of engineering students (n = 38) and interview transcripts with engineering students (n = 16). We generated three themes that characterized the experience of professional shame amid faculty-student interactions. First, faculty would engender shame through conveying vague, holistic expectations of what it means to be an engineer. Second, students would cope with the experience of shame by blaming the faculty member for the experience. Finally, some students saw the faculty member as a source of hope while they experienced professional shame. These findings point to the crucial role that faculty play in not only preparing engineering students for professional practice but also for cultivating environments of well-being within engineering programs. [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]

Motivation & Background Studies of Black students' experiences and journeys to success at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) show that the experiences of Black students are uniquely complex and need to be examined through a lens that can capture the distinct intersectionality of Black students in engineering programs. In a previous pilot study, we explored the experiences of two Black students at a PWI. That study captured their stories in which they described elements of engineering thriving and engineering identity that need to be further explored. There are currently no existing theories that explain Black student thriving in engineering. In this theory paper, we present a new framework, Black Student Thriving in Engineering (BSTiE, pronounced "bestie"), that combines the tenets of Engineering Thriving by Juliana Ge, Engineering Identity by Allison Godwin, and Black Student science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) Identity by Kristina Collins. We aim to show that at the intersection of these three frameworks there exists a unique space that can be used to capture the experiences of Black student thriving in engineering. Theoretical Frameworks & Sources Engineering Thriving Engineering thriving (ET) is seen as an output of achieving high measures of competency in the engineering culture and leans on the studies of thriving from a psychological context to support the need to achieve holistic growth. Engineering thriving is defined as the optimization of academic and personal competencies strengthened in the engineering culture that is then used for engineering success. Engineering Identity Engineering identity (EI) encompasses the way that students identify with the role of engineer. This theory pulls from broader role identity theory and situates itself within the culture of engineering. A student's EI comprises three components: interest in the subject, perceived recognition by others, and performance/competence beliefs, and in some cases a fourth component, self-awareness. Black Student STEM Identity Black student STEM identity (BSSI) is situated within the context of the external and internal environments where Black STEM students perceive their reflective identity (how they view themselves), their competence and ability, their values and interests, and their assimilation into STEM culture. These four perception components are influenced by Black students' genderbased racial identity. Significance Drawing from existing literature, we seek to identify overlapping elements in ET, EI, and BSSI. We are developing a culturally relevant theory of Black Student Thriving in Engineering (BSTiE, pronounced "bestie") situated at the cross-section of the aforementioned theories. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the origins of the theories to lay the foundation for their application in our context of interest. It is our belief that researchers can use BSTiE to understand how Black students thrive in engineering, with results that can give students a working model for how they can integrate their own individual culture to feel good, achieve holistic growth, and function well in engineering cultures at PWIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oral examinations have been widely utilized as an alternative form of assessment to traditional written exams. While oral exams are effective as a form of evaluation, students may miss on learning opportunities that come with oral exams while studying using strategies meant for traditional written exams. In this paper, we study how homework preparation (video assignments) can play a role in impacting student performance outcomes in oral examinations. We report on results from two engineering courses conducting oral examinations and analyze the correlation between student completion of video assignments and exam outcomes. Preliminary results show a correlation in better examination scores with students that consistently completed the video assignments as a part of their preparation for the oral exam. Students that completed the video assignments were able to better articulate their thoughts and show a deeper understanding of the conceptual aspects of the course content. While unconventional, video assignments alongside oral examinations provide new insight to the teaching team and students regarding the students' depth and mastery of the material that can be important to identifying knowledge gaps and dynamically improving overall course experience and learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active learning in any field of study is a time-demanding approach to engaging students in problem-solving and other activities in face-to-face class settings and online environments. The origin of learning is rooted in the activity, which is doing something to find out about specific topics. Active learning constitutes a natural pair in any education, especially in engineering and management. Engineering and management students are trained to design and construct solutions to problems in the real world. This paper presents the perceptions and attitudes of students who participated in active learning activities of civil/environmental engineering and construction management courses in fall 2021. One course from the Civil and Environmental Engineering curriculum (Introduction to Environmental Engineering) and another course from the Construction Management curriculum (Construction Quantity Surveying) were selected. Problem-solving in the class as a part of course delivery was performed in each topic of the courses as a part of the active learning activities. At the end of the semester, a survey with three Likert-scale questions was conducted, and the data was analyzed to determine the students' perceptions and attitudes about active learning in terms of their learning experience and performance in the exam. The final grades were also analyzed and compared with previous similar semesters' data for both the courses to predict the effect of active learning activities. Although statistically, the difference was insignificant, students' perceptions and attitudes were positive. Their performance in the examination was better with active learning course settings than those without active learning course settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the principles, procedures, materials, and assessment of a new approach to improve the teaching of writing in engineering. The Civil Engineering Writing Project aims to improve students' preparation for writing in industry by developing new teaching materials that can be integrated into existing civil engineering courses. With collaboration among engineering practitioners, applied linguists, and engineering faculty at four universities, the project draws on multiple perspectives to analyze writing and develop teaching materials. Phase 1 of the project investigated differences between practitioner and student writing in a large collection of texts and identified the most serious student weaknesses. Phase 2 of the project, currently underway, develops materials to address those weaknesses and evaluates their effectiveness. Student writing after the use of the materials is assessed with multiple measures, including linguistic analysis of specific language features and holistic evaluation of effectiveness by engineering practitioners. After initial piloting with seven courses, all quantitative assessments have found significant improvement in student writing. Student comments suggest the materials also challenge their misconceptions about writing in engineering. Although the project focuses on civil engineering, the principles behind the project and the procedures for materials development and assessment are applicable to any engineering discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, V2V communication is discussed based on a wireless protocol called Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). This protocol allows cars on the road to form a dynamic wireless networks that aid in driving with the overall goal of reducing car accidents and carbon footprint. The onboard car computer manages and controls all the communication systems as well as electrical systems or subsystems in the vehicle which involve many sophisticated sensors. These sensors, and the software, help cars to make automatic, or semi-automatic, decisions and provide warning information. V2V includes control technology that comes into play at the local (sensor-level) and higher layers of the communication architecture for this dynamic wireless network to work properly. Note that V2V is also being heavily promoted by the US government and car manufacturers should have all this technology ready for deployment in the near future. The authors stress that V2V is a very good example of systems engineering where different architectures (mechanical, electrical, computers and communications), including government policy, are integrated into a product. While this type of development is being disseminated through national media, which gives the public a better understanding as to why V2V communication is important, in-depth discussion of this technology is not typically found in an electrical engineering undergraduate curriculum. This paper is based on a report written in the context of an undergraduate Electrical Engineering computer and communications course at Penn State Harrisburg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The specialization of careers in various industries has created a multitude of professional networks that demand close collaboration between parties when working toward a common goal. Additionally, the exponential growth of information technology has evolved with the workflows among various entities involved in a project. Therefore, professionals in various construction or engineering positions must work with their peers closely to form teams. As an interpersonal skill set, the ability to work in teams is gaining more attention in workforce development programs. Construction and engineering programs in higher education should prepare their graduates with ample knowledge and experience in teamworking skills. While the technical and detailed nature of construction and engineering courses influences the possibility of students working in teams, there is still sufficient flexibility in the classroom to facilitate students' collaboration in the form of team projects. This paper reports on a study conducted in Fall 2022 to explore teamwork among construction and engineering students. The goal of this study is to investigate various aspects of teamwork as perceived by students. In the first phase, a quantitative survey was designed and developed, and a sample of subjects was drawn from students in construction and engineering programs at Mississippi State University. The comparison between these programs produced common themes. The findings of this study contribute to the body of knowledge by addressing key aspects of team-based projects and practices when developing or modifying course components in pertinent programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in industry funded research can have significant impacts on faculty's research experiences. As industry funded research tends to have different characteristics than government funded research, i.e. industry funded research is relatively short term, deadline driven, more applied, and more focused on commercial outputs than government funded research, these characteristics can lead to measurable impacts on faculty research experiences when participating in industry funded research. This is especially true for Engineering at R1 institutions, where industry funded research is a much higher percentage of R&D expenditures than overall industry funded university R&D expenditures (typically 10 - 25% for Engineering alone, compared to about 6 - 8% of the university overall). This paper examines the existing literature for impacts on Engineering faculty's research experiences when participating in industry funded research, including research productivity as measured by publication output, innovation as measured by patent output, and the likelihood for collaboration with others. Results of the literature review will be synthesized for a better understanding of each of these impacted areas and where there are opportunities for further research on the subject. [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]

The meaningful inclusion of ethics in engineering education often seems to be a challenge in programs which are already packed full of technical content. Most often the ways in which ethics are included into engineering education relates to microethical issues such as ethical codes or personal professional conduct in the office. Macroethical topics, such as the profession's ethical obligations around climate change or sustainability, are less common and the ways in which macroethics are included in engineering courses has not been well studied. Two surveys were developed to explore the ways in which faculty teach students about macroethical issues; one focused on curricular settings and the other on co-curricular settings. Participants were asked to describe general topics that they covered in their respective settings and then to describe in detail the ways in which they include the societal impacts of engineering in a single course or cocurricular activity including specific topics, educational approaches and assessment tools. At the end of the survey, participants were asked in a free-response question to share their thoughts about the education of engineering students regarding broader impacts and ethical issues. This paper focuses on faculty response to this question. There were 406 responses to the open-ended question. These responses were coded using emergent, thematic coding. Inter-rater reliability was established for frequently-identified themes. The analysis of these themes highlighted four main themes: current practices, topics, challenges, and goals/opportunities. In talking about current practices, some faculty focused on engineering service opportunities or experiential learning as effective approaches. Examples of topics that were discussed include justice and community development contexts. Examples of challenges that were discussed include faculty having a limited knowledge or training about how to teach ethics or that ethics education is currently taught in ways that are too black and white and more nuanced topics should be included. Some goals or opportunities that faculty talked about indicate that students should receive a broader exposure to the societal impacts of engineering and that students should learn how to identify and negotiate work related ethical dilemmas. Some differences were found in the frequency that challenges and goals/opportunity-related themes were used between gender, tenured/tenure-track (T/TT) vs. non-T/TT, and institution types. The paper provides an interesting view of faculty perspectives on teaching ethical issues. [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]

Throughout history, humans roamed the Earth in pursuit of food and water; minimum necessities for living. People had tendency to settle lands where means of survival and thriving existed. Scarcity of favorable land, coupled with population increase, intensified competition for resources and this, oftentimes, flared into conflicts. Violence and war were used to settle such conflicts, and this left behind nothing but misery and destruction. War did not only inflict damage on the defeated party but it was also costly to the triumphant one. Sadly, this scenario has repeated itself untold number of times throughout history and, more regrettably, it is still playing itself to this day in many regions around the world. With this in mind, engineers as well as non-engineers have a role to play to ameliorate living conditions for humans everywhere to reduce the possibility of war and conflict. The question humanity in general and engineers in particular are faced with is how to engineer peace and employ various skills to build a better future for all. The answer to this question starts with an attempt to combat the factors that ultimately lead to conflict. Peace engineering is a branch of study in which engineering and non-engineering students are trained to think critically across many disciplines to use technical solutions involving science and engineering, together with policy, to address societal ills resulting from natural disasters, man-made disasters, irresponsible and non-sustainable consumption of resources, pollution and contamination, and lack of opportunity. This program trains students to pursue practical solutions that proactively promote peace and reduce the potential for disputes in a world plagued with problems that require unconventional thinking to overcome. Students are exposed to innovative approaches toward addressing multidimensional problems in addition to gaining skill in economic, social, environmental, political, ethical, legal, cultural, and historical aspects associated with the effort of building enduring peace. This paper will detail the elements that constitute a peace engineering program. It will use real world examples to show how such a program could alter the way students look at finding solutions that make a difference in people's lives. The program's main objective is to inspire students to become agents to advance humanity toward an optimistic and a brighter tomorrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an active research study examining the effectiveness of a spatial visualization course offered by the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University for students who desire to enroll in dental school. Students who enroll in the spatial visualization course are either first year engineering students, undergraduate students who are majoring in a pre-dental curriculum anticipating taking the Dental Admissions Test (DAT), or students who are in a post baccalaureate program (PostBac) that conditionally accepts them into dental school. The DAT includes a "Perceptual Ability Test" (PAT) section that is a test of spatial visualization and there is evidence that the PAT predicts performance in pre-clinical dental school courses. This paper will evaluate the impact of the course on the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R), the potential correlation between the PSVT:R and the PAT, and the performance of the PostBac students in the future dental school key courses that heavily rely on strong perceptual abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses feasible means of integrating mentorship programs into engineering and engineering technology curricula. The two main motivations for investigating the development of such programs are to improve retention rates and to augment the efforts toward increasing the enrollment of minority students. In fact, it can be argued that a mentorship program can also indirectly assist in the achievement of critical student outcomes for accreditation. The model of mentorship presented in this paper involves a vertical integration of cohorts through a series of project-based learning (PBL) courses. Furthermore, this attempt is enhanced by the introduction of incentives that encourage student involvement in undergraduate research as well as on-campus engineering organizations. The specific focus of the mentorship is on student-student relationships in addition to the conventional faculty-student relationships. These relationships allow students to learn from each other since they are able to strongly relate to each other's experiences among their peer group. The mentoring model proposed in this paper formulates a learning community that allows the student to form a support group and a mechanism for preventive intervention, as discussed in other studies on mentoring programs. Such student engagement is commonly acknowledged to significantly benefit the students as well as the student mentors involved in the program. Data from an initial student survey that measures the efficacy of the proposed mentorship program is included in this paper and these data are discussed in detail. A 1-5 Likert scale is used for quantitative analysis of the data in order to evaluate the self-efficacy of the program. The group size of the mentorship cohort has been limited to a maximum of thirty students at this stage. Preliminary analysis of the data indicates that the participating students have a strongly positive opinion of the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the perception of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) and construction management (CM) students on cheating. Topics discussed include the view of students on copying from an unapproved reference sheet during a closed-book test or quiz, the perception on students on adding fake references on term papers to expand bibliography, and the opinion of students on copying from old term paper or laboratory report.

The Toy Adaptation Program (TAP) currently has partners in engineering and health, interested in profit and non-profit work, and who are individuals and organizations. This intricate network was developed over the last four years and brings together a variety of stakeholders interested in toy adaptation. Toy adaptation is the process of modifying an electronic toy for a child with special needs. TAP along with its community partners has been able to establish a presence in this space while serving others. Currently, TAP facilitates a variety of workshops for students, families, and other stakeholders, all interested in addressing the need for adapted toys. These workshops take many forms and have evolved over the years based on the recommendations and interests of our partners. To date, TAP has donated over 1,000 adapted toys to adapted toy lending libraries and directly to families with children with special needs. In this paper, we will share our lessons learned through successes and failures related to TAP's network. For example, to establish our health related network, we had to reach beyond our current professional networks within engineering, leveraging personal connections in the health field that were not immediately obvious. By sharing our lessons learned, we hope to aid others wishing to establish a strong network which includes many stakeholders. Since we are still solidifying TAP, this is a Work in Progress paper which will also allow us to learn from others and strengthen our program. Through these collaborations, true success will be achieved and progress will continue to be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing to learn is one of the very important pedagogical strategies in a variety of disciplines. This concept is not specifically addressed in the majority of engineering courses. Hence, university initiatives such as the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), emerging out of accreditation and institutional assessments, are focusing on infusing scholarship from other disciplines (in this case English) for the purpose of student learning improvement. Engineering and Science programs do include various courses in English Composition as the part of the curriculum; however, writing is not embedded in all discipline-specific courses at the upper-division level. The program outlined here focuses on the exploration of possible methods for engineering and science faculty to embed more writing assignments in their STEM courses so that undergraduate students can adequately transfer what they learned from English courses and apply it in their specific discipline once they attain higher proficiency (at the junior and senior level). The project presented in this paper included the creation of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) composed of English, Engineering, and Science scholars, with the goal of developing writing assignments that enhance student learning while also building off of writing concepts students learn in introductory writing courses. This paper evaluates the effect of the FLC on student learning and on faculty professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]