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This article explores challenges and opportunities associated with sharing qualitative data in engineering education research. This exploration is theoretically informed by an existing framework of interpretive research quality with a focus on the concept of Communicative Validation. Drawing on practice anecdotes from the authors' work, the article examines which aspects of the social reality under investigation and what details of the contextual research process would need to be understood by a researcher attempting a secondary analysis. To foster a thoughtful discussion in the community, we propose to conceptualize data sharing as the tentative re-use of data analogous to the concept of the tentative transfer of interpretive research findings. We contend that such a tentative re-use of data would need to be supported by communicating sufficiently detailed "thick metadata" to safeguard the continuity and robustness of the theoretical, methodological, and value commitments made in the original study.

Background: Women and men of color and White women participate in American engineering education in lower proportions than they represent in the general U.S. population. Much existing engineering education research uses individual-level (such as psychological) theories to explain this difference. The study reported here instead takes a structural perspective, asking how social relations are coordinated in engineering education. Purpose: This study explores how the intersection of ruling relations, critical race, and feminist theories can investigate how gender and race are built into engineering education's institutional structure. Design/Method: This study used interviews collected from 17 women and men of color and White women who were engineering undergraduate students at U.S. universities. The interviews were drawn from a project that takes as its premise that learning from such small numbers of students facilitates analyzing data intersectionally. The primary analysis used narrative methods through repeated readings. Results: I offer empirically based illustrations of ruling relations in U.S. universities and schools of engineering that unduly impact minoritized populations. These illustrations include discussions of financial aid knowledge, meeting the needs of transfer and Native students, and how schools crafting "the ideal student" as a young, single White male problematically impact minoritized students. The results illustrate how ruling relations structure engineering education in White- and male-dominated ways. Conclusions: This paper offers questions to help readers consider how ruling relations race and gender their own institutions. In addition, it offers an interpretive, emergent method for interrogating institutional structure and ideas for future work using ruling relations in engineering education research.

Background: Teamwork has become a central element of engineering education. However, the race‐ and gender‐based marginalization prevalent in society is also prevalent in engineering student teams. These problematic dynamics limit learning opportunities, isolate historically marginalized students, and ultimately push students away from engineering, further reinforcing the demographic imbalances in the profession. Purpose: While there are strategies to improve the experiences of marginalized students within teams, there are few tools for detecting marginalizing behaviors as they occur. The purpose of this work is to examine how peer evaluations collected as a normal part of an engineering course can be used as a window into team dynamics to reveal marginalization as it occurs. Method: We used a semester of peer evaluation data from a large engineering course in which a team project is the central assignment and peer evaluation occurs four times during the course. We designed an algorithm to identify teams where marginalization may be occurring. We then performed qualitative analyses using a sociolinguistic analysis. Results: Results show that the algorithm helps identify teams where marginalization occurs. Qualitative analyses of four illustrative cases demonstrated the stealth appearance and evolution of marginalization, providing strong evidence that hidden within language of peer evaluation are indicators of marginalization. Based on the wider dataset, we present a taxonomy (eight categories) of linguistic marginalization appearing in peer comments. Conclusion: Both peer evaluation scores and the language used in peer evaluations can reveal team inequities and may serve as a near‐real‐time mechanism to interrupt marginalization within engineering teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Prior to undertaking studies involving human subjects, engineering education researchers are required to consider the ethical implications of their work by obtaining approval from an ethical review board. Purpose/Hypothesis: Recent research suggests that some unintended consequences of this procedure are that it externalizes and inflexibly formalizes ethical considerations, and limits researchers' readiness to systematically identify and consider ethical questions that arise while conducting research. Design/Method: We used a collaborative inquiry approach to examine such ethically important moments that emerged in two of our interpretive research projects. We drew on Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam's framework for interpretive research quality as the departure point for our shared sense-making process. Results: Our explorations revealed two insights that connect research ethics to research quality in novel ways. First, we found that the quality of our work improved when we critically explored the intersections between our motivations and intentions for investigating particular research topics and broader cultural agendas and assumptions. Second, we found that when we actively sought to do justice to the participants, co-investigators, and readers of our research, we were afforded with opportunities to increase the quality of our work, in sometimes quite unexpected ways. Conclusions: We synthesized the findings from our collaborative inquiry into a process-oriented model for ethical validation, which we propose as a sixth construct to our prior five-construct framework for interpretive research quality.

Background: The field of engineering education research is adopting an increasingly diverse range of qualitative methods. These developments necessitate a coherent language and conceptual framework to critically engage with questions of qualitative research quality. Purpose/Hypothesis: This article advances discussions of qualitative research quality through sharing and analyzing a methodologically diverse, practice-based exploration of research quality in the context of five engineering education research studies. Design/Method: As a group of seven engineering education researchers, we drew on the collaborative inquiry method to systematically examine questions of qualitative research quality in our everyday research practice. We used a process-based, theoretical framework for research quality as the anchor for these explorations. Results: We constructed five practice explorations spanning grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and various forms of narrative inquiry. Examining the individual contributions as a whole yielded four key insights: quality challenges require examination from multiple theoretical lenses; questions of research quality are implicitly infused in research practice; research quality extends beyond the objects, procedures, and products of research to concern the human context and local research setting; and research quality lies at the heart of introducing novices to interpretive research. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the potential and further need for the engineering education community to advance methodological theory through purposeful and reflective engagement in research practice across the diverse methodological approaches currently being adopted.

Background: The participation of women in engineering education has increased only slightly since the 1980s, despite the publication of many research studies on gender in engineering education. We think that these studies have not affected practice because researchers have focused too narrowly on how gender relates to engineering education. Purpose: This article investigates whether there is indeed a narrow focus by analyzing how articles published in "JEE" investigate gender. We asked, What are the dominant themes and patterns in the structure of gender research published in "JEE"? We wanted to see how engineering education research articles incorporated gender theory and research methods from the social sciences and education to explore the relationships between gender and engineering education. Design/Method: We conducted a content analysis of gender-related research published in "JEE" between 1998 and 2012. We developed scientometric and other classification categories and applied them quantitatively. Results: Articles related to gender are predominantly quantitative studies that focus on undergraduate students in formal university settings, and incorporate participant identities in the groups of women and men (together) or women, men, and racial minorities (together). Researchers used varied theories of gender, but most of those theories were not used again in later research in the articles analyzed. Conclusions: A greater diversity of theories and designs should lead to a better understanding of gender in engineering education. We suggest areas for future research.

This paper analyses the role that forms of documentation play in faculty members' experiences of tenure and promotion. Taking an institutional ethnography approach, it examines inconsistencies and ambiguities in documents and connects them to the experiences of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) faculty at one institution in the USA. The authors argue that the university documentation surrounding tenure and promotion does not capture the actual practices and experiences of faculty members as they prepare for their tenure or promotion and that the documentation creates a "flexibility bind" of tenure and promotion. Faculty members' strategies for navigating this bind are also examined. The implications of these findings for diversity among STEM faculty are also explored.

This paper contributes new perspectives on the underrepresentation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines by identifying how faculty themselves conceptualize or make sense of the problem. We conducted in-depth interviews with 19 STEM faculty members. The interviews were employed to identify discourses faculty engage in their explanations for underrepresentation. Work-family balance emerged as the leading theme, with participants identifying many challenges thereto. As participants discussed work-family balance, they engaged a discourse of "choice" to frame the challenges faced by female faculty members in particular. We relate the discourse of choice to the persistence of gender inequalities in STEM departments.

There seems to be a disconnect between the purported goal of engineering education (and perhaps STEM education broadly) to become a more inclusive discipline, and the means by which this is accomplished. Efforts from thousands of dedicated researchers and program directors around the country continue in full force to develop theory and programming to better recruit, hire or admit, retain, promote, and sustain underrepresented women and men in engineering education, and yet overall the needle budges little. In this perspectives paper, I join with others in thinking through a new way for thinking about gender and race in engineering education research. While the careful investigation of psychological constructs in education have brought great value to the broadening participation in STEM research space, less interrogated are the structural aspects of how gender and race are baked into the very institution of higher education and of engineering education into which we are hoping to recruit, hire or admit, retain, promote, and sustain underrepresented women and men. This paper draws on feminist and critical race theory to help us collectively continue to "shift the default" away from the White male backdrop of higher and engineering education, and join our research voices with those who have been in this space a while to more insistently question how Whiteness and maleness has been baked into the structure of our educational institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable engineering has been highlighted in many national reports as a key component of the education of engineers of the future. Yet faculty perceptions of sustainable engineering as 'soft' and outside the boundaries of engineering prevent its widespread inclusion in the engineering undergraduate curriculum. In this paper, we demonstrate how ecofeminist theory could be used to understand the inferior status that sustainable engineering currently occupies in the disciplinary hierarchy. To characterize the ongoing debates and tensions underlying acceptance ofsustainability as part of the engineering process as well as of engineering education, we have closely analyzed 42 out of 150 articles published in the area of engineering education using inductive grounded theory, and we relate our themes and sub-themes to ecofeminist theory. The first theme considers sustainability to be a challenging skill set for the future engineer; the second emphasizes the disciplinary aspects of sustainability; and the third theme looks at the normative aspect of sustainability as value-based engineering. We found it helpful to use ecofeminism as a framework for thinking how sustainability's marginalization in engineering education could be related to its 'soft' ness, its chaotic and system-level character, as these aspects align it not with the core of engineering but rather with the marginalized 'feminine.' This framing should help us reconceptualize how we talk about sustainability in engineering education to make it a more integrated and valued concept for future engineering students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The motivation for the current study was to examine the experiences that contribute to engineering identity both in terms of educational and professional pathways; this was accomplished through both qualitative and quantitative means. A cross-sectional study of undergraduate engineering students was conducted at a medium-sized Midwestern private university. A large-scale survey of all undergraduate engineering students, ~1100, yielded responses from ~700 students during the spring of 2009. Survey questions were based on a study approach defining adulthood by Jeffrey Arnett, but specifically applied to engineering identity as a parallel but unique instrument. Engineering identity from a student perspective was assessed, both in terms of self-identification (do engineering students consider themselves to be engineers?) and identifying factors that are "necessary" to be considered an engineer. A qualitative inquiry followed to better inform the quantitative survey results. Individual student interviews across class levels and engineering self-identifications were conducted as a collection of case studies. While it was not surprising to find that individual student experiences contribute to an overall sense of belonging to the college, it was interesting that key experiences such as internships and undergraduate research were not found to be statistically significant predictors of engineer self-identification. Student interviews offered insight into this finding; those experiences were formative, but there is a bi-directionality to these experiences-they can be either affirming or discouraging. Students cited experiences that were positive, challenging learning opportunities as reaffirming their engineering identity as it relates to future career plans. Conversely, negative student experiences were also formative but were related to non-identification and dissuaded students from future engineering related career plans. Finally, the implications for an institution's curricular structure as it relates to engineering identity are discussed as are suggestions for promoting multiple student experiences before graduation and formal assessment of those experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 2007, Purdue University began integrating sustainable design topics into our Introduction to Engineering Problem Solving and Computer Tools course which our first-year engineering students complete prior to advancing to their specific engineering disciplinary programs. In the Spring of 2008 we began assigning a six-week design project related to Sustainable Design. The students work in teams of three-to-four students to consider their living spaces and how they might make those spaces more sustainable. In this paper, we present an overview of the educational activities, including the material that is presented to students and more details on the design project. Additionally, we present an analysis of some of the student's final projects. We present three cases which represent different student responses. This work will contribute to what we as a design education community understand about first-year engineering students' ability to engage with this material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]