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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Race, Class And Gender In Engineering Education: A Quantitative Investigation Of First Year Enrollment, Canek Moises Luna Phillips Dec 2016

Race, Class And Gender In Engineering Education: A Quantitative Investigation Of First Year Enrollment, Canek Moises Luna Phillips

Open Access Dissertations

Research explanations for the disparity across both race and gender in engineering education has typically relied on a deficit model, whereby women and people of color lack the requisite knowledge or psychological characteristics that Whites and men have to become engineers in sufficient numbers. Instead of using a deficit model approach to explain gender and race disparity, in the three studies conducted for this dissertation, I approach gender and race disparity as the result of processes of segregation linked to the historic and on-going perpetuation of systemic sources of oppression in the United States. In the first study, I investigate …


Conceptual Understanding Of Threshold Concepts Of Electrical Phenomena: Mental Models Of Senior Undergraduates In Electrical Engineering, Mark T. Carnes Dec 2016

Conceptual Understanding Of Threshold Concepts Of Electrical Phenomena: Mental Models Of Senior Undergraduates In Electrical Engineering, Mark T. Carnes

Open Access Dissertations

Every field of study has a set of domain-specific concepts that anyone who desires to work in that field must know and understand. Most students who pursue university degrees in engineering trust that their education is designed to provide them with this knowledge. But does it? In electrical engineering (EE), conceptual understanding of electrical phenomena has rarely been addressed. Even though the presumed goal of instructors and students alike is to learn the concepts of electrical phenomena well enough to be able to use the concepts to design useful things, it is difficult to determine whether this goal is being …


Learning The Language Of Academic Engineering: Sociocognitive Writing In Graduate Students, Catherine G. P. Berdanier Mar 2016

Learning The Language Of Academic Engineering: Sociocognitive Writing In Graduate Students, Catherine G. P. Berdanier

Open Access Dissertations

Although engineering graduate programs rarely require academic writing courses, the indicators of merit in academic engineering, such as journal publications, successful grants, and doctoral milestones (e.g. theses, dissertations) are based in effective written argumentation and disciplinary discourse. Further, graduate student attrition averages 57% across all disciplines, with some studies classifying up to 50% of these students as “ABD” (All But Dissertation.) In engineering disciplines specifically, graduate attrition rates across the U.S. average 36% (both Master’s and PhD students), according to the Council of Graduate Schools. The lack of socialization is generally noted as a main reason for graduate attrition, one …


A Standards-Based Grading Model To Predict Students' Success In A First-Year Engineering Course, Farshid Marbouti Jan 2016

A Standards-Based Grading Model To Predict Students' Success In A First-Year Engineering Course, Farshid Marbouti

Open Access Dissertations

Using predictive modeling methods, it is possible to identify at-risk students early in the semester and inform both the instructors and the students. While some universities have started to use standards-based grading, which has educational advantages over common score-based grading, at–risk prediction models have not been adapted to reap the benefits of standards-based grading. In this study, seven prediction models were compared to identify at-risk students in a course that used standards-based grading. When identifying at-risk students, it is important to minimize false negative (i.e., type II) errors while not increasing false positive (i.e., type I) errors significantly. To increase …