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Background: While a primary goal of education research is discovering and disseminating scholarly knowledge, traditional dissemination alone is insufficient to foster sustainable educational change. Journals and conferences target a particular audience invested in a specific topic; it is often not practical for stakeholders to engage with research outside of their specific areas of specialization. Thus, the research-to-practice gap continually widens as education research findings fail to influence wider audiences. Purpose: In this paper, we highlight audio as a promising alternative format for dissemination. Audio dissemination has the potential to multiply the impacts of qualitative research by disseminating findings with more immediacy and accessibility than traditional research publications. Approach: We summarize one specific audio narrative dissemination approach conducted as part of the pilot phase of the Audio for Inclusion Project, a recent National Science Foundation-funded project to foster inclusive understandings for engineering faculty. We organize the discussion around orienting goals and challenges encountered, as well as lessons learned and suggestions for future improvements. Findings: Lessons learned for audio narrative dissemination include paying close attention to creating a coherent and cohesive narrative by removing distracting details, and aligning student actors with participants so that the tone, affect, and emphasis remain true to the participant. Implications: This paper presents new possibilities for qualitative researchers on broadening participation, to repurpose their interview content to form practical resources and training that can improve faculty's knowledge, empathy, and understanding of students' diverse and marginalized backgrounds. Additionally, these findings will be useful for all researchers seeking new methods of translating research findings into actionable impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This theory paper contributes to the study of smartness in engineering culture from different disciplinary perspectives. We are interested in the construct of smartness, which is a powerful, yet implicit, driver of students' experience in engineering education. Smartness in engineering culture can be linked to both the broad narratives and norms that overarch engineering at a societal level (e.g., engineers are smart) as well as the more specific, individual beliefs that individual students hold about the nature of intelligence (e.g., fixed vs. growth mindset). However, the construct of smartness at these different levels is operationalized differently and is informed by theory from different disciplinary fields such as psychology and anthropology. Studying a complex social construct, such as smartness, from a single disciplinary frame is common; each frame has its advantages and limitations. We use this paper to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue and to motivate the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to studying smartness and its role in the culture of undergraduate engineering education. We ground our dialogue in the scholarly literature from psychology and anthropology, and leverage two co-authors' prior work in each of these research frames respectively. From these vantage points, we discuss our own observations of the affordances and limitations of the single disciplinary perspectives. We then motivate and discuss the features of an interdisciplinary research agenda, including challenges associated with blending the assumptions and epistemologies of the two different disciplinary frames. We offer an idea of leveraging the unifying construct of beliefs as a way to facilitate interdisciplinary research on the complex construct of smartness. Theoretical implications of interdisciplinary research in this vein include new approaches to other educational constructs that span both individual mental and collective social dimensions. We note that the interdisciplinary study of smartness in engineering culture also has practical implications, such as for inclusive classroom design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the outcomes of early research activity that is related to an investigation on shame in the context of engineering education. We are investigating shame as an individual experience that occurs in the particular sociocultural context of engineering education and practice. We list the research questions below and provide detail regarding our working theoretical model for shame and justification for investigating this in the engineering education context. Furthermore, we provide a summary of our data collection efforts. We are using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to interview engineering students about their experiences of shame and ethnographic focus groups to describe the landscape of sociocultural expectations that establish a platform for students' experiences with this emotional construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, the engineering education community has focused primarily on developing evidencebased best practices and fundamental theories of teaching and learning. An emerging focus, embodied in initiatives like the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program, is on achieving systemic, sustainable, and scalable change, that is, the translation of theory to impact practice. Current models for engineering education units within universities have achieved goals to develop fundamental theory, making engineering education into a viable discipline. Alternative institutional models for engineering education are beginning to emerge that explore new avenues for achieving widespread, transformational impacts on educational practice. This paper describes a novel, next generation approach to translating theory to practice, and transforming an institutional culture through an integrated focus on building community and shared capacity around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) and educational research in a college of engineering. When organizing a departmental or programmatic effort, logistical decisions can dominate and obscure the underlying organizing theory for the effort. Consistent with NSF's calls for a greater understanding of theories of change, we connect the explicit and implicit organizing philosophies underpinning the innovative approach to enacted institutional plans and approaches. We draw on Henderson's theoretical models of Institutional Change in higher education to clarify the chosen approach to transformation. We also draw on a complex systems perspective as a guiding philosophy to conceptualize change in the interconnected human, institutional, and social structures of our engineering college, and on boundary spanning to address the ways that communication across knowledge domains can be enacted and supported. The anthropologically inspired methodology explores institutional artifacts, structure, and guiding philosophies for their explicitly stated or implicitly enacted theories. As a collaboration between insiders (founders and longtime participants) and relative outsiders (a new participant), the innovative approach could be both described from experience and examined anew, and could explore both planned intentions and enacted realities. Guiding principles, made explicit in PROGRAM founding documents and written reflections of organizers, include "plant a lot of seeds" and "people are the drivers of change." An organizing structure includes administrative and faculty roles with dual focuses on developing research and translating to practice. Several opportunities for engagement between researchers and practitioners are structured as regular events and forums. We connect the guiding theories to specific aspects of PROGRAM to clarify the purpose and implicit assumptions embedded inside institutional practices. For example, the events and forums can be understood as a form of boundary spanning, while the underlying goal of investing in people is consistent with Henderson's "developing reflective practitioners" model for institutional change. We highlight PROGRAM's approach to engineering educational transformation, substantiated by guiding theories. In so doing, we hope to provide greater insight into one approach, show contrasts with other approaches, and suggest a parallel theoretical clarification as a generative activity for other efforts at institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares an innovative approach to teaching an introductory C programming course to a traditional C programming course for electrical engineering students. Students who pass either course must subsequently take a traditional intermediate C programming course. The novel course utilizes hardware-based projects to motivate students to master language syntax and implement key programming concepts and best practices. In addition to comparing the attitudes and selfperceptions of the students in each of the introductory courses, we also look at success rates for each cohort in the intermediate programming class as well as their progress toward their degrees. The electrical engineering students who took either introductory class on average had identical GPAs. However, students who took the novel introductory C course did somewhat better than the other cohort in the intermediate traditional class. Furthermore, after students took the novel course, they were more likely to feel that they fit in as electrical engineers and less likely to believe that programming was "not real engineering." This increase spanned a number of subgroups within the course, including students from underserved populations. Additional results, a synopsis of the two introductory courses, and a description of a technology-driven intermediate programming course are presented and discussed in this paper. [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]