Search

The global pandemic of COVID-19 brought about the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) at higher education institutions across the United States, prompting both students and the faculty to rapidly adjust to a different modality of teaching and learning. Other crises have induced disruptions to academic continuity (e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes), but not to the same extent as COVID-19, which has affected universities on a global scale. In this paper, we describe a qualitative case study where we interviewed 11 second-year Integrated Engineering students during the Spring 2020 semester to explore how they adapted to the transition to remote learning. Our results revealed several student challenges, how they used self-discipline strategies to overcome them, and how the faculty supported students in the classroom through a compassionate and flexible pedagogy. Faculty members showed compassion and flexibility by adjusting the curriculum and assessment and effectively communicating with students. This was especially important for the women participants in this study, who more frequently expressed utilizing pass/fail grading and the personal and gendered challenges they faced due to the pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis, we found that a key element for supporting students' well-being and success is the faculty members communicating care and incorporating flexibility into their courses.

Contribution: This work provides evidence of various approaches to studying longitudinal student unit record data in undergraduate education in the USA and the outcomes that can be realized using a large multi-institutional longitudinal dataset, Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). Background: Cross-sectional studies introduce a variety of sources of error in estimating student pathways and outcomes. Longitudinal outcomes that ignore pathways also miss important information, and some populations are systematically excluded (such as transfer students). Intended Outcomes: By providing examples of how longitudinal student unit-record data can be analyzed and the results that can be expected, this work aims to deepen the research toolbox in engineering education. Findings: MIDFIELD is being used to support studies of demographic and financial trends among universities in the southeastern USA, required math and science course grades and disciplinary cultures, time to find graduation major, educational data mining, and applications of selected advanced models.

Supporting diverse students in engineering education is considered a critical unsolved issue facing engineering education. The field continues to suffer from a lack of diversity and struggles to recruit and retain underrepresented students. We argue that structural barriers prevent equitable participation. In this paper, we examine structural barriers - specifically racism and sexism - experienced by underrepresented students in engineering education and highlight useful interventions. We then call for action to improve and diversify educational pathways in engineering. Specifically, we call for and highlight examples of rethinking mindsets for research and instruction. Lastly, we call for the engineering education community to work together in changing the culture of engineering education while highlighting the key role of the allies.

The article discusses the SHARE framework for secondary qualitative data analysis in engineering education research. The authors advocate for SDA due to its benefits, such as reduced time to publication and increased data transparency. They emphasize the importance of ethical considerations, especially when working with data from marginalized populations. The article provides practical guidance for researchers conducting SDA and addresses frequently asked questions about the legitimacy, practicality, and ethics of SDA. The authors envision the SHARE principles as a dynamic tool to reshape the future of engineering education research through collaborative data analysis. [Extracted from the article]

Military student veterans' distinct life pathways often make it difficult for educational researchers to adequately capture and represent the challenges and opportunities they face in college. Thus, student veteran educational programs and policies are often built on inaccurate notions about their experiences and identities. Using Veteran Critical Theory as an organizing framework, this article describes two qualitative methods used in a study of student veterans: the key event timeline and the identity circle. The resulting data offer rich, thick description beyond what is typically captured through standard in-depth interviews. Student veterans construct their own narratives and offer counter-narratives that challenge prevailing assumptions about what it means to be a veteran in higher education. This qualitative approach could help veteran studies move from a deficit-based focus to an asset-based framework, and may be useful to educational researchers studying other marginalized populations.

Background: Pipeline and pathways models influence persistence metrics used to study how students navigate engineering education. Purpose: This study presents pipeline, pathways, and ecosystem models and their associated metrics, compares and contrasts these models using an intersectional approach to explore persistence, and advocates for use of an ecosystem model. Design/Method: This study presents a quantitative perspective of engineering student outcomes disaggregated by discipline, race/ethnicity, and sex. It includes 111,925 engineering students from 11 U.S. universities, including first-time-in-college and transfer students who ever majored in the most common engineering disciplines: chemical, civil, electrical, industrial, and mechanical engineering. Contemporary data visualization methods are used to display quantitative data and clarify their complexity. Results: This work captures the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, sex, and discipline with metrics that are new or little used, such as stickiness (retention by a discipline), migrator graduation rate, and migration yield (attraction of a discipline). Using these metrics, we uncover information about the success of students who migrate between and among the top five engineering disciplines. Conclusions: Stickiness, migrator graduation rates, and migration yield metrics coupled with contemporary data visualization methods provide insights into the student experience not afforded by the conventional pipeline and pathways models. Considering engineering education as an ecosystem tells stories of complexity and nuance, opening possibilities for new research.

The concept of electric current is fundamental in the study of electrical engineering (EE). Students are often exposed to this concept in their daily lives and early in middle school education. Lower-division university courses are usually limited to the study of passive electronic devices and simple electric circuits. Semiconductor physics is an upper-division course that presents the physics behind semiconductor devices in depth and exposes the students to microscale explanations of different types of current, such as drift and diffusion currents. This paper investigates how third-year college students majoring in EE link microscale and macroscale concepts of current, and what misconceptions they reveal after one quarter of advanced instruction in semiconductor physics. The interviewees were posed a problem, based on a distracting device structure that exposed student difficulties in defining current, charges and doping, and the plotting of current-voltage (I-V) characteristics. For example, some students had the naïve idea that current is the flow of a particular type of charge (i.e., only electrons or only holes) or that there is a "spectrum of doping." Almost all students drew a one-quadrant coordinate system for the I-V curves, which might imply that students think only about positive voltages. These findings can inform further studies to identify and address misconceptions in the important area of semiconductor device physics.

In the fall of 2022, we offered a pedagogically redesigned sociotechnical environmental engineering elective for junior and senior undergraduates that applied place-based and culturally sustaining pedagogies. The course featured a project designed to facilitate the celebration and leveraging of classroom geographic and cultural diversity to enhance student learning about water sustainability. We analyzed the students' written project reflections using an inductive thematic analysis to explore whether and how the project and pedagogical model augmented student learning. The primary themes that emerged included: (1) deepened knowledge of home and culture; (2) global conceptualizations; (3) re-evaluation of perceptions and beliefs (in terms of water sustainability and personal relationships with water); and (4) future-facing viewpoints. We consider each of these 'enhancements' to the student learning because they extend beyond the course objectives and explore the sociotechnical aspect of engineering. The purpose of this paper is to share the course and project model, our findings from its implementation, and suggestions on how this pedagogical framework could be adapted and scaled to expand the learning of a range of topics at different learner levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer Engineering (CpE) programs have similar curricula, but different demographics and student outcomes. This paper extends earlier longitudinal studies to a larger and more diverse dataset with 90,000 first-time-in-college and 26,000 transfer students who majored in engineering at USA institutions, including students who started in first-year engineering programs, those switching majors, and those transferring from other institutions. Black men and women and Asian men in engineering are strongly attracted to EE when they start in college. Black students and Asian and Hispanic men are attracted to CpE more than other engineering disciplines, but at lower rates than EE. Asian students have the highest graduation rates in EE. EE students are much more likely to graduate than CpE students. Compared to other engineering disciplines, CpE graduation rates are low for women of all races/ethnicities and Black men. Both EE and CpE lose many of those starting the programs, but switchers and transfers compensate for some of the loss. Considering Asian students and White men, switching to EE accounts for the high attrition rate from CpE, but attrition in other populations cannot be explained so easily. Trajectories of student enrollment differ by race/ethnicity. The approach used here could serve as a model for other fields studying their own demographic distributions.

Using a large multi-institutional dataset, we describe demographics and outcomes for students starting in and transferring into chemical engineering (ChE). In this dataset, men outnumber women in ChE except among black students. While ChE starters graduate in ChE at rates comparable to or above their racial/ethnic population average for engineering, women choose and graduate in ChE at similar or higher rates than men of the same race/ethnicity. Trajectories of ChE students differ by race/ethnicity, but gender differences are small compared with the differences by race/ethnicity and the gender differences observed for engineering as a whole and in other engineering disciplines.

Investigations of the relationships between contexts in which learning occurs and students' behaviours, cognitions and motivations may further our understanding of how instruction is related to students' development as self-regulated learners. In this study, student self-regulated learning strategies in problem-based learning and project-based learning environments were examined to determine whether student self-regulation outcomes differed depending on the instructional design. Quantitative results showed that student motivations and behaviours were not statistically different in the two settings. Differences in cognitions associated with self-regulated learning were, however, observed in the two settings, with students in the project-based environments reporting higher levels of elaboration, critical thinking and metacognition. In addition, students in the project-based courses reported higher perceived autonomy support, or the degree to which they perceived their instructors provided them with supportive opportunities to act and think independently compared to students in the problem-based courses. These findings indicate that different non-traditional student-centred learning environments may support different outcomes related to self-regulated learning. (Contains 4 tables.)

Does emphasizing the role of people in engineering influence the memorability of engineering content? This study is part of a larger project through which our team developed a new undergraduate energy course to better reflect students' cultures and lived experiences through asset-based pedagogies to help students develop a sociotechnical mindset in engineering problem solving. In this study, students in the class were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews (n=5) to explore our effectiveness in helping them develop a sociotechnical mindset around energy issues and conceptualize engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor. This study focuses on an activity during the interview where the participants were asked to sort a variety of images associated with class learning experiences along a spectrum of least to most memorable. Emergent themes from students' responses revolved around learning experiences that included global perspectives and emphasized a "who" (i.e., whose problems, who is impacted by engineering, and what type of engineers the students will choose to become) as the most memorable. Our results indicate that students found the sociotechnical aspects of the course more memorable than the traditional canonical engineering content. These findings suggest that framing engineering content as sociotechnical can be one strategy to increase student engagement, increase memorability of lessons, and help students to think more deeply about their own goals as future engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering, a field that has shaped the world's industrial and technological base, is ripe for an influx of Latino undergraduate students. Given U.S. Latino population increases, what is the trajectory of Latino participation in engineering education? Using an interdisciplinary lens, we critically examine Latino trends in undergraduate engineering education in the United States. We find that Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are particularly successful at graduating Latino engineers and propose explanatory analyses. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 3 notes.)

Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with student veterans in the United States pursuing Bachelor's degrees in engineering across four institutions, we present findings relating military leadership and its application to engineering education. Our findings address three themes: (1) how leadership skills are learned, (2) motivation to be a leader, and (3) translation into, and enactment of military leadership skills in, engineering education. The interviews show that leadership skills and experiences acquired in the military play an important role in the academic experiences and success of student veterans in engineering (SVEs). Findings can help inform strategies and programs to encourage more SVEs to translate their leadership skills to an academic setting in an asset-based framework. Providing leadership opportunities for SVEs in the classroom has the potential to increase their engagement in engineering, strengthen their pathways to professional engineering practice, and provide important role models of servant leadership for the other engineering undergraduates who work with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]