Engineering Commons^™

Statistical Analysis When The Data Is An Image: Eliciting Student Thinking About Sampling And Variability., Margaret A. Hjalmarson, Tamara J. Moore, Robert Delmas

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

Results of analysis of responses to a first-year undergraduate engineering activity are presented. Teams of students were asked to develop a procedure for quantifying the roughness of a surface at the nanoscale, which is typical of problems in Materials Engineering where qualities of a material need to be quantified. Thirty-five teams were selected from a large engineering course for analysis of their responses. The results indicate that engagement in the task naturally led teams to design a sampling plan, use or design measures of center and variability, and integrate those measures into a model to solve the stated problem. Team …

Person-Thing Orientation As A Predictor Of Engineering Persistence And Success, Ida Ngambeki, Demetra Evangelou Dr, William Graziano, Diana N Bairaktarova, Sara E Branch, Anna Woodcock

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Interest, especially in the United States, is an important motivation for students in choosing a major and the strength of their commitment to remaining in that major. In the examination of engineering students’ reasons for persistence and success, interest has not received an in-depth treatment. Interest as a motivational factor can be characterized and operationalized in several ways. Engineering is often typified as a discipline that primarily deals with the creation and manipulation of man-made artefacts as opposed to a discipline centered on interpersonal interaction. For this study interest has been characterized along the Person-Thing dimension.This has been operationalized as …

Returning Students In Engineering Education: Making A Case For “Experience Capital”, Michele L. Strutz, James E. Cawthorne Jr, Daniel M. Ferguson, Mark T. Carnes, Matthew Ohland

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Students returning to college are not generally studied, where most of the research on non-traditional students is focused on individuals returning to earn their undergraduate degree. There are, however, many students returning to receive graduate degrees as they pursue new directions in life by interest or economic necessity. Undergraduate students with experience have clear educational related goals, practical approaches to problem-solving, and high learning motivation.Returning graduate students are expected to model similar behaviors. These individuals bring a lifetime of personal and professional expertise, which we identify as “experience capital.”A review of the literature reveals that capital has been pondered since …

Three Deadly Venoms: Phenomenology, Existentialism, And Philosophical Constructs To Expand Engineering Education Research Methodologies And Philosophy, George Dante Ricco

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

The Engineer through a Multidisciplinary Lens Our work invokes multiple theoretical approaches to the question of the engineer’s perception of his/her place in the field of engineering through lenses within social psychology and modern philosophy. We aim to help augment current conversations on and further dialogue as to what engineering is from ethnomethodological (or existential phenomenological) and symbolic interactionism points of view. The foundation of our work is the current state of engineering and how to address the engineer’s negotiation of his/her state of affairs. We believe this work has strong implications amidst recent publications invoking epistemologies based upon modern …

Engineering Children's Literature: Development Of An Engineering Storybook For Young Children, Brianna L. Dorie, Monica Cardella

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

While the notions of doctor, teacher and firefighter are ubiquitous in young literature,there is a lack of engagement about engineering (Holbrook et al., 2008). Picture books are a compelling medium for introducing concepts to children at a young age. Story books have the ability to present new information, increase stimulation of the imagination, and deliver messages both moral and social. In a school setting, story books have been shown to impact kindergartener’s mathematical achievement when produced in tandem with a mathematics unit (Keat & Wilburne, 2009). However, there have been little to no studies regarding the impact of engineering literature …

Integrating Children’S Literature Into Occupational Learning About Engineers, Brianna L. Dorie, Monica Cardella

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

At a very young age, a child has the ability to formulate ideas regarding the occupation of a lawyer, a nurse or even a doctor. However, studies have shown that most children have limited information regarding engineers, and the lack of knowledge can often perpetuate into adulthood(Cunningham et al., 2005; NAE, 2002). Augur et al. (2005) found that “occupational aspirations and expectations of children undergo dramatic development changes during the elementary years, as well as resisting change in other respects.” This means prior to school education,children have already formed their perception of occupations and that stereotypical attributes have already been …

Lifelong Learning And Information Literacy Skills And The First Year Engineering Undergraduate: Report Of A Self-Assessment, Meagan Ross, Michael Fosmire, Ruth Eh Wertz, Monica Cardella, Senay Purzer

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

ABET accreditation requires engineering students to attain ‘a recognition of the need for and an ability to engage in lifelong learning.” (Outcome 3.i) However, there are few standard tools that attempt to assess the skills and techniques students need in order to achieve those outcomes. Focusing on the problem articulation and information literacy skills embedded in lifelong learning competencies, the authors constructed a standardized assessment to measure student self-perceptions of how often they employ those skills. The criteria for these competencies were based on the Information Search Process of Carol Kuhlthau, engineering design process characteristics, and the authors’ own analysis …

Do Students Gather Information To Inform Design Decisions? Assessment With An Authentic Design Task In First-Year Engineering, Ruth Eh Wertz, Meagan Ross, Michael Fosmire, Monica Cardella, Senay Purzer

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Information gathering is a very important aspect of the design process, one that is used continuously throughout the project to make informed design decisions. This study reports the development of an authentic instrument used to assess skills related to information gathering in first-year engineering students. Existing assessment tools, such as the scenario-based Self- Knowledge Inventory of Lifelong Learning (SKILLS), developed by Conti & Fellenz, or the Self- Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS), developed by Guglielmino, were evaluated. While these have the advantage of being very easy to administer and analyze, one significant disadvantage is that they are self-reported and thus …

Doctoral Students As Course Instructors: Three Engineering Teaching Assistants' Socialization Experiences, Irene Mena, Heidi Diefes-Dux, Brenda Capobianco

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

The purpose of this study was to explore and understand the types of socialization experiences that result from engineering graduate teaching assistants‟ (TAs) roles as course instructors. Socialization refers to an individual‟s process of becoming a part of a group. In the context of doctoral education, socialization can be a complex area to study, largely because there are many roles and groups for which graduate students can be socialized.

Using situated learning, more specifically the communities of practice literature, as the theoretical framework, this study looked at how three doctoral engineering TAs, with experience as course instructors, become members of …

Motivations And Benefits For College Students Serving As Mentors In A High School Robotics Competition, Noah Salzman, Johannes Strobel

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Many universities provide space for student organizations in which undergraduate students are learning leadership skills, mentor other students and bring their engineering skills to practice.Purdue FIRST Programs (PFP) is a service-learning program where university students mentor predominantly high school student teams participating in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). Whereas most FRC teams are mentored by professional engineers, PFP is unique in both the extent which it relies on student mentors and the overall scope of the organization. Existing models of mentorship do not adequately describe the specific relationship between the college and high schools students: (1) Due to the proximity …

Assessing Engineering Students' Information Literacy Skills: An Alpha Version Of A Multiple-Choice Instrument, Ruth Eh Wertz, Meagan Ross, Senay Purzer, Michael Fosmire, Monica Cardella

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Information literacy is crucial component of developing life-long learning skills. However, few standard and easily gradable assessment tools exist to assess the information literacy competencies of learners. In this paper, we discuss the development of a multiple choice instrument designed to measure these competencies in an efficient and expedient manner, and we present results of data collected from 366 first-year engineering students. The instrument requires students to first read a technical memo and, based on the memo‟s arguments, answer eight multiple choice and two open-ended response questions. The mean score on the multiple choice portion was only 3.46 out of …

Exploring The Motivations For Migration Among Engineering Students, Ida Ngambeki, Demetra Evangelou Dr, Matthew Ohland, George Dante Ricco

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Students often graduate from a major other than that in which they first enrolled. A large proportion of this migration happens within engineering with students moving from one discipline of engineering to another. This movement between disciplines sometimes happens several times. While there has been extensive examination of why students leave engineering,very little research has looked into why students leave one engineering discipline for another.Longitudinal data collected from several engineering colleges has shown that there are definite trends within the movement of engineering students.This study examines the reasons for some of these trends using a unique approach which combines both …

Exploring Curriculum Flexibility And Compliance Through The Use Of A Metric For Curricular Progression, George Dante Ricco, Matthew Ohland

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

No abstract provided.

Statistical Analysis When The Data Is An Image: Eliciting Student Thinking About Sampling And Variability, Tamara J. Moore, Margret Hjalmarson, Robert Delmas

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

Within statistics education, there is a growing interest in understanding students' application of understanding about variability and sampling given the relative lack of research in either area (Shaughnessy, 2007). The task examined in this paper elicited students' knowledge of these concepts within a small-group problem solving task completed by teams of first-year engineering students. In the Nanoroughness task, teams of students designed a procedure for quantifying the roughness of a material surface using digital images generated by atomic force microscopy. The procedure required students to apply statistical methods in order to aggregate the data. The focus of this article is …