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The Innovation-Corps™ (I-Corps) program was created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2011 to help translate NSF-funded academic research to market. Working with coordi- nating partner VentureWell, the NSF offers select participants from U. S. academic laboratories the opportunity to immerse themselves in a process to test and explore the opportunities and value of their ideas in the marketplace. Participants talk to potential customers, partners, and competitors to refine their research ideas into viable products using an entrepreneurial approach to meet the challenges and uncertainty of creating successful innovations. This paper summarizes panel content that was planned for the NAI Ninth Annual Meeting, which was cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns and restrictions. The purpose of the panel was to provide a range of uniquely different perspectives; thus, we have opted to maintain the question and answer format. The panelists first examine the real and perceived, or intended and unintended, outputs of I-Corps projects and then discuss the I-Corps process as the catalyst for refining and/or scaling promising research idea into a product to meet a customer need. The panelists then describe the importance of customer discovery as relevant to invention and to culturally conscious entrepreneurship and how this first step can aid basic research. The panelists highlight the opportunities and challenges of teaching a customer discovery approach in an academic setting by charging learners to ask open-ended questions to acquire a 360-degree perspective of a technological innovation. Lastly, the panelists provide a viewpoint on the execution of academic customer discovery during the current COVID-19 challenges and the potential for economic development.

Background Little research exists on students’ misconceptions about semiconductors, why they form, and what role educational resources like simulations play in misconception formation. Research on misconceptions can help enhance student learning about semiconductors. Purpose (Hypothesis) This project sought to identify students’ misconceptions about three semiconductor phenomena – diffusion, drift, and excitation – and to determine if prior knowledge, knowledge acquired from watching animated simulations, or both were related to students’ misconceptions. We hypothesized that students would hold misconceptions about those phenomena and that students’ prior knowledge and knowledge acquired from watching animated simulations would be associated with their misconceptions. Design/Method Forty-one engineering students completed an instrument that asked questions about three semiconductor phenomena after the students had observed the animated simulations. Responses were analyzed and coded using two frameworks: misconception and knowledge use. Results Misconceptions were prevalent for all three phenomena. Misconceptions were associated with use of incorrect prior knowledge, a combination of correct or incorrect prior knowledge, and the knowledge acquired from watching the animated simulations alone or in combination with correct and incorrect prior knowledge. Misconceptions indicated a lack of understanding of chemistry and physics concepts. Conclusions Findings indicate that students hold many misconceptions about semiconductor phenomena. These misconceptions were common among our participants. The knowledge acquired from the animated simulations alone or in combination with prior knowledge could reinforce or contribute to misconception formation. Our findings can guide instructors to use or create better simulations to aid student learning.

This panel session combines principles from graduate student socialization and intergenerational mentorship to provide a unique opportunity for early career scholars and pioneers in engineering education to interact face-to-face. Pioneers will serve as panelists and give their personal tips and reflections on networking and mentorship. Session attendees will then meet with the pioneers in a roundtable format, to ask questions, seek advice, and get feedback. This work builds on the National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Education Pioneers Project, which documented the stories of more than 40 engineering education pioneers through online profiles. The intended audience for this panel includes graduate students, junior faculty, and other individuals interested in the engineering education community. Expected benefits include better understanding, increased belonging, and new or enhanced interest in engineering education. Future efforts associated with this session include understanding the impact of such exposure to the pioneers on attendees and exploring the possibility of offering this event at future engineering education conferences.

Product archaeology as an educational approach asks engineering students to consider and explore the broader societal and global impacts of a product's manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal on people, economics, and the environment. This study examined the impact of product archaeology in a project-based engineering design course on student attitudes and perceptions about engineering and abilities to extend and refine knowledge about broader contexts. Two design scenarios were created: one related to dental hygiene and one related to vaccination delivery. Design scenarios were used to (1) assess knowledge of broader contexts, and (2) test variability of student responses across different contextual situations. Results from pre- to post-surveying revealed improved student perceptions of knowledge of broader contexts. Significant differences were observed between the two design scenarios. The findings support the assumption that different design scenarios elicit consideration of different contexts ...

At FIE 2002, 13 engineering educators assembled to address a variety of topics and predict the “Future of Engineering Education.” Larry Shuman organized and moderated the session [1]. Topics included the changing demographics and economics of the country, technological advances, the engineering pipeline, the state of the University and forces driving change, engineering as a liberal art, the accreditation process and faculty reward system, the role of technology in delivering engineering education, educating for higher levels of performance, research in engineering education, research applications, and outcomes assessment. This panel includes five of the original authors and some new contributors who are active in FIE. We will examine the predictions made in 2002, and ask where we were right, where we were wrong, what has come to pass, what is still in progress, and what concerns have faded from view. Many of the issues previously discussed are still hot topics 15 years later.

Background Modeling is a pervasive feature of engineering that is rarely taught explicitly to engineering students. The implicit inclusion of modeling often results in conceptions held by students of models based on the everyday use of the term that neglects important predictive types of models. Purpose We studied the effectiveness of an explicit modeling module designed to broaden student understandings of various approaches to and applications of modeling. Design/Method A two-phase analysis of student conceptions was undertaken. Phase I analyzed the conceptions of an experimental group before and after they were taught an explicit modeling module. Phase II added a comparison group at a second institution. Results A significant shift was observed for engineering students who were explicitly taught a modeling module. Student-held conceptions were predominantly descriptive-centric (e.g., physical models) throughout the investigation with an added focus on predictive (e.g., mathematical) modeling after completing the modeling module. These results were consistent for a comparison group. Conclusions Explicit learning experiences about models and the modeling process need to be embedded into the engineering curriculum, specifically in the teaching of engineering design. Teaching modeling will improve student use and understanding of modeling as an important and pervasive engineering tool.

Portfolio mining facilitates the creation of actionable knowledge, catalyzes innovations, and sustains research communities.

Over the last several years, engineering faculty and learning scientists from four universities worked in collaboration to develop educational materials to improve the quality of faculty teaching and student learning. Guided by the How People Learn (HPL) framework, engineering faculty worked in collaboration with learning scientists to develop learner-centered, student-focused instructional methods. In consultation with learning scientists, engineering faculty carried out educational inquiry in their classrooms aimed at investigating student learning and enhancing instruction. In this paper we discuss the extent to which faculty engaged in these collaborative endeavors and how their teaching approaches differed as a result of their level of engagement. Study findings reveal the role that collaborative reflection plays in shaping teaching approaches. Results from this study provide insights for researchers and other practitioners in engineering and higher education interested in implementing engineering faculty development programs to optimize the impact on teaching.

Using multiple quantitative and qualitative methods to examine engineering design learning, we found that students taking a course in engineering design and/or studying engineering for four years acquired engineering design language that is common to a larger community of practice as well as common to their own programs and institutions of higher learning. The study also suggests that engineering design language shapes the knowledge that students have about engineering design. Finally, students did not always put their design knowledge into practice, suggesting the need for educational improvements and research to bridge this gap.

This paper discusses an effort to enhance the learning and affective experience of students in a laboratory module in metabolism through the use of the “How People Learn” framework, which is grounded in educational theory and research. The laboratory, which was a component of a systems physiology course in biomedical engineering, was modified such that some students had educational experiences informed by How People Learn principles while other students encountered a more traditional laboratory. Students were compared on a number of dimensions including knowledge acquisition, ability to use information to solve problems, transfer, and perceptions of their course experience. Several differences were observed between groups, with students in the “How People Learn” group out-performing controls on measures that required a deeper ability to use the material, but not differing in basic acquisition of information. Implications for the development of similar laboratories are discussed.

In this paper, we identify several approaches engineering faculty use to teach engineering topics. We report results from an exploratory study, consisting of 16 faculty interviews from five diverse institutions of higher education. We focus specifically on engineering faculty because the engineering faculty teaching culture is not well explored, even though there are many ongoing projects to reform engineering education. The results from this study contribute to efforts currently underway to improve teaching and learning in engineering education, as well as in higher education. Results from this study highlight the disciplinary nature of teaching in the engineering domain. Furthermore, our results can serve as a foundation to compare teaching approaches in other disciplines, or to potential changes in engineering teaching practices.

Transfer of knowledge is a common and ongoing area of investigation in many education studies. The topic is of central importance to the education community because it enables educators to understand how knowledge learned in one context can apply, or transfer, to new contexts. This is particularly important in the context of technological innovation and design education. That is, design often requires the generation of solutions that do not already exist. Generating unique solutions requires the ability to recognize when previous knowledge or learning is appropriate, and then to accurately apply previous learning to novel situations. Furthermore, focusing on transfer of knowledge brings a learner-centered approach to education such that learning experiences are designed to reinforce and to build on students’ prior knowledge. This paper presents results from a study that measured the type of design process knowledge that gets transferred into and out of design-focused courses. The study included approximately 100 students in three different courses: one freshman and two upper-level design courses. Results from this study shed light on the nature of students’ design process knowledge, as novice (freshman) as well as more experienced (junior and senior) student designers. In addition, study results show significant increases in pre- and post-measures of design process knowledge as students advance in the curriculum. Finally, we describe our findings in the context of an emerging framework for instruction and assessment: adaptive expertise. The concept of adaptive expertise is relevant to design education since it presents a model that guides the educational experience to have a balance of gaining technical proficiency with opportunities for applying one’s knowledge in innovative ways.

This chapter highlights some specific differences encountered between K–12 and higher education settings as a way to provide context for several research studies under way in engineering education. Specifically, this chapter highlights differences in three aspects of an academic learning environment: faculty, students, and subject matter.

This chapter describes how engineering faculty and learning scientists developed a collective wisdom—shared language, capabilities, and world view—in order to work together to achieve a common goal of developing course materials in the domain of biomedical engineering.

A learning environment to support mechanical reasoning and understanding of simple machines for middle school and high school students is presented, along with results of an evaluation of its effectiveness in student learning. Based on recommendations from literature on instructional frameworks and cognitive aspects of mechanical reasoning, SIMALE (the Simple Machines Learning Environment) was designed to support reflection, collaboration, and presentation of concepts from multiple perspectives. SIMALE was implemented with a diverse population of middle and high school students with three treatment variations: (1) environment with focus on Lego exercises to engage in hands-on physical activities, (2) environment with focus on a Web-based computer module, and (3) environment with both the computer module and Lego exercises. Analyses of results show significant increases in post-test performance for all treatment variations within SIMALE. The results also revealed unexpected dramatic results in equalizing post-test scores along ethnic and gender dimensions, in spite of large population differences in pre-test scores.

The Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps-L) is a pilot initiative from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) to study whether the NSF I-Corps model can help to propagate and scale educational innovations. The NSF I-Corps guides teams based on established strategies for business start-ups, using Blank's Lean LaunchPad and Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas and associated tools, to build entrepreneurial skills that will encourage mainstream application of their emerging technologies. The overriding goal is improving student learning and success rates in key STEM courses by helping to accelerate the process of bringing effective educational innovations to scale. The project goal of I-Corps-L is to investigate the potential of the I-Corps model for fostering an entrepreneurial mindset within the education community to impact the way innovations are designed and implemented. This Work in Progress describes the features of the I-Corps-L pilot and provides preliminary indications of its applicability for propagating, scaling and sustaining education innovations. Addressing the persistent challenge in STEM education to adopt evidence-based instructional practices is an urgent need as many approaches have been tried yet the rate and extent of adoption are very low.

A challenge many faculty face is finding effective qualitative tools to assess students' skills and knowledge of practices. This paper describes how one such tool, the scenario assignment, was used in an upper division Mechanical Engineering course at the University of California at Berkeley. The scenario assignment is a qualitative performance assessment tool designed to assess students' knowledge of engineering practices, framework, and problem solving. An analytic rubric was developed to assess students' knowledge with respect to the learning outcomes associated with the scenario tool. Students were given a scenario that describes a "day in the life" problem faced by engineers. They were then asked to describe a process they would use to solve the problem. Careful testing of the rubric and training of the scorers revealed that the scores reliably differentiated among student abilities. Two sample student responses to the battery scenario are presented and discussed. Initial findings suggest that use of the scenarios can help faculty to quickly identify students' strengths and weaknesses and adapt their course to address the areas where students need attention.

The current work describes an instructional module that emphasizes integrative design using six simple machines: the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the inclined plane, the screw, and the gear. The emphasis of this module is to have students investigate the underlying scientific and mathematical properties of the “machines,” and then integrate this knowledge to design creative solutions to problems. This simple machines module makes use of an original web-based multimedia learning environment as well as off-line, hands-on building activities with the LEGOTM Technic I set. The current instructional module was used in a pilot study in an Introduction to Engineering class, and we include preliminary results from this study.

The exponentially growing data in every aspect of human lives is offering both opportunities to gain unprecedented insights and challenges for designing efficient discovery experiences. To respond to the challenge of dealing with big data, our work is designing a web-based, knowledge mining and interactive visualization platform that allows users to interactively synthesize, mine, and visualize large-scale data. In this paper, we extend the classic information retrieval concept of information seeking to more general insight discovery behavior. Our approach is to focus on user's insight discovery workflow rather than data per se. User interviews were conducted to extract workflows and specific requirements to inform and direct design decisions.

Many engineering departments often struggle with meeting “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” (outcome h) that is required by ABET. The already packed curricula provide few opportunities to offer meaningful experiences to address this outcome, and most departments relegate this requirement to an early cornerstone or later capstone design experience as a result, making these courses an ineffective “catch all” for many ABET requirements. We address this issue by using the paradigm of product archaeology, defined as the process of reconstructing the lifecycle of a product — the customer requirements, design specifications, and manufacturing processes used to produce it — to understand the decisions that led to its development. By considering products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, we embed context as a central component in developing design solutions. Specifically, in our work we have implemented several approaches to integrate contextual thinking into a senior level engineering design course. Following Kolb’s model of experiential learning and an instructional framework adapted for product archaeology (inclusive of evaluate-explain-prepare-excavate activities) we have restructured the course to embed specific and targeted reflection, dissection, and analysis activities so that students teams effectively address the global, economic, environmental, and societal factors in their design solutions. This paper provides the theoretical framework of our instructional approach, describes the specific instructional activities we implemented, and results from our pre and post survey assessments that describe the impact on students’ understanding of contextual as well engineering design topics.Copyright © 2011 by ASME

Our work is investigating the role of team conflict in the context of student design project work. We are interested in the types of conflicts that occur during the team’s development of their design solution, and how these conflicts may in fact contribute in a positive way to the overall design solution. We are using a mixed-method approach to data collection through student interviews, team observations, reflective memos, and surveys. This paper reports results from a study implemented in a required first-year engineering design course. Results from this study indicate that teams experience a range of conflicts, where some students perceive these conflicts as beneficial to team performance. In addition, our results describe several strategies teams use to manage and leverage these conflicts. Finally, methodologically we found that the team memos and team conflict surveys were better instruments for capturing team conflict, more so than self-report surveys.Copyright © 2011 by ASME

In this paper, we report on the results from a qualitative study of six exemplary engineering programs focusing on the ways and the extent of nurturing creativity in engineering students. The study (P360: Prototyping the Engineering of 2020) included data collection from students, faculty, and administrators at the six institutions. This data collection focused mainly on three student outcomes, including design and problem solving. Creativity and how creativity was nurtured, both inside the classroom and outside, often emerged as a major theme. We also support our qualitative findings with quantitative data. Overall, the results indicate that although students improve their creativity in design settings, this result is mostly a by-product of design teaching, and creativity is not taught per se. Quantitative results show that program emphasis on creativity and innovation significantly correlates to skill levels in design problem solving, interdisciplinarity, contextual awareness, and recognizing perspectives. Qualitative data provide supporting evidence for this.Copyright © 2011 by ASME

Engineering faculty members interested in education research and development projects need NSF funding to support their efforts. This session aims to enable the participants to prepare more competitive curriculum development proposals to the NSF Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics (TUES) Program, the replacement for the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory (CCLI) Program. The session should make them aware of the expanded expectations defined in the new Solicitation and prepare them to develop proposals that meet these expectations.

Evidence suggests that transformational innovation occurs at the intersection of multiple disciplines rather than isolated within them. Design—being both pervasive and inherently interdisciplinary—has the power to transcend many disciplines and help break down the departmental “silos” that hinder such collaborative efforts. Many universities are now struggling to embrace the curricular innovations that are necessary to achieve and sustain interdisciplinary education. Given the already packed undergraduate engineering curricula, several universities have started to offer new design programs that span several disciplines at the masters and doctoral levels. In this paper, we examine the five interdisciplinary graduate design programs offered by three different universities—University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Stanford University—that hosted the NSF Design Workshop Series in 2008–2009. Collectively, these programs represent “solutions” that span a variety of graduate degree offerings that are available and provide examples of ways to successfully navigate the barriers and hurdles to interdisciplinary design education. A recap of the NSF Design Workshop Series is also provided along with recommendations from the workshops to foster discussion and provide directions for future work.Copyright © 2010 by ASME

Highlighting two higher education institutions that have been identified as exemplary in preparing engineering undergraduates for 2020, this work in progress paper focuses on what these institutions are doing to prepare their students. Using case study approaches, findings suggest that engineering undergraduate students gain contextual competence, design and problem solving, and interdisciplinary competence skills through curriculum redesign efforts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Howard University. These design efforts include innovative teaching strategies, year-long undergraduate research opportunities, and extracurricular activities.

Product dissection has become a popular pedagogy for actively engaging engineering students in the classroom through practical hands-on experiences. Despite its numerous advantages, dissection of physical products has many drawbacks, including not only the costs required to start-up and maintain such activities but also the workspace and storage space needed for the products and tools used to dissect them. This paper presents results from on-going research that is investigating the extent to which dissection of virtual representations of products — what we refer to as virtual dissection — can be used in lieu of physical product dissection in the classroom. In particular, we found positive learning gains in students’ ability to identify and describe the function and production method of components contained in a hand-held power drill, for both physical and virtual dissection groups. However, the data also reveal differences in the overall maximum level attained as well as differences in the range and types of components identified between the groups. While we recognize that virtual dissection will never provide the same hands-on experiences as physical dissection, we contend that virtual dissection can be used effectively in the classroom to increase students’ understanding of engineering design principles. By substantiating this impact, we can help establish cost-effective sets of computer-based dissection activities that do not require extensive workspace and storage spaces and can be easily scaled to any size classroom.

Using personal response systems (PRS) in large lecture classes has been suggested as one way to encourage the active involvement of students in this challenging pedagogical environment. Positive correlations between PRS use and course grades have been shown, but few have attempted to determine what components of the active learning are most effective. Some factors that may contribute to the positive correlation include: increased time in which students are actively applying concepts in class, increased exposure to the type of questions asked by a particular instructor, and peer discussion opportunities that often accompany PRS use. We are most interested in the latter factor, as we believe that knowledge construction is social and peer discussion is an effective technique to promote conceptual understanding. By studying peer discussions, we can gain information on how to structure these social interactions so they lead to the most conceptual understanding. We have initiated a study of peer discussions with an experienced PRS instructor. This instructor has included several classroom scenarios where students respond to a PRS question, discuss the question with a peer, and then vote again. We are tracking several characteristics of the peer team (gender, comfort level in discussing with peer, familiarity with peer, comfort level with material) and we will determine the effectiveness of these discussions by 1) correlating them with the number of correct PRS responses and 2) listening to the recorded discussions of five groups.

Summary form only given. The annals of research on engineering education (AREE) is an experiment in collaborative scholarship linking education researchers across disciplinary boundaries in order to provide access to the latest education research and offer guidance on education research methodology. AREE is a collaborative venture of the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education and leading journals of education research in engineering and science fields. This session will a) provide a history of AREE, b) review its successes and the remaining challenges it faces in building a collaborative community of discipline-based education researchers, and c) report on a user-survey of participating authors. The session will be highly interactive as we seek audience input on on the a) strategies to follow-up on the ideas identified in the survey of participating authors, b) identification of the scholarly information and tools needed by the engineering education research community, c) alternative strategies to achieve AREE's goals, and d) practical models for sustaining AREE into the future.

Based on rapid technological and educational advances in other nations, recent reports on the status of engineering and scientific research in the U.S. have expressed concern for our nation's future position in the global economy. These reports have suggested combating the issue by increasing opportunities for college students to practice the use of innovation in learning. In an effort to understand how educators might create the most effective opportunities for introducing students to innovation, this study investigates students' use of innovation in their development of design solutions. Guided by the adaptive expertise framework, we explore students' perceptions of the problem-solving environment and the influence those perceptions have on their use of innovation in design.

Characterizing the existing funding portfolio of a federal agency is difficult due to the number, complexity, and diversity of funded projects and associated metadata. Determining the impact of a funded project can be even more challenging, especially in terms of qualifying the return on investment of the research activity. Deep Insights Anywhere, Anytime (DIA2) is an interactive data-mining and Web-based visualization platform that makes it easy to access and understand funding portfolios. The authors performed an assessment of DIA2's usability and asked users at the US National Science Foundation how DIA2 can provide meaningful representations that contribute to determining the impact of a research portfolio. Their results show that DIA2 has good usability, and the study participants identified several indicators of impact as a result of the visualizations that can be realized through DIA2.

In this paper we describe how we refined our instruction to create a more constructivist classroom setting for learning programming skills as applied to engineering analysis. In the context of our course, programming skills are important to help students develop engineering "habits of mind" such as how to break a large complex problem into manageable parts, how to isolate effects, test, and debug problems. The paper presents the rationale for refining the instruction, the method for collecting data on the impact of the changes, and results from our data collection. Results indicate that the new instructional format is effective in helping novice students understand Matlab to solve engineering analysis problems. Furthermore, student feedback indicates that the instructional setting modeled the central features of a constructivist learning environment

In this paper we present the concept of adaptive expertise and relate this concept to the design curriculum offered by the Institute for Design Engineering and Applications (IDEA) at Northwestern University. The model of adaptive expertise suggests that instruction and assessment include a balance of “efficiency” and “innovation”. These two dimensions are first described from a theoretical perspective, then are discussed in more concrete terms in the context of the design experiences provided in IDEA. The model of adaptive expertise suggests that by providing learning experiences that balance these two dimensions we better prepare students to flexibly apply their knowledge in innovative ways. Since these aims are so closely aligned with the goals of design, we offer adaptive expertise as the target for engineering design education.Copyright © 2006 by ASME

A team of domain experts, learning scientists, learning technologists, assessment experts and students are currently working on developing and refining educational tools for biotechnology as well as for other domains within the "How People Learn" framework in the NSF funded VaNTH ERC in Bioengineering Educational Technologies. Educational modules In biotechnology cover a collection of challenges designed around bioreactors, mass and momentum transfer issues, and microbial kinetics, which are among core biotechnology topics. The activities form the core of the STAR Legacy Cycle method that was adopted as the template for module development. These modules have been tested in classrooms both at Vanderbilt and Northwestern and detailed assessment data have also been collected. The focus of this contribution is on development and implementation of these educational modules at two universities (VU and NJU).

New modular materials and methods for teaching biotechnology have been developed based on the 'How People Learn' (HPL) framework and classroom tested in a STAR Legacy sequence. Domain-specific questions targeting each of the learning objectives were used in a pre/post assessment strategy that seeks to measure the change in learner capabilities. One such pre/post assessment revealed a statistically significant increase in learner performance following intervention using HPL and modular materials. The same pre/post assessment yielded no increase in learner performance on control learning objectives not addressed in the classroom. Our results suggest that this approach can produce satisfactory interrater correlation and is a sensitive measure of learner performance.

How to establish the trustworthiness of qualitative tools to assess students' knowledge of engineering practices, teamwork and problem solving is a question that remains unanswered for many faculty. This paper describes a process that was conducted to ensure the dependability of scenario assignments. Scenarios are a qualitative performance assessment tool designed to assess students' knowledge of engineering practices, teamwork, and problem solving. Two scoring rubrics, a holistic and an analytic, were developed to assess students' knowledge with respect to the learning outcomes associated with the scenario tool. Careful training of the scorers, analysis of the scores, and comparison of test scores determined dependability of the tool. Students were given a scenario that describes a "day in the life" problem faced by engineers, then they are asked to explain the process they would use to solve the problem. Initial findings suggest that faculty who score the scenarios with the analytic rubric can quickly identify, students' strengths and weaknesses in these areas and adapt their course to address the areas where students need attention. At the departmental or college level, scoring the scenarios with the holistic rubric is useful to assess changes in students' learning and development over time. Careful testing of the rubric revealed that the scores can reliably differentiate among student abilities.

The present work describes the authors experiences capturing student performance in the freshman design class ME39C: Multimedia Case Studies of Engineering Design, at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. The focus of the ME39C class is to facilitate students as they work in teams to develop an original web based multimedia case study of an engineering design. The paper emphasizes a qualitative approach to capturing student performance and focuses on the process of teamwork and the interaction among students. They used a series of different methods to triangulate, compare and evaluate student performance. Specifically, they used an original web-based discussion tool, student observations and interviews, and questionnaires. Initial findings revealed that information obtained by one method sometimes contradicted data obtained from another. These contradictions suggest caution when analyzing student performance based on just one point of view. The data also indicates that team work, both in terms of product and process, can and should be collected continuously throughout the semester in order to provide the necessary feedback essential to student learning and improvement. Using a variety of assessment techniques affords a more comprehensive analysis of student performance.

The current work describes an instructional module which emphasizes integrative design using the six simple machines of the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the inclined plane, the screw, and gear. The emphasis of this module is on having the students investigate the underlying scientific and mathematical properties of the 'machines', and then integrating this knowledge to design creative solutions to problems. This simple machines module makes use of an original web-based multimedia learning environment as well as off-line hands-on building activities with the LEGO Technic I set.

Faculty from the mathematics, physics, and engineering departments at the University of California have collaborated over the past three years to restructure first year and lower division courses. Specific courses have been restructured in order to improve students' integrative understanding of calculus and the physical sciences, and their applications to engineering. The purpose of this project is to examine the impact that the reforms had on student learning, as well as to gain insight into students' experiences during their undergraduate engineering career. One-on-one interviews with engineering students have been conducted in order to identify and understand differences, if any, between the "traditionally" taught physics and calculus courses and the "reformed" courses.

Our study investigates the role of team conflict in the context of student design project work. We are interested in how students experience conflicts in a team environment and how these conflicts relate to other aspects of teamwork such as communication, division of work, shared goals, and leadership. We are using a mixed-method approach to data collection through peer-review data, team observations, and reflective memos. This paper reports results from a study implemented in a required first-year engineering design course. The majority of participants recognise the benefits that task and procedural conflicts have on team performance. Specifically, teamwork aspects such as communication, open-mindedness, and working towards a common goal were connected to cognitive conflict. The peer-review data illustrates that some class sections showed statistically significant improvements in goal commitment, idea communication during conflicts, conflict engagement and attentive listening over time. The results of the post-hoc tests further suggest that students in teams with a predominantly male composition (three males and one female) reported a statistically significant decrease in goal commitment and attentive listening during the ten-week evaluation period. Finally, methodologically we found that the reflective memos and team observations were better instruments for capturing team conflict, more so than peer-review surveys.

As leaders in higher education, industry, and government ( 1 ) bemoan the limited academic success of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), many practices of academe impede the ability of college and university faculty to address the issues. Consistent with barriers to community-engaged scholarship in general ( 2 ), STEM faculty engagement in elementary and secondary schools (K–12) can be undermined, for example, by (i) low status accorded to STEM education research and publications, (ii) a zero-sum view of faculty time allocation (e.g., K–12 engagement means time away from work more highly rewarded during promotion, tenure, and merit review), and (iii) bureaucracies that hinder collaboration between STEM faculty and K–12 teachers and administrators ( 3 ).