Search

As the discipline of civil engineering has evolved from an apprentice-based trade to a socially-engaged profession, the role of the civil engineer has responded to shifts within the ever-changing culture of society. These shifts and historical events have directly influenced what is considered to be valued civil engineering knowledge, behaviors, and practices that we teach to students during their undergraduate careers. As part of a larger grounded theory study that is currently being conducted by the authors, the purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we present the topic of professional identity formation as heavily influenced by unique historical events that shape the civil engineering discipline. . To establish the connection between identity formation and the history of civil engineering, we interpret historical events as constituents that create a disciplinary identity that is communicated to and subjectively applied by students during their undergraduate careers. Second, we hope to promote and invoke conversations surrounding the relevancy of civil engineering professional identity formation in engineering education among our colleagues within the technical disciplines. Through this paper, we add to ongoing research exploring the professional formation of engineering identities and promote discussions surround this topic at the disciplinary level. While most research conducted on identity formation has been generalized to include all or most engineering disciplines, we focus our discussion solely on professional identity formation within the civil engineering discipline. To reinforce the relationship between the history of the civil engineering profession and students’ professional identity formation, we review the literature on these two areas of inquiry. In particular, we will frame our paper using the following key discussion points: 1) providing a brief overview of key historical events of civil engineering in the United States; 2) discussing the influence of this history on instructor pedagogies and student learning within civil engineering education; and 3) conceptualizing this learning process as a means of professional identity formation. From this work, we will begin to understand how major historical shifts within our discipline maintain the potential to impact its future as we educate the next generation of civil engineering students. To conclude this paper, we will introduce current research that is being conducted by the authors to further understand the nuances of professional identity formation in undergraduate civil engineering students and how instructors may help or hinder that development. Published version Yes, full paper (Peer reviewed?)

Background: Engineering students who achieve academic success during their first year may later disengage from challenging course material in their upper-level courses, due to perceived differences between their expectations and values and those of their degree programs. In the extreme, academic disengagement can lead to attrition. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to better understand the learning approaches and strategies used by first-year engineering students. Research questions were as follows:  How do first-year engineering students describe their learning approaches and strategies?  How do first-year engineering students customize their learning strategies among their courses?  How do first-year engineering students employ reflection as part of their learning strategies? Design/Method: I employed both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyze data, using an explanatory design approach consisting of two surveys and a set of semi-structured interviews between survey administrations. The interview data from a purposive sample of survey participants were coded using a priori, pattern and comparative coding. The survey data were analyzed for medians and interquartile ranges in order to identify trends in reflective learning strategies among courses. Results: One notable finding was the fact that many interviewees stated that their overall purpose for studying was to achieve high grades by preparing for tests (a surface-level approach), and yet the learning strategies that they used reflected a deeper engagement with their course material than one would expect from students whose singular focus was on grades. Certain strategies were similar for both technical and non-technical courses, while others were dissimilar. There are also ways to combine the surface and deep learning strategies sequentially. They need not be mutually exclusive. Conclusions: The results of this study will provide educators with a starting point for the development of guided practice in meaningful learning strategies to encourage a greater engagement with learning. Both educators and administrators should be amenable to measures that would improve their students' chances for success, by providing guidance in how to learn as well as what to learn. Several recommendations are given for future studies, such as the relationships among reflection, metacognition, and critical thinking, and the integration of meaningful learning strategies into technically overloaded engineering degree curricula. Doctor of Philosophy I chose to study the learning approaches and strategies of first-year engineering students. The term "learning strategies" refers to study habits, but learning strategies also involve choices about how to study based on goals, motivation, and available resources. My results will provide professors and instructors with insights that they can use to help their students learn more effectively and find deeper meaning in their course material, by guiding them in how to learn as well as what to learn. Knowing how to learn is a lifelong skill. First-year engineering students have a special need to know how to learn in order to be better prepared for a more challenging workload in their upper level engineering courses. Prior studies have shown that students most often leave an engineering program during their first or second year due to inadequate academic preparation in prior years. If we are to help engineering these students to improve their learning approaches and strategies, we first need to know what approaches and strategies they currently use. My data came from two surveys that were given at the end of each of two introductory engineering courses to a group of approximately 1,200 students, and from interviews with fifteen students who had also completed the surveys. I was trying to learn more about how these students customized their learning strategies among their courses, and how they used reflection to discover the meaning behind what they are learning. One of the most interesting findings was the fact that many interviewees stated that their overall purpose for studying was to achieve high grades by preparing for tests (a surface-level approach), and yet the learning strategies that they used reflected a deeper engagement with their course material than one would expect from students whose only focus was on grades. This combination of different learning approaches was more common in engineering, science and mathematics courses than in humanities or social science courses. This dissertation also contains a three-part class assignment, given at the beginning, middle, and end of a first-year engineering course, in which students reflect on their progress in learning one or more skills that they had identified at the beginning of the course. Implications arising from my study are directed at researchers, administrators, faculty, and students, respectively, as well as opportunities for further work in this aspect of higher education. Opportunities for further studies include the relationship between reflection and critical thinking, and methods for incorporating guided practice in learning strategies into engineering degree programs that currently contain too much technical content.

This dissertation is a study of groundwork in Engaged Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research. Engaged STS scholars reframe STS knowledge and move it beyond the traditional scope and boundaries of the field. They use various methods such as critical participation, making and doing, situated interventions, and experimentation to critically engage with their fields of study. These scholars have evaluated their work within the context of the disciplinary outsider, described their use of high-level pragmatic frameworks, and used the arts to bring critical social issues to the public eye. Yet, when I decided to use STS engagement methods to bring visibility to the lesser-known communities in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech, I found a lack of work documenting the groundwork and experience of engagement. I could not locate groundwork regarding negotiation, designing the most appropriate intervention, collaboration strategies, or confronting my fears and doubts about being in the field. Therefore, in this dissertation, I identify and examine my engagement experience in three interventions within the ECE department to bring visibility to the groundwork of STS engagement. The limited-series podcast Engineering Visibility was a platform to bring visibility to the less dominant communities in the ECE department. Highlighting the experiences of women in engineering, the first-generation student, inclusion and diversity, and the non-traditional student fostered a shared identity and sense of belonging within the ECE department. On the ground, this project examined the need to protect participants' visibility through invisibility. Interventionist Protectivity conceptualizes how I combined trust, accountability, and social awareness to protect my participants' from social scrutiny. The second project was a seminar titled "Expand Your ECE Career." The seminar exposed students to a "broader range of careers" by challenging the traditional ideas of success. The seminar featured four ECE alumni with successful careers in law, finance, and fashion entrepreneurship. Additionally, this intervention pointed out the inadequacies of traditional forms of project assessment. I describe how I measured intervention success through other assessment methods such as "assessment per mobility." The last project was a data-driven white paper that translated the care work of the undergraduate academic career advisors and framed it to be understood by the ECE faculty. The care work done by the academic advisors was underappreciated in its connection to undergraduate student success. On the ground, I discussed the importance of identifying the advisors and the faculty's social construction to create an intervention that translated the advisors' work to be valued by the faculty. Lastly, I conclude with a discussion summarizing the overall lessons learned from the three interventions and discussing my experience of engagement. My engaged STS experience is discussed through my framing of the concept of self-confrontation and the work of avoiding the term of STS being deemed as useful. Doctor of Philosophy This dissertation is a study of groundwork in engaged Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research. Recent advances such as critical participation, making and doing, and situated intervention are reframing boundaries between knowledge and action in STS, offering scholars new approaches for improving scientific and technological communities. When I attempted to utilize these theories and methods in a culture change project, however, I found a lack of scholarship documenting the experience of engagement. How does one design the most appropriate intervention? What strategies are required to collaborate and negotiate? How do engaged scholars confront their fears and doubts in their communities and concerning the knowledge they bring back to STS? These groundwork questions confront both novice and seasoned STS scholars and are crucial to successful engaged scholarship, but they rarely are documented and analyzed. Utilizing a matters-of-care framework and self-reflective methods, I describe how and why I sought to change the culture of a large engineering department by making visible unseen and sometimes under-appreciated stakeholders. To do so, I created three interventions: a limited-series podcast to showcase the diversity of experiences in the department, an alternative-career seminar to redefine what counted as success in engineering, and a data-driven white paper to showcase the indispensable care work of academic advisors. I analyzed these projects' construction, application, and outcomes to highlight the complexities and significance of groundwork for STS engagement.

Reports that call for change in engineering education date back to the Mann report (1918), but more recent reports like "The Engineer of 2020" (NAE, 2004), and "Lean Engineering Education," (Flumerfelt et al., 2015) describe the need for engineers who are creative leaders, who have sustainability and ethics skills. Two narrative threads emerge from these reports: that engineering education does not adequately prepare engineers with the skills needed for industry, and that preparation for industry is imperative in order to address problems in society. However, these threads conflict with research from engineering education, science and technology studies, and higher education. There may not be a gap between school and work (Modestino, Shoag and Balance, 2016), and if there is one, it might be a socio-cultural gap that is unreasonable for universities to accept the full responsibility of narrowing. More problematic is that establishing "preparation-for-work" as the purpose for education threatens the goal of preparing students for life outside of work and does not necessarily prepare them to act towards benefit for society. The goal of this study was to critique these narratives using narratives of newcomer engineers' lived experiences. I had two research questions: 1) Who are new engineers asked to be at work? 2) Who do new engineers choose to be in response? I answered these by constructing and analyzing narratives of 12 newcomer engineers, based on interviews collected as part of the Capstone to Work study (Paretti et al., 2021). Using the figured worlds framework of identity development (Holland et al., 1998), I investigated the structures of work, which constrained who newcomers could become, and newcomers' agency, which they used to improvise identities within those constraints. The structures of engineering work that I examined required newcomers to acclimate to ongoing practices at their companies, which did not conform to newcomers' expectations of creative engineering work. Newcomers were objectified: their value and identity was often defined in terms of how much money they made for their company. They were alienated: their engineering problems were rarely defined in terms of their societal impact. The faced sexism: they were denied respectable identities based on gender. In response, some newcomers sought the identity of "asset" for their companies. Other newcomers sought new jobs that would give them opportunities for creativity, growth or societal benefit. And some newcomers worked to create opportunities at their jobs to be who they wanted: leaders, engineers working for environmental benefit, whole persons outside and inside of work. The results of this study suggest limitations of preparation narratives: They do not account for objectification, alienation, and sexism that newcomers face. Engineers also may unfortunately be prepared with stereotypes that do not match the realities of engineering work. This study suggests that we need to educate engineers in a way that recognizes them as human and prepares them for these realities. It also shows us that socio-technical change requires change at the structural level and cannot be limited to changes in education. Doctor of Philosophy Reports like "The Engineer of 2020", and "Lean Engineering Education," describe the need for engineers who are creative leaders, and who have sustainability and ethics skills. Engineering education researchers and practitioners use these preparation narratives to justify their funding to grant-awarding institutions, to develop research agendas, and to align their education efforts with these national calls. Two threads emerge from typical preparation narratives: that engineering education does not adequately prepare engineers with the skills needed for industry, and that preparation for industry is necessary for engineering to address societal problems. These, however, conflict with research from engineering education, science and technology studies, and higher education. If there is a gap between school and work, it might be a socio-cultural gap that is unreasonable for universities to accept the full responsibility of narrowing. More problematic is that establishing "preparation-for-work" as the primary purpose of education threatens the goal of preparing students for life outside of work and does not necessarily prepare them to act towards benefit for society. This study critiques these narratives by referring to newcomer engineers' lived experiences and identity development. I had two research questions: 1) Who are new engineers asked to be at work? 2) Who do new engineers choose to be in response? I answered these by constructing and analyzing narratives of 12 newcomer engineers, based on interviews collected as part of the Capstone to Work study. Using the figured worlds framework of identity development, I investigated the structures of work, which constrained who newcomers could become, and newcomers' agency in becoming different kinds of engineers within those constraints. Newcomers were generally required to acclimate to ongoing practices at their companies, which did not conform to their expectations of creative engineering work. Newcomers were objectified: their value and identity was often defined in terms of how much money they made for their company. They were alienated: their engineering problems were rarely defined in terms of their societal impact. The faced sexism: they were denied respectable identities based on gender. In response, some newcomers sought the identity of "asset" for their companies. Other newcomers sought new jobs that would give them opportunities for creativity, growth or societal benefit. And some newcomers worked to create opportunities at their jobs to be who they wanted. The results of this study suggest limitations of preparation narratives: they do not account for objectification, alienation, and sexism that newcomers face. Engineers also may unfortunately be prepared with stereotypes that do not match the realities of engineering work. Engineers should be educated in a way that recognizes them as human and prepares them for the realities of work. The study also confirms that efforts for socio-technical change cannot be limited to educational changes, because of structural constraints.

This study examines policy and procedure documents related to Disability at 3 U.S. institutions of higher education over a 25-year time frame. Policy and procedure documents are the foundation that govern how institutions "handle" Disability, outlining expectations and guidelines for providing services and establishing bureaucratic channels used to determine who has access to those services. This research employs a comparative case study mixed methods approach. The found documents and their online contexts are analyzed according to four qualities: findability, cohesion, consistency, and transparency. A document's findability refers to the ability of a user to locate the original document, and a document's cohesion, consistency, and transparency, refer to respectively where, what, and how these documents persist from their original creation date. As I collected these documents, I constructed comparative matrices to track these qualities within and across three different universities. The initial findability of documents demonstrates two key results: 1) during the overall 1990– 2015 time frame, there was a marked change in the availability of materials in a digital format, and 2) the emergence of a way to describe documents via the phrase "Does Not Exist." These materials definitively did not exist prior to a given time frame, but later versions of such documents included an earlier start date. Cohesion results indicate that the documents most likely to be presented in a single source were broadly usable to a large portion of the university population: the general student body. Consistency results address a major issue with the document search: while these materials were likely to exist, at each of these institutions and time frames (barring the DNE documents), they are very difficult to track down. Transparency across found, single-source documents was ubiquitous; if it could be found, it had searchable text. Beyond the findings of my document collection, I created two major products as a result of this dissertation work: key recommendations for different stakeholder groups and a curated exhibit of VT-specific materials collected for this study. Doctor of Philosophy This study examines policy and procedure documents related to Disability at 3 U.S. institutions of higher education over a 25-year time frame. Policy and procedure documents are the foundation that govern how institutions "handle" Disability, outlining expectations and guidelines for providing services and establishing bureaucratic channels used to determine who has access to those services. This research employs a comparative case study mixed methods approach. The found documents and their online contexts are analyzed according to four qualities: findability, cohesion, consistency, and transparency. A document's findability refers to the ability of a user to locate the original document, and a document's cohesion, consistency, and transparency, refer to respectively where, what, and how these documents persist from their original creation date. As I collected these documents, I constructed comparative matrices to track these qualities within and across three different universities. The initial findability of documents demonstrates two key results: 1) during the overall 1990– 2015 time frame, there was a marked change in the availability of materials in a digital format, and 2) the emergence of a way to describe documents via the phrase "Does Not Exist." These materials definitively did not exist prior to a given time frame, but later versions of such documents included an earlier start date. Cohesion results indicate that the documents most likely to be presented in a single source were broadly usable to a large portion of the university population: the general student body. Consistency results address a major issue with the document search: while these materials were likely to exist, at each of these institutions and time frames (barring the DNE documents), they are very difficult to track down. Transparency across found, single-source documents was ubiquitous; if it could be found, it had searchable text. Beyond the findings of the document collection, there are two major products as a result of this dissertation work. First, key recommendations for different stakeholder groups (SEEKERS, WRITERS, and KEEPERS) are outlined; these recommendations are intended for the entire audience as practices that they can incorporate within their own documents. Second, the work undertaken to create a repository using materials from my document collection, utilizing the Qualitative Data Repository (based in Syracuse University) as the host for a curated exhibit of VT-specific materials, is described.

University-level transdisciplinary initiatives have become prevalent as institutions reorient disciplines around complex problems that are relevant to society. Transdisciplinary research initiatives, like those of interdisciplinarity in the previous decade, are reinforced by federal funding agencies because of their potential to yield technological innovation, and in turn, economic growth. However, the sustained development of transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary curriculum design remains limited due to the multiple competing factors that govern the curriculum. This dissertation research focuses on the implementation of the transdisciplinary initiative as it pertains to interdisciplinary curriculum design. I use public institutional documents to trace the transdisciplinary institutional initiative as it is enacted at different university levels and interviews to understand the initiatives in practice, drawing from administrators, faculty, and staff experiences as they develop interdisciplinary courses. Many university-level initiatives that purport transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary education fall short in their implementation because of academic structures that directly or indirectly inhibit sustainable interdisciplinary curricula. Instead, administrative organizations like the Registrar's Office, Office of Integrated General Education, and Transdisciplinary Initiative Office develop networks and artifacts that connect faculty who have experience bypassing academic structures with faculty who seek out these forms of institutional support. These emergent practices are an adaptation to the university system rather than a proactive measure that facilitates the large-scale structural change claimed by university-level transdisciplinary initiatives. This study contributes to the understanding of potential long-term implications through the examination of interrelated university initiatives as they exist through metrics and incentives provided by the upper administration and experiences of faculty and staff in developing interdisciplinary courses. Doctor of Philosophy There is a trend in universities across the United States of implementing initiatives that incentivize departments to focus their research and teaching on complex problems that span different disciplines. These initiatives are attractive to potential university donors due to their perceived societal relevance and reinforced by external funding agencies because of their potential to yield technological innovation. These initiatives can be short-lived, however, as they seek to disrupt the traditional university structure. The purpose of this study is to examine how faculty and staff translate and negotiate the complex university structures and initiatives as they design interdisciplinary courses. I use public institutional documents to trace the transdisciplinary institutional initiative as it is enacted at different university levels and interviews to understand the initiatives in practice, drawing from administrators, faculty, and staff experiences as they develop interdisciplinary courses. The findings show that even for faculty and staff working to create interdisciplinary classes in alignment with these initiatives, they are faced with challenges as the initiatives are limited in their structural reorientation. Instead, mid-tier administrative organizations have developed networks and artifacts that connect those who have experience bypassing academic structures with those who express interest in following their lead. This study includes a discussion of broader socio-political and economic factors that contextualizes layers of faculty and staff experiences, administrator perspectives, and the university's public messaging through the historical legacies of academia, the economy, and society at large.

Game-based learning--using games to achieve learning objectives--represents a promising and increasingly popular means of progressing engineering education's decades-long goal of bringing more evidence-based, active learning pedagogy into the classroom. However, if game-based learning is to proliferate as a pedagogy, research on game-based teaching is critical to provide practical recommendations for implementation, making the pedagogy more accessible to instructors. However, reviews of game-based literature reveal that little work exists in the game-based teaching space, and what work exists models high-level teaching practices and archetypal roles, which often fail to pinpoint specific practices game-based instructors can use to be successful. Moreover, reviews of game-based learning literature more generally suggest that research on how to improve student motivation in game-based learning settings--an important variable for learning and a longstanding argument for the value of games in education--are lacking in both quantity and theoretical soundness. To redress these gaps, I conducted a primarily qualitative, multiple-case study of seven non-digital game-based learning activities in engineering with the goal of furthering game-based teaching research and providing practical recommendations to instructors when using games in their classrooms. Using the MUSIC Model of Motivation as a motivation framework and the Observation Protocol for Adaptive Learning as a framework for categorizing teaching practices, I interviewed instructors about how they expected their teaching practices to affect student motivation, and I interviewed these instructors' students about how they actually perceived their instructors' actions as affecting their motivation. By comparing instructor and student responses, I derived recommendations for game-based learning practice that are likely to have a high impact on student motivation, and condensed these recommendations into a four-phase framework of game-based teaching to bolster student motivation. I supplemented my interview data with observation data to construct detailed summaries of each case I studied. The recommendations I offer in my framework can serve as useful resources for instructors seeking to foray into game-based teaching practices or improve their existing game activities, especially in engineering. Moreover, my study provides a model for investigating game-based teaching practices and motivation in game-based learning using established theoretical frameworks in natural classroom settings. Ph. D. Game-based learning—the use of games to achieve learning objectives—is a promising and increasingly popular way to introduce active learning into engineering classrooms, which is something engineering education as a field has been trying to achieve for decades. However, if game-based learning is to reach a wider audience of engineering instructors, research on the teaching practices instructors use in game-based learning classrooms is important, so that researchers can provide practical recommendations to instructors and make game-based learning less intimidating. However, little work has been done to study these teaching practices, and the work that exists tends to look at high-level trends across teaching practices, rather than offering specific pieces of advice. Moreover, research on how to improve student motivation in game-based learning settings is lacking, which is a problem because student motivation is important for learning and is one of the biggest theoretical benefits of using games in education. To fill in some of these gaps, I conducted instructor and student interviews around seven non-digital game-based learning activities in engineering, with the goal of furthering game-based teaching research and providing practical recommendations to instructors considering or currently using games in their classrooms. Using an established framework of student motivation and an existing means of grouping teaching practices, I interviewed instructors about how they expected their teaching practices to affect student motivation, and I interviewed these instructors’ students about how they actually perceived their instructors’ actions as affecting their motivation. By comparing instructor and student responses, I came up with several recommendations for gamebased learning practice that are likely to have a high impact on student motivation, and I produced a framework to serve as a visual aid to help instructors implement teaching practices that can bolster student motivation at any phase of a game-based learning activity. I also supplemented my interview data with observation data to provide readers with detailed summaries of each case I studied. The recommendations I offer in my framework can serve as useful resources for instructors looking to implement game-based learning activities or improve their existing game-based learning activities, especially in engineering. Moreover, my study serves as a model for future researchers who want to qualitatively study game-based teaching practices or motivation in game-based learning using established frameworks.

Over the past two decades, many American universities have created transdisciplinary institutes devoted to science, engineering, art, and design (SEAD). These organizations promote research, teaching, and engagement across technoscientific and artistic disciplines, and seek to cultivate creativity and innovation. Their proponents argue that this particular type of transdisciplinary knowledge-making has the potential to transform research universities. However, making and maintaining SEAD institutions is difficult work for the researchers and administrators involved. Practitioners struggle to define the broader goals of their transdisciplinary research; to demonstrate its value; to receive appropriate credit from their peers; and to feel that they belong in their institutions. I argue that these issues result from a fundamental “transdisciplinary dilemma”: the challenge of institutionalizing an ideal of transdisciplinarity that is actually a complex and contradictory set of different actors and motivations. In my dissertation I examine SEAD and transdisciplinarity through an ethnographic study of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, a research institute that aspires to work “at the nexus of science, engineering, art, and design.” I identify three significant “matters of concern” for SEAD practitioners, each of which is a tension that reveals an aspect of the transdisciplinary dilemma and the challenges of institutionalizing art and technology research. Sponsored collaboration contrasts the idea of transdisciplinarity as an idealized stage of creative knowledge production with the notion of transdisciplinarity as an economic driver for higher education. Value and belonging highlights researchers’ simultaneous desire to exist outside of traditional disciplines and to enjoy the comforts of a disciplinary home. Measurable impact describes the balancing act between institutions’ need for resources and status, and the nature of researchers’ everyday work. Ultimately, I argue, these tensions are irresolvable aspects of SEAD as it exists within the contemporary research university. The persistence of the transdisciplinary dilemma leaves practitioners in a perpetual state of striving to belong, and SEAD institutions continually seeking to (re-)define themselves. Ph. D. Over the past two decades, many American universities have created transdisciplinary institutes devoted to science, engineering, art, and design (SEAD). These organizations promote research, teaching, and engagement across technical, scientific, and artistic disciplines, and seek to cultivate creativity and innovation. Their proponents argue that this particular type of transdisciplinary research and education has the potential to transform universities. However, making and maintaining SEAD institutions is difficult work for the researchers and administrators involved. Practitioners struggle to define the broader goals of their transdisciplinary research; to demonstrate its value; to receive appropriate credit from their peers; and to feel that they belong in their institutions. I argue that these issues result from a fundamental “transdisciplinary dilemma”: the challenge of institutionalizing an ideal of transdisciplinarity that is actually a complex and contradictory set of different actors and motivations. In my dissertation I examine SEAD and transdisciplinarity through a study of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, a research institute that aspires to work “at the nexus of science, engineering, art, and design.” I identify three significant “matters of concern” for SEAD practitioners, each of which is an issue that reveals an aspect of the transdisciplinary dilemma and the challenges of institutionalizing art and technology research. Ultimately, I argue, these tensions are irresolvable aspects of SEAD as it exists within the contemporary research university. The persistence of the transdisciplinary dilemma leaves practitioners in a perpetual state of striving to belong, and SEAD institutions continually seeking to (re-) define themselves.

Engineering educators and industry professionals recognize the need for graduates to be effective communicators, yet the effective teaching of communication remains a persistent contemporary issue, with studies continuing to indicate that engineering graduates are insufficiently prepared for workplace communication. Despite compelling arguments that that writing should be treated as a situated activity, writing instruction is often separated from content instruction within engineering curricula. Even when they are integrated, it is often in a way does not optimally support improvement of students' writing skills. Writing studies scholarship identifies best practices that include treating writing as a process, with pedagogy that includes writing and revising drafts based on feedback and revision. However, writing assignments in engineering courses often not process-oriented. Challenges in addressing this problem include epistemology (i.e. instructors believe that learning to write and learning to engineer are separate skills), self-efficacy (i.e. instructors not feeling qualified to effectively provide feedback or writing instruction), and resources (i.e. inclusion of feedback and revision is unfeasible within key constraints of many engineering courses – limited instructor time and large student-faculty ratios). A potential solution is to use peer feedback, where students provide each other feedback on drafts, which can support a process approach while addressing these challenges. Research outside engineering has demonstrated that peer feedback can be as or more effective than instructor feedback; to bring that work into engineering, this study examines peer feedback in the context of a first-year engineering course through a quasi-experimental intervention in which feedback and revision were incorporated into an existing assignment using several variations of peer feedback. Interventions included two types of feedback training as well as feedback from single peers and multiple peers. Results support peer feedback in this context: it was statistically indistinguishable from instructor feedback when students were given sufficient instruction. Feedback from multiple peers, in fact was more effective than instructor feedback in improving writing quality, and in-class instruction was more effective than a handout only in helping students provide effective feedback. However, some general feedback recommendations – notably that readerly feedback should be encouraged directive feedback discouraged – were not supported. While writing studies literature encourages feedback that takes the position of the reader, readerly peer feedback reduced revision quality in this study. Directive feedback, on the other hand, caused improvements in writing quality, supporting previous hypotheses that the tightly-constrained genres in which engineers write justify more use of directive feedback. Ph. D.

As a national initiative to support retention of engineering students, engineering programs have undergone a surge of revisions to their coursework in recent years, most notably in relation to first-year programs. These program modifications are generally intended to enhance student success in engineering, including both students' achievement and students' motivation to persist in an engineering degree. This study examines motivational constructs as it compares two versions (standard and revised) of an introductory engineering course taught in a general first year engineering program. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine students' course perceptions, students' Expectancy-Value beliefs, and the relationship between perceptions and beliefs in the two versions of an introductory engineering course. Students' perceptions of the class were measured at the course level using the MUSIC model of Academic Motivation, and students' Expectancy-Value beliefs were measured within the engineering domain level using Expectancy-value theory. The dissertation is divided into three stages: In the first stage I provide a quantitative comparison of students' perceptions of the course, from students enrolled in each of the two versions of the course. In the second stage, I describe comparisons of Expectancy-Value engineering-related beliefs between students in each of the two versions of the introductory course, as well as within students in one of the courses. In the third stage, I develop structural models to test the relationship between students' perceptions of the introductory engineering courses and their Expectancy-Value engineering-related beliefs. This study suggests three main outcomes: First, students' perceptions of success and caring are statistically and significantly different between the two versions of the course. Second, students' Expectancy-Value beliefs are discovered to have declined significantly in the standard version of the course, whereas in the revised version of the course, there are no statistically significant differences. Third, the fit indices of the models suggest a good model data-fit providing strong support for the hypothesis that students' perceptions of introductory engineering courses have effect on students' broader motivational beliefs. These outcomes have practical implications for students, instructors, and researchers in first year engineering education. PHD

Engineering Education is a developing field, with new research and ideas constantly emerging and contributing to the ever-evolving nature of this discipline. Textual data (such as publications, open-ended questions on student assignments, and interview transcripts) form an important means of dialogue between the various stakeholders of the engineering community. Analysis of textual data demands consumption of a lot of time and resources. As a result, researchers end up spending a lot of time and effort in analyzing such text repositories. While there is a lot to be gained through in-depth research analysis of text data, some educators or administrators could benefit from an automated system which could reveal trends and present broader overviews for given datasets in more time and resource efficient ways. Analyzing datasets using Natural Language Processing is one solution to this problem. The purpose of my doctoral research was two-pronged: first, to describe the current state of use of Natural Language Processing as it applies to the broader field of Education, and second, to demonstrate the use of Natural Language Processing techniques for two Engineering Education specific contexts of instruction and research respectively. Specifically, my research includes three manuscripts: (1) systematic review of existing publications on the use of Natural Language Processing in education research, (2) automated classification system for open-ended student responses to gauge metacognition levels in engineering classrooms, and (3) using insights from Natural Language Processing techniques to facilitate exploratory analysis of a large interview dataset led by a novice researcher. A common theme across the three tasks was to explore the use of Natural Language Processing techniques to enable the computer to extract meaningful information from textual data for Engineering Education related contexts. Results from my first manuscript suggested that researchers in the broader fields of Education used Natural Language Processing for a wide range of tasks, primarily serving to automate instruction in terms of creating content for examinations, automated grading or intelligent tutoring purposes. In manuscripts two and three I implemented some of the Natural Language Processing techniques such as Part-of-Speech tagging and tf-idf (text frequency-inverse document frequency) that were found (through my systematic review) to be used by researchers, to (a) develop an automated classification system for student responses to gauge their metacognitive levels and (b) conduct an exploratory novice led analysis of excerpts from interviews of students on career preparedness, respectively. Overall results of my research studies indicate that although the use of Natural Language Processing techniques in Engineering Education is not widespread, although such research endeavors could facilitate research and practice in our field. Particularly, this type of approach to textual data could be of use to practitioners in large engineering classrooms who are unable to devote large amounts of time to data analysis but would benefit from algorithmic systems that could quickly present a summary based on information processed from available text data. Ph. D.

Skill sets such as understanding and applying computational concepts are essential prerequisites for success in the 21st century. One can learn computational concepts by taking a traditional course offered in a school or by self-guided learning through an online platform. Collaborative learning has emerged as an approach that researchers have found to be generally applicable and effective for teaching computational concepts. Rather than learning individually, collaboration can help reduce the anxiety level of learners, improve understanding and create a positive atmosphere to learning Computational Thinking (CT). There is, however, limited research focusing on how natural collaborative interactions among learners manifest during learning of computational concepts. Structured as a manuscript style dissertation, this doctoral study investigates three different but related aspects of novice learners collaboratively learning CT. The first manuscript (qualitative study) provides an overall understanding of the contextual factors and characterizes collaborative aspects of learning in a CT face-to-face classroom at a large Southeastern University. The second manuscript (qualitative study) investigates the social interaction occurring between group members of the same classroom. And the third manuscript (quantitative study) focuses on the relationship between different social interactions initiated by users and learning of CT in an online learning platform Scratch™. In the two diverse settings, Chi's (2009) Differentiated Overt Learning Activities (DOLA) has been used as a lens to better understand the significance of social interactions in terms of being active, constructive and interactive. Together, the findings of this dissertation study contribute to the limited body of CT research by providing insight on novice learner's attitude towards learning CT, collaborative moments of learning CT, and the differences in relationship between social interactions and learning CT. The identification of collaborative attributes of CT is expected to help educators in designing learning activities that facilitate such interactions within group of learners and look out for traits of such activities to assess CT in both classroom and online settings. PHD

As evidenced by a large body of research within the engineering education community, those individuals who do not maintain a sense of belonging, identify with engineering groups, or perceive themselves as engineers are more likely to leave the profession. However, little is known about the ways in which engineering students construct or develop their personal and professional identities as influenced by the disciplinary values, behaviors, and practices learned during the undergraduate education experience. In order to deepen the understanding of professional identity formation within the engineering disciplines, a grounded theory study was conducted to explore the experiences of 31 sophomore, junior, and senior level undergraduate students enrolled in a civil engineering program. Upon conducting an iterative process of data collection and analysis, a theory of professional identity negotiation emerged from interviews depicting participants' experiences. This theory titled Negotiating Equilibrium: Advancing from Outsider to Insider or the AOI Model, captures the identities negotiated by students as they iteratively define, adjust, and readjust definitions of self and profession to maintain a balance between their personal self and the learned disciplinary identity of the civil engineering profession. As participants gained this balance, they began to see themselves as professionals and advance from an outsider (i.e., one not belonging to the civil engineering profession) to an insider (i.e., one belonging to the civil engineering profession). The AOI Model provides a framework for researchers to further explore professional identity formation, promotes the development of identity-influencing coursework and instructor teaching approaches, and inspires future research trajectories in engineering and civil engineering education. Ph. D.

Since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, commercialization (e.g., patenting discoveries, licensing technologies, and developing startups) has become increasingly prominent at universities across the nation. These activities can be beneficial for universities as mechanisms to increase research dollars, unrestricted funds, student success, institutional prestige, and public benefit, while developing an innovation and entrepreneurship culture. However, although faculty members are a key source of human capital within the university commercialization process, studies of faculty members' experiences with university commercialization are scarce. To better understand these experiences, I conducted a multiple case study exploring engineering faculty members' commercialization experiences at three land-grant universities, using Activity Theory as an analytical framework. Each case consists of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 5-6 engineering faculty members, 1-2 university administrators, and a technology transfer officer, as well as university commercialization documentation (e.g., university commercialization policy documents and web resources). I analyzed the data using provisional coding (activity system elements, supports, challenges, and affect), inductive coding, and within and cross-case analysis techniques. The study's findings include characteristics of the university commercialization activity system, supports for and challenges to faculty engagement, and provisional recommendations to enhance the university commercialization work system. Key findings include faculty members' desire to make an impact with their work, lack of training and expertise relative to commercialization, conflicting attitudes towards commercialization from colleagues and administrations, and tensions about the place of commercialization within the university's mission. This study highlights an important and underrepresented voice in university commercialization research—"the voice of the individual faculty member. By understanding how faculty members experience university commercialization, university leaders are able to make well-informed decisions regarding the university's mission, culture, work structure, resource allocation, and incentive systems related to this increasingly-prominent faculty activity. Moreover, faculty members and industry collaborators interested in university commercialization can use the study's results to make decisions regarding if and how to best proceed with university commercialization activities. Accordingly, this work not only contributes to faculty work system design, but it also contributes a unique systems research approach to the university commercialization literature. Ph. D.

The purpose of this study is to understand how engineering students perceive the patterns of culture at the disciplinary level using Hofstede's constructs (power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity). The methodology design for this study is mixed methods. More specifically, the design of this study is an explanatory sequential design that begins with the collection and analysis of quantitative data from a version of Hofstede's survey developed by Sharma (2010), followed by subsequent collection and analysis of qualitative data, with the qualitative analysis being informed by preliminary results from the initial quantitative phase. Results from the quantitative study led to a review of the literature regarding Hofstede's main critiques and how other authors have successfully implemented his model in different contexts, and qualitative data collection with semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students. There are three aims of this study, which are addressed and presented in three separate manuscripts. The first aim (Manuscript 1) was identifying if Hofstede's theory of dimensions of national culture can map to academic disciplines. Results from surveying 3388 undergraduate students provided scores on Hofstede's dimensions for each major. Responses matched the national culture of the students rather than the disciplinary culture; therefore, Hofstede's theory didn't map to explain cultural differences in academic majors. The second aim (Manuscript 2) of this study was to review the extensive available literature regarding the critiques of Hofstede's model and its implementation in different settings. Results provided with conceptual, and methodological critiques and misuse of his theory that allowed us to understand the value of his model to understand cultural differences at the national level, as well as the value of the dimensions to inform our qualitative research design. The third aim (Manuscript 3) of this study was to explore students' perceptions of disciplinary engineering culture and how it compared to other disciplines using a qualitative interview protocol that provided rich findings that complement the quantitative results. Results from interviewing 24 students in industrial and systems engineering, electrical and computer engineering, marketing, and industrial design provided with valuable information on how students perceive their disciplinary culture in terms of what it is valued, how they learn, how it is taught, why they learn, how it is going to be used in the workplace, and the reason for select the major. Implications for research and practice in the engineering education field are provided to inform how to make decisions on engineering curriculum, and engineering classrooms and try to find ways to improve some of the issues that engineering education has been facing for the last decades. Ph. D.

Academia and industry both report benefits to forming and maintaining collaborative research partnerships. As organizations come together to participate in these partnerships, each brings their own set of operational norms and strategic goals. Some of these norms and goals are complementary, but others can be conflicting. University-industry research partnerships (UIRPs) in particular are susceptible to conflicts for at least four major reasons: 1) there are strategic differences in the purposes of industry and academia that can result in misalignment of goals and unrealistic expectations; 2) each organization has different operational norms and discord can arise from misunderstandings among participants; 3) many UIRPs function as virtual teams and are susceptible to miscommunication that arises when face-to-face communications are missing; and, 4) UIRPs are knowledge-based organizations meaning that their primary purpose is to translate research into applicable technology that is a largely intangible process and therefore, difficult to manage. The conflicts that can arise from these misalignments, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and mismanagement can deteriorate trust and can become detrimental to a partnership. Trust has been cited as being a factor in adequately addressing conflict and reducing the potentially detrimental effects of each characteristic. This makes the need to proactively cultivate trusting relationships in UIRPs critical. The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the role of trust in university-industry research partnership performance. The study was designed as a convergent parallel mixed methods research design utilizing an online questionnaire administered to boundary role spanning academic and industry UIRP participants for the quantitative study and interviews of the academic-industry leadership teams for the qualitative study. Following independent analyses of each study, an integrative discussion of the results of both studies more holistically described the role of trust in UIRPs. The research results enhance our understanding of the role of trust in UIRPs and suggest empirically-based guidelines for managing trust and sustaining positive, long-term UIRP performance. Ph. D.

The careers that students pursue after graduating from engineering programs are a central component to engineering education. However, we lack perspective on how students, the main stakeholder of the engineering education system, describe the goals they have for their post-graduation careers and make choices related to those goals. As a first step in closing this gap, I explored the different types of career goals that students have, investigated how students connect different types of goals to choices they make in engineering programs, and developed a survey instrument for future research on career goals. My sequential mixed methods study consisted of three phases. In the first phase, I analyzed interview data via the constant comparative method to explore the different types of career goals that students described. In second phase, I used the types of goals identified in phase one to analyze how students described connecting their career goals to choices they made as undergraduates in longitudinal interview data. In the final phase, I adapted the ideas from phase one and phase two into a quantitative survey instrument, which I piloted for validity and reliability. My study produced four main outcomes. The first outcome was identifying two distinct types of career goals held by students including goals about the jobs students want post-graduation and goals relative to job attributes rather than specific jobs. The second outcome was that students connected both types of career goals to choices they make in the present academic context. The third outcome was that career goals and their connection to choices students make could be measured in a valid, reliable survey instrument. Finally, my results suggest that there may be differences in the ways that male and female students describe their career goals and the ways that career goals are connected to choices. These outcomes have broad implications for students, educators and researchers in the engineering education system. Ph. D.

Pervasive computing proposes a new paradigm for human-computer interaction. By embedding computation, sensing, and networking into our daily environments, new computing systems can be developed that become helpful, supportive, and invisible elements of our lives. This tight proximity between the human and computational worlds poses challenges for the design of these systems - what disciplines should be involved in their design and what tools and processes should they follow? We address these issues by advocating for interdisciplinary design of pervasive computing systems. Based upon our experiences teaching courses in interactive architecture, product design, physical computing and through surveys of existing literature, we examine the challenges faced by interdisciplinary teams when developing pervasive computing systems. We find that teams lack accessible prototyping tools to express their design ideas across domains. To address this issue we propose a new software-based design tool called electronic storyboards. We implement electronic storyboards by developing a domain-specific modeling language in the Eclipse Graphical Editor Framework. The key insight of electronic storyboards is to balance the tension between the ambiguity in drawn storyboards and the requirements of implementing computing systems. We implement a set of user-applied tags, perform layout analysis on the storyboard, and utilize natural language processing to extract behavioral information from the storyboard in the form of a timed automaton. This behavioral information is then transformed into design artifacts such as state charts, textual descriptions, and source code. To evaluate the potential impact of electronic storyboards on interdisciplinary design teams we develop of user study based around ``boundary objects''. These objects are frequently used within computer-supported collaborative work to examine how objects mediate interactions between individuals. Teams of computing and non-computing participants were asked to storyboard pervasive computing systems and their storyboards were evaluated using a prototype electronic storyboarding tool. The study examines how teams use traditional storyboarding, tagging, tool queries, and generated artifacts to express design ideas and iterate upon their designs. From this study we develop new recommendations for future tools in architecture and fashion design based upon electronic storyboarding principles. Overall, this study contributes to the expanding knowledge base of pervasive computing design tools. As an emerging discipline, standardized tools and platforms have yet to be developed. Electronic storyboards offer a solution to describe pervasive computing systems across application domains and in a manner accessible to multiple disciplines. Ph. D.

The purpose of my dissertation study is to better understand the educational experiences of undergraduate engineering students within non-curricular learning environments, specifically in the form of extracurricular engineering groups or programs. I first conducted a content analysis of engineering education literature to identify where engineering design learning occurs, and to synthesize the implications of studies regarding engineering design learning. Aiming to fill a gap in the literature regarding non-curricular learning contexts, this study investigated what extracurricular groups and programs can educationally provide undergraduate engineering students by observing and interviewing students engaging in these environments. This study also aimed to identify if and how engineering students find navigational flexibility within engineering curricula, and how non-curricular learning environments might provide navigational flexibility. With regard to where engineering design learning occurs, the literature points to various educational contexts that effectively deliver engineering design education. Strategies that involve authentic and longer-term engineering design experiences tend to be the most impactful in terms of student outcomes and perceptions, however those experiences are not always implementable at larger scale. More traditional educational approaches to engineering design learning, though less impactful, are still effective delivery methods for introducing key aspects of engineering design education (e.g. modeling, global/societal/economic/environmental factors, communication skills). However, there was limited literature regarding more non-curricular learning experiences, such as learning in designed settings, outreach learning, learning media, and everyday informal learning. This literature review is one of the first attempts towards synthesizing where and how engineering design learning occurs, and has identified a significant gap in the literature regarding non-curricular educational settings. Addressing the identified gap in engineering education literature regarding non-curricular learning experiences, this dissertation study investigated five non-curricular engineering learning sites for undergraduate engineering students at a large research-driven state institution. Informed by the preliminary findings of a pilot study, I first investigated the salient features of engineering-related non-curricular activities from the students' perspectives using a self-directed learner autonomy framework to guide the study. Students participating in extracurricular engineering environments exhibited strong attributes of self-directed learners, particularly a willingness and ability to be challenged and to learn. The educational environments of the extracurricular opportunities cultivated these self-directed learning attributes by providing students a space to be exposed to an engineering community, authentic engineering work, and accessible resources. Findings from this portion of the dissertation indicated necessary modifications to the self-directed learner autonomy framework used to guide this study. The modified framework contributes a possible approach towards future assessment or research pursuits regarding non-curricular learning experiences in engineering. I also investigated the role non-curricular activities play in providing engineering students navigational flexibility through engineering curricula. Extracurricular engineering environments afford navigational flexibility by offering students opportunities to work on motivating challenges with and among supportive communities. By providing a space for students to express their engineering selves in primarily self-directed ways, extracurricular engineering experiences cultivate students' drive to find and pursue personally meaningful curricular and non-curricular educational experiences. However, institutional barriers, particularly time constraints and institutionally recognized achievements, stifle students' flexibility and willingness to pursue personally meaningful experiences. The findings of this study have helped uncover the various affordances non-curricular learning experiences provide engineering students, but more importantly, have identified the institutional barriers that prevent students from taking full advantage of non-curricular learning experiences. Based on these findings, I recommend that university and program level structures be reevaluated to encourage and provide students with more flexibility to find personalized learning experiences in and out of the classroom. Ph. D.

Metacognition has been identified as a critical skill set for learning in problem solving, conceptual understanding, and studying, all of which are key in any undergraduate engineering curriculum. Though significant research has identified metacognition as critical in learning, most of this research has been conducted in experimental settings and has focused on individual engagement. While experimental settings provide evidence that metacognition is important to learning, these controlled studies do not tell us if students actually engage in metacognition in their own contexts. The purpose of this research study was to describe the metacognitive habits of engineering students in the naturalistic setting of study groups as well as contextual factors that supported this engagement. In order to accomplish this, I developed a methodological approach useful for identifying metacognitive engagement in naturalistic settings. In this ethnographically-inspired qualitative study, I used participant observations as my primary source of data and ethnographic interviews as supplemental data. Three study groups participated in this study and represented a diverse range of strategies for learning and studying. In order to identify the metacognitive behaviors of the study participants, I developed the Naturalistic Observations of Metacognitive Engagement (NOME) coding strategy, a coding scheme that can be used to identify metacognitive engagement in naturalistic settings involving undergraduate engineering students. Through the use of the NOME for coding the observational transcripts, I found that undergraduate engineering students engage in metacognitive engagement in different ways and certain metacognitive behaviors are engaged in at a higher rate than others. From an analysis of the observational fieldnotes, I found that contextual factors such as learning environment, study group schedule, study group purpose, learning resources, and workload potentially impact the way in which engineering students engage in metacognitive practices. The findings of this study provide important implications for researchers in metacognition and engineering education, educational practitioners, students, and the research site and participants from which the data was collected. Ph. D.

Identity development, through time, of graduate students is a topic understudied in most disciplines, and completely unstudied in optics and photonics. As a physical science and engineering discipline with blossoming scientific value, optics and photonics is growing a small number of graduate programs. With this growth, a more in depth and detailed understanding of the exposure, recruitment, development and enrollment experiences of those students are needed. Identity-trajectory offers a promising theoretical framework to understand academic and professional development of professionals through time and has been shown to be reliable in many social science and humanities disciplines. The narrative methodology is emerging in use and acceptance within the engineering education research community. The provoking combination of a growing discipline, a theoretical framework with little prior application in physical science and engineering, with a creative methodology were intentionally selected for this study. A semi-structured interview protocol was developed to prompt participants through a reflective description of their academic and professional development. Twenty-five current and recent graduate students from nine degree granting optics and photonics graduate programs participated in the study. In addition to participating in the interview, averaging about forty-five minutes, participants submitted a curriculum vita in advance of the interview. Both the interview and the vita provide the primary data used in this study. Interview transcripts were coded with the theory of identity-trajectory's three strands: intellectual development, institutional influence and network. The findings are grouped into pre-graduate training and graduate development experiences. Considering pre-graduate training, research experience as an undergraduate facilitates future decisions and access to graduate education. For graduate students, the structural experience within the graduate program, specifically related to research, facilitate progress through the program and beyond. The graduate program experience generally prepares students for academic research, but not the broader career pathways that students seek and eventually follow. All of these findings center on the laboratory, as the conduit for developing undergraduates to graduate students, and graduate students to professionals; the experience within the laboratory frames identity-trajectory throughout undergraduate and graduate experiences. These findings were used to provide strategies for departments, faculty and students in these fields, but are applicable in similarly structured disciplines. Ph. D.

Many engineering programs have a common content based first-year curriculum that all engineering students are required to take. These courses tend to be large in size, having multiple sections requiring the use of Teaching Assistants (TAs) who may be graduate students (GTAs) or undergraduate students (UTAs). The roles of TAs in first-year engineering courses vary from instructional staff to lab supervisors to graders, but despite their widespread use, little is known about the TAs' experiences. This study fills a gap in the literature by taking a participant centered approach to GTA motivation to teach and identity development as a teacher specifically in the context of first-year engineering programs (FYEPs). To guide this research, a combined motivation and identity framework was developed based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Possible Selves Theory (PST). In the framework, PST serves as the foundation for the SDT constructs of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. The framework supports that the various constructs lead to increased motivation and identity development but that each experience through the process is based on one's own identity and views of themself in the future. This was studied through an exploratory sequential mixed methods design where 12 semi-structured interviews representing five different FYEPs served as the foundation for the development of a national survey completed by 33 GTAs representing seven different FYEPs. Priority was ultimately given to the qualitative strand, but mixing occurred throughout the study. The results indicate that there are seven factors that affect GTA motivation and identity and there are profiles, lenses, and filters can be used to understand GTAs' experiences in FYEPs. While each individual is unique, general trends among experiences were observed. Additionally based on the results, the framework was found to be an appropriate tool but that a slight modification was needed to better align the framework with GTA developmental trends. This research allows future research-based GTA training programs and appointments to be developed that specifically aim towards meeting the motivational and identity developmental needs of GTAs, ultimately improving the quality of higher education. Ph. D.

Though some research exists related to career choices among Appalachian youth, and literature exists which broadly examines choices to pursue engineering degrees, information specifically related to Appalachian students' career choice toward engineering is limited. Engineering typically represents high paying, stable jobs so it is particularly important to understand what attracts students to, or deters them from, engineering careers in the Appalachian region, which is beset by poverty and low representation in higher education. The purpose of this research was to explore what influences students from the Central Appalachian region of Virginia in choosing their career goals, in particular, relative to engineering careers. Therefore, the overarching research question was: How are Central Appalachian high school students influenced as they choose their career goals, especially with respect to engineering? In this qualitative study, I used semi-structured interviews and case study methods, guided by Lent and Brown's Social Cognitive Career Theory, to explore career choice goals of high school participants in Southwest Virginia. The twenty-four high school participants and twelve college engineering student participants represented a diverse sample with respect to school and county demographics. Through thematic coding, the data revealed patterns relative to 1) reasons students chose their career goals, and 2) variation in factors contributing to career goals. Specifically, I identified six high school categories of reasons and only three reasons for college engineering students. High school students' career choice reasons, while related to interests, were largely influenced by critical life events. Additionally, patterns emerged based on whether or not the student was a continuing generation Appalachian (CGA), parent/guardian educational attainment and place of employment, and the location of the high school relative to college resources. This is consistent with previous literature, which points to the importance of parental education and student interests as factors for determining a student's career choice, and STEM literature, which often links interests in math, science, or engineering activities as key influencers. However, this research also revealed that critical life events, a student's family background (First Generation College and CGA), and parental job location are patterned with career goals. Ph. D.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how educational research, specifically Research-Based Instructional Strategies (RBIS), is adopted by education practice, specifically within the engineering Statics classroom. Using a systematic approach, changes in classroom teaching practices were investigated from the instructors\' perspective. Both researchers and practitioners are included in the process, combining efforts to improve student learning, which is a critical goal for engineering education. The study is divided into 3 stages and each is discussed in an individual manuscript. Manuscript 1 provides an assessment of current teaching practices; Manuscript 2 explores RBIS use by Statics instructors and perceived barriers of adoption; and Manuscript 3 evaluates adoption using Fidelity of Implementation. A common set of concurrent mixed methods was used for each stage of this study. A quantitative national survey of Statics instructors (n =166) and 18 qualitative interviews were conducted to examine activities used in the Statics classroom and familiarity with nine RBIS. The results of this study show that lecturing is the most common activity throughout Statics classrooms, but is not the only activity. Other common activities included working examples and students working on problems individually and in groups. As discussed by the interview participants, each of Rogers\' characteristics influenced adoption for different reasons. For example, Complexity (level of difficulty with implementation of an RBIS) was most commonly identified as a barrier. His study also evaluated the Fidelity of Implementation for each RBIS and found it to be higher for RBIS that were less complex (in terms of the number of critical components). Many of the critical components (i.e. activities required for implementation, as described in the literature) were found to statistically distinguish RBIS users and non-users. This dissertation offers four contributions: (1) an understanding of current ractices in Statics; (2) the instructor perspective of the barriers to using RBIS in the classroom; (3) the use of Fidelity of Implementation as a unique evaluation of RBIS adoption, which can be used by future engineering education researchers; and (4) a systematic approach of exploring change in the classroom, which offers new perspectives and approaches to accelerate the adoption process. Ph. D.

Communication deficiencies within interdisciplinary teams are known to reduce the effectiveness of those teams by causing erroneous behaviors (Alvarez & Coiera, 2006; Reader, Flin, & Cuthbertson, 2007). Also, many design defects have been attributed to communication breakdowns across disciplines (Chen & Lin, 2004). As the number of interdisciplinary teams in industry grows in order to adapt to dynamic business environments of the twenty-first century, providing an appropriate environment to improve interdisciplinary team effectiveness is critical for many organizations. In spite of its importance, little is known about what kind of environments support interdisciplinary team interactions. There were three objectives of this dissertation: 1) to investigate the influence of physical environment on the effectiveness of interdisciplinary engineering design teams, 2) to investigate the influence of interaction strategy design support on the effectiveness of interdisciplinary engineering design teams, 3) to construct behavioral indicators of successful interdisciplinary teamwork to design testing and design guidelines for interdisciplinary team collaboration spaces. To achieve these goals, the study was conducted in two phases. In Phase 1, the researcher conducted a direct observation of industry teams operating in the novel design space, the Kiva, at a design-consulting firm based in Pittsburgh, PA. The observation data provided 1) a list of significant participant behaviors to be examined and 2) interaction strategy design support (ISDS) procedures to be used during phase 2. Phase 2 was a laboratory-based 2x2 experimental study with physical room condition (Kiva vs. conference room) and interaction strategy design support (present vs. absent) as independent variables. The dependent variables were categorized as team process and output that measured team effectiveness. Overall, a significant interaction effect between the physical conditions and interaction strategy design support was found from all dependent measurements except for product evaluation. A significant main effect of physical conditions and interaction strategy support were found to a lesser extent. Based on the findings, testing methodology guidelines and design guidelines were developed. Ph. D.

This research was undertaken to investigate the assessment of the spatial visualization skills of first-year engineering students. This research was conducted through three approaches: (1) a review of cogent research framed by a spatial visualization matrix, (2) the development and validation of an Engineering Graphics Concept Inventory, and (3) an investigation into the relationship into the correlations between 3D modeling skills and performance on the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R) and the Mental Cutting Test (MCT). The literature reviewed spans the field of published research from the early 1930's to the present. This review expands and provides a new direction on published research as it is viewed through the lenses of the four common pedagogical approaches to teaching spatial visualization: the standard approach, the remedial approach, computer-aided design, and the theory-informed approach. A spatial visualization matrix of criteria was developed to evaluate each of the methods. The four principle criteria included: learning outcomes, active and engaged learning, stage of knowledge, and explanatory power. Key findings from the literature review indicate the standard method is not the most effective method to teaching spatial visualization while the theory-informed method as evaluated by the matrix is the most effective pedagogical approach of the four methods evaluated. The next phase of this research focused on the two-year development, validation, and reliability of an Engineering Graphics Concept Inventory given to over 1300 participants from three universities. A Delphi method was used to determine the key concepts identified by the expert panel to be included in the inventory. A student panel of 20 participants participated in the pilot study of "think aloud" protocols to refine inventory test items and to generate the appropriate distractors. Multiple pilot studies coupled with a detailed psychometric analysis provided the feedback and direction needed for the adjustment of test items. The reported Cronbach's α for the final instrument is .73, which is within the acceptable range. The inventory is ready to be implemented and the predictability of the instrument, in reference to students' spatial visualization skills, to be researched. The final chapter of this research was a correlational study of the relationship between first-year engineering student's 3D modeling frameworks and their performance on the PSVT:R and the MCT. 3D modeling presence in graphical communications has steadily increased over the last 15 years; however there has been little research on the correlations between the standard visualization tests and 3D modeling. 220 first-year engineering students from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University participated in the study in the fall of 2011. The main findings from this research indicate there is no significant correlational relationship between the PSVT:R and a student's 3D modeling ability, but there is one for the MCT. The significant correlational factors reported for the MCT and modeling aptitude for the three assignments are: r = .32 (p < 0.05), .36 (p< 0.01), and .47 (p< 0.01). These findings may be used by undergraduate educators and course administrators to more effectively organize engineering graphics education to yield students with deeper, more meaningful knowledge about engineering graphics and its inherent connection throughout the engineering curriculum. Together these three studies represent a sequential exploratory mixed methods approach that intertwines qualitative interviews and observations to frame the quantitative instrument and data collection. Results of this study can be used to guide the assessment of incoming freshmen engineering students, and the modification and development of engineering graphics courses. Ph. D.

The purpose of this research project was to better understand the experiences of graduate students in internationally diverse research groups, and how these research groups and international diversity contributes to a student's intent to complete his or her graduate degree. This exploratory mixed methods research was conducted in three phases: (1) an ethnographic study of selected research groups in two engineering graduate departments, (2) development of a survey for students in graduate engineering students, and (3) administering the survey to graduate engineering students in research groups to verify the findings. In order to address the project aims, three smaller studies were initiated that address individual elements of graduate education, including: learning in research groups and international diversity, and retention in graduate engineering programs. The focus of the first study was to understand how and under what conditions research groups foster successful learning and professional development for graduate engineering students, and how these findings can be used to inform management of engineering research groups to optimize student learning, productivity, and intent to complete the degree. Key findings from the ethnographic analysis indicate that group size directly influences the mechanisms of student learning, as well as several elements common across research groups from different universities and academic departments, including: power distance and communication, access to resources, and role of the advisor. During the (second) integration phase of this mixed methods study, the nine months of ethnographically guided observations and interviews were used to develop a survey examining graduate engineering student retention. Findings from the ethnographic fieldwork yielded several themes, including: the role of international diversity, research group organization and climate, student self efficacy, and individual and group learning experiences. Final retention themes from the ethnographic analysis are presented along with a discussion of how these data were configured into instrument questions. A discussion of the final instrument is presented, including validity and reliability analysis, and how the final questions were integrated into themes to test hypotheses for future studies. This chapter also presents implications for mixed methods researchers interested in using qualitative methods to create new instruments. In the third and final stage of the research study, the survey developed in the second phase of the research study was administered to four universities across the United States. Data analysis focused on better understanding the differences in retention constructs by student nationality. Results from more than 600 engineering PhD students from 6 international regions enrolled in U.S. engineering graduate programs were examined to characterize demographic differences in participant responses for intention to complete the degree. Six constructs were found to be significant in predicting students' responses regarding their intention to complete their degree, including: expectations, climate, organization, project ownership, perception of value, and individual preferences. Taken together these constructs were able to explain 28 percent of the variation in student responses. Additionally, all six constructs showed significant differences with respect to a respondent's country or region or origin. These results are discussed in light of the implications for faculty members advising similarly diverse groups of students. In combination, these three studies represent a sequential exploratory mixed methods approach in which ethnographically guided observations and interviews were integrated into a quantitative instrument. Results of this study can be used to inform the organization and management of internationally diverse research groups to foster student development and ultimately increase retention. Ph. D.

Web games provide a platform for creative instructional activities that can capture the students' attention towards the course. These games can be used to emulate the realistic situations which can be used as effective lab experiments that could give the students a hands-on experience using real world scenarios. This thesis presents an innovative web-based game developed for the demonstration of the driver-behavior at signalized intersections that can be used as a supplementary tool for the Transportation Engineering course. The game format is carefully designed to supplement the understanding of the class learning material through a fun environment. It was designed to be widely accessible through the internet and have an attractive user interface and was improved from the feedback obtained from the pilot study. The game is programmed on the .NET Framework using the Microsoft Visual C# as a core programming language, ASP to develop the web interface, and Microsoft Access as the databases for the program. The thesis also provides a methodological framework for collecting data about student engagement in a course and in particular presents the data collection procedure used in Transportation Engineering Course (CEE 4609). The collected data was analyzed to find the student engagement in the course after the introduction of the game. The thesis gives the conclusions drawn from the research with insights into possible drawbacks and scope for future improvements. Master of Science

In interdisciplinary and cross-functional groups and teams, members pool diverse perspectives for the purposes of new product design and innovation, but these different perspectives may cause interruptions in effective communication. This study examines the use of analogies and metaphors as effective communication tools in interdisciplinary group settings. Analogies and metaphors are an important aspect of our cognitive activities. Communication using analogies and metaphors plays an important role in constructing our knowledge structures. In this study, an instructional tool with group activities has been designed and tested to teach the effective use of analogies and metaphors in interdisciplinary and cross-functional group and team settings. The tool was designed using theories of pedagogy and includes activities for group members. The instructional tool was tested in interdisciplinary group settings. The results from a mixed methods analysis of data the collected are presented as contributions to the research in group communication and analogies and metaphors. The study also identified characteristics of effective analogies that may be used as potential communication tools in interactions between members from different disciplines and functions. Master of Science