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Engineering ethics curriculum and the research around it often emphasizes micro-ethical issues such as whistle-blowing and responsible conduct of research with lesser but growing attention to macro-ethical issues such as how engineering practice is entangled with broader social, political, economic, and environmental concerns. Engaging in macro-ethical reasoning often requires conceptualizing a wide range of stakeholders and their concerns, challenging one's beliefs about engineering as naturally leading to social good, and conceptualizing negative impacts of engineering work. There is still a paucity of research on the moment-to-moment dynamics and evolution of students' macro-ethical reasoning in sociotechnical contexts. In this paper, we present analysis of audio-video data from a series of focus group sessions in which engineering students discuss the ethics and ethical implications of a 2012 incident in which statisticians and engineers at Target developed predictive analytical software capable of identifying shoppers who were pregnant. We show how students' conceptualization of different stakeholders was relational, in that the ways in which pregnant women were conceptualized was entangled with how Target was conceptualized. We also argue that the way students construct various stakeholders over three focus group sessions constrained how they were able to understand any of the stakeholders as causing harm or being harmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists and historians of science/engineering have documented the salience of meritocracy and technocracy in engineering and engineering education (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015; Riley, 2008). Some engineering education scholars have begun to document how technocracy and meritocracy have been mechanisms of marginalization within engineering education (Slaton, 2015; Foor, Walden, & Trytten, 2007; Secules, Gupta, Elby, & Turpen, 2018). Our team has been engaged in the iterative redesign of a pedagogy seminar for engineering peer educators working within a college-level introduction to engineering design course. Using tools of discourse analysis, we analyze how technocratic stances are reproduced or challenged in engineering peer educators' talk during pedagogy seminar discussions. We study peer educators, in particular, because they are in a unique position to do harm if the ideologies of meritocracy and technocracy aren't challenged. Likewise, they are in a unique position to do good if they actively disrupt these ideologies in the introductory engineering design course. We present empirical examples of engineering peer educators both reproducing and contesting technocratic (and, at times, meritocratic) stances in reasoning about engineering education. We believe that such empirical examples can help engineering educators hone their attention to student thinking in the classroom and help us understand what it might look like to see evidence of growth in students' reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering ethics curriculum and the research around it often emphasizes micro-ethical issues such as whistle-blowing and responsible conduct of research with lesser but growing attention to macro-ethical issues such as how engineering practice is entangled with broader social, political, economic, and environmental concerns. Engaging in macro-ethical reasoning often requires conceptualizing a wide range of stakeholders and their concerns, challenging one's beliefs about engineering as naturally leading to social good, and conceptualizing negative impacts of engineering work. There is still a paucity of research on the moment-to-moment dynamics and evolution of students' macro-ethical reasoning in sociotechnical contexts. In this paper, we present analysis of audio-video data from a series of focus group sessions in which engineering students discuss the ethics and ethical implications of a 2012 incident in which statisticians and engineers at Target developed predictive analytical software capable of identifying shoppers who were pregnant. We show how students' conceptualization of different stakeholders was relational, in that the ways in which pregnant women were conceptualized was entangled with how Target was conceptualized. We also argue that the way students construct various stakeholders over three focus group sessions constrained how they were able to understand any of the stakeholders as causing harm or being harmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering education research has started to attend to the idea that the education of a socially responsible professional engineer will, in part, require the weaving of social responsibility and engineering macro-ethics into the fabric of the engineering curriculum. In this paper, writing as an engineering design instructor, I present my own successes and challenges with incorporating notions of social responsibility and macro-ethics in an engineering design lesson. The lesson plan evolved over a period of 10 semesters. I document the process of that evolution and discuss how students' responses to activity prompts influenced that evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning Assistants (LAs) are undergraduate peer educators who participate in weekly pedagogy seminars and work alongside faculty instructors in active-learning based undergraduate courses. While LA programs were initially developed for science and math courses, many LA programs support LAs in a wide range of disciplines. This paper describes a pilot adaptation of the LA program for engineering design courses that we have developed at the University of Maryland, College Park Campus. All LAs assist in 14 separate sections of University of Maryland's engineering design course for first-year undergraduate students. Our seminar integrates topics from the discipline-general LA pedagogy seminar (cognitive science of learning, facilitation of classroom discourse, collaboration, metacognition) with topics especially relevant to engineering design (design reviews, design thinking, expert-novice practices in engineering design, engineering epistemology, teamwork and equity). While seminar goals aligned with the goals of LA programs nationally, our seminar design team also articulated several values which guided the design of our seminar: a) helping LAs reframe their role as supporting growth rather than evaluation, b) valuing a broad set of metrics of success from day one, c) celebrating that different students bring in different expertise, and disrupting overly simplistic expertise/novice dichotomies, d) acknowledging that we all have different starting points and valuing a plurality of goals, e) helping our students track their own progress through reflecting on concrete representations of their thinking, and f) supporting LAs in developing deep disciplinary knowledge of design thinking. This paper describes the embodiment of these goals by highlighting several key features of the seminar. We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of several data sources (surveys, instructor reflections, field notes, and coursework) to assess the extent to which the embodiment of our values helped us meet our goals. Finally, we describe challenges and identify areas where we were not meeting our goals and describe some of the aspects of the seminar that we plan to revise in the next iteration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within research on retention and persistence in STEM, the concept of student agency is typically treated as a personal characteristic or as an element of coping and navigational strategies. The act of theorizing about one's own experiences and persistence is under-explored as a source of taking agency. Through interviews with a woman in the first year of an undergraduate engineering major, we examine the role that theorizing about engineering culture and her own experiences plays in her constructing a narrative of persistence that counters the prominent perceived narratives marginalizing her position in engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on productivity designing for task tinkering and related fundamentals. Topics discussed include illustration of tinkering as productive activity, negative impact of tinkering evoked by computer researchers, strategies for effective production, and instructional background provided in classroom teaching.

The article focuses on problematizing best practices for pairing in K-12 student design teams. Group composition with respect to varying skill levels among students is an important instructional decision for team-based class projects since that, in combination with other factors, can influence group dynamics on a team.

Understanding the social, environmental, economic, and political impact of engineering is an important aspect of being a professional engineer. Responding to this need, engineering programs increasingly offer engineering ethics education. However, courses in engineering ethics as well as research on students' developing sense of engineering ethics often emphasize the micro-ethics of research, mentoring, and publications. In comparison, research is limited on how future engineers understand the social, ethical, environmental, economic, and political impact of their scientific and technological contributions. In this manuscript, we present 2 case-study accounts of how future engineers think about an engineer's responsibility towards the social and global impact of their contribution. The case studies draw from video-taped semi-structured interviews with engineering undergraduates. Our case-study analysis suggests that how some engineering students construe an engineer's responsibility depends on the particular issue at hand (weaponized drones versus malfunctioning bridges, for example), on their sense of self as a future engineer, views about what is engineering, sense of nationality, emotions, empathy, and ideologies/narratives available to them through participation in the world at large. We argue that students' views towards macro-ethics of engineering are sensitive to context, and that there's need for further research on how identity, epistemology, and emotions are entangled with an engineers' ethical view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing firstyear engineering majors with an opportunity to experience engineering through a projectbased design course has become an important curricular element in many engineering degree programs. This paper provides a reflection on the process of selecting, developing, and launching a new design project by providing a practitioner's account that details the successes, missteps, and lessons learned in transitioning to a new design project. The reflection is supported by a survey administered to the instructional team at the end of the first semester the course was taught, the authors' reflection and assessment of teaching the new course, and student course evaluation responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In planning and teaching courses for engineering majors, physics instructors grapple with multiple instructional goals: extensive content coverage, quantitative problem solving, conceptual understanding, motivation, and more. The temptation is to treat these goals as mutually reinforcing or at least as not in conflict. We argue, however, that at least for novice instructors, these goals can be in tension. In our study, one instructor was experienced and emphasized traditional quantitative problem solving. A second instructor teaching another lecture section of the same course was a novice who chose to emphasize a goal suggested by physics education research and studies of practicing engineers, namely mathematical sensemaking-- translating and seeking coherence between mathematical formalism and physical reasoning. A common final exam, containing standard traditional problems and also opportunities for mathematical sense-making, enabled us to document the following trade-off: the novice instructor outperformed the experienced traditional instructor at fostering mathematical sense-making but underperformed at fostering traditional problem solving. In other words, the novice instructor's success at teaching mathematical sense-making came at a cost. A third instructor, expert in emphasizing mathematical sense-making, showed that it is possible to succeed at teaching mathematical sense-making without a significant trade-off in teaching traditional problem-solving. However, for instructors considering the adoption of physics/engineering education research-based instructional strategies, trade-offs must be acknowledged and tough choices must be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]