Engineering Education Commons^™

Epics: Broadening The Pathway Into Stem, Mindy Hart, Patrice M. Buzzanell, William Charles Oakes, Carla B Zoltowski

ADVANCE-Purdue Gender and STEM Research Symposium

The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program was co-founded at Purdue University in 1995 and has since spread throughout the United States and globally with inroads into K-12 education through EPICS High. This presentation offers a synthesis of research findings and interventions gleaned from several datasets about students’ and alumni’s reported experiences with EPICS and the consequences of their participation. In particular, this presentation discusses the ways in which EPICS provides a different vantage point on the underrepresentation of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Specifically, researchers have been tackling this issue of underrepresentation for decades with …

Appreciating Episodic Mentoring: Reconsiderations Of And Interventions For A Comprehensive Mentoring Process For Engineering Faculty, Patrice M. Buzzanell, Ziyu Long, Klod Kokini, Lindsey B. Anderson, Jennifer C. Batra

ADVANCE-Purdue Gender and STEM Research Symposium

The benefits of formal and informal mentoring systems in academe and other organizational settings are well documented. However, a third form of mentoring—known as episodic or spontaneous mentoring as well as mentoring moments—offers a different entrée point into the everyday construction of mentoring. Whereas most mentoring either focuses on one-on-one long-term relationships or group/cluster mentoring arrangements, episodic mentoring emphasizes processes, relational aspects of the mentoring experiences, multiple inputs, and individual empowerment. Based on inductive-deductive analyses of in-depth interviews and other empirical data about engineering faculty members' mentoring experiences in a mid-western university, we discuss how episodic mentoring is a way …

Navigating Pregnancy And Parenthood: Work-Family Considerations For Men And Women Graduate Students In Stem And Other Disciplines, Ziyu Long, Patrice M. Buzzanell, Abigail Selzer King

ADVANCE-Purdue Gender and STEM Research Symposium

Scholars and non-academicians consider popular key advantages to be flexibility in career trajectories as well as autonomy and control over one’s schedule and the work that one chooses to do (e.g., Buzzanell & Lucas, 2006, 2013). Although academic careers seem to offer these benefits, there are questions about whether and how such flexibility actually occurs, particularly in times of pregnancy/adoption, family leave, and work-life “balance” (e.g., Stone, 2008). Implicit in academic flexibility is that graduate student careers might evidence some of the same flexibility but within institutional structures that can range from lockstep to a build-you-own-plan and timetable model. In …

A High-Quality Professional Development For Teachers Of Grades 3–6 For Implementing Engineering Into Classrooms, S. Selcen Guzey, Kristina Tank, Hui-Hui Wang, Gillian Roehrig, Tamara J. Moore

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

With the increasing emphasis on integrating engineering into K-12 classrooms to help meet the needs of our complex and multidisciplinary society, there is an urgent need to investigate teachers' engineering-focused professional development experiences as they relate to teacher learning, implementation, and student achievement. This study addresses this need by examining the effects of a professional development program focused on engineering integration, and how teachers chose to implement engineering in their classrooms as a result of the professional development. 198 teachers in grades 3–6 from 43 schools in 17 districts participated in a yearlong professional development program designed to help integrate …

Development Of An Instrument To Assess Attitudes Toward Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics (Stem), Tamara J. Moore, Selcen Guzey, Michael Harwell

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

There is a need for more students to be interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers to advance U.S. competitiveness and economic growth. A consensus exits that improving STEM education is necessary for motivating more students to pursue STEM careers. In this study, a survey to measure student (grades 4-6) attitudes toward STEM and STEM careers was developed and administered to 662 students from two STEM-focused and three comprehensive (non-STEM focused) schools. Cronbach’s alphas for the whole survey and subscales indicated a high internal consistency. Statistically significant difference in means between students attending the STEM-focused and comprehensive schools …

The Importance Of Formative Assessment In Science And Engineering Ethics Education: Some Evidence And Practical Advice, Matthew W. Keefer, Sara E. Wilson, Harry Dankowicz, Michael C. Loui

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

Recent research in ethics education shows a potentially problematic variation in content, curricular materials, and instruction. While ethics instruction is now widespread, studies have identified significant variation in both the goals and methods of ethics education, leaving researchers to conclude that many approaches may be inappropriately paired with goals that are unachievable. This paper speaks to these concerns by demonstrating the importance of aligning classroom-based assessments to clear ethical learning objectives in order to help students and instructors track their progress toward meeting those objectives. Two studies at two different universities demonstrate the usefulness of classroom-based, formative assessments for improving …

Piecemeal Versus Integrated Design: Framing Meets Design Thinking, Stephen Secules, Ayush Gupta, Andrew Elby

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Systems thinking is an important component of engineering design thinking but one that is often difficult for beginning designers. In this paper, we present an empirically grounded case that sometimes the novice-like design behaviors emerge, not due to a lack of skills/knowledge on part of the student designers, but by the nature of the way the activity is structured and the implicit and explicit messages communicated to the students on the nature of the design task. Our analysis draws on video-records of brainstorming and design review and briefing meetings between students, instructors, and stakeholders in the context of a service-learning …

Motivation Of Community Partners And Advisors To Participate In Community Engagement Engineering Programs, Julia D Thompson, Brent Jesiek

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Since 2000, research in service-learning has started to investigate partnerships and community voice, but this research trend has received little attention among engineering education scholars. This study aims to fill this gap by developing a richer understanding of community-university partnerships in engineering community engagement from the perspectives of academic programs and served communities. In part inspired by the existing service-learning literature, this study addresses the question: Why are individuals and local community organizations involved in engineering service-learning partnerships? This study utilizes a single case study design, with data collection including in-depth interviews with community partners, faculty and program administrators (n=11) …

Design For The Other 90% And Appropriate Technology: The Legacies Of Paul Polak And E.F. Schumacher, Lindsey Anne Nelson

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Recent movements showcase engineering design activities on behalf of poor people, inspiring engineering educators to create global service-learning programs. People who encourage engineers to “design for the other 90%” envision globally engaged businesses paving a new way forward for poverty eradication while other engineers pursue forms of “appropriate technology”to create socially-just technological systems. The engineering practices related to these phrases raise questions of which people benefit from engineering design for poverty alleviation, how engineers define “poor” people, what indicates “success” when engineers design for poverty alleviation, and how engineering educators create meaningful global service-learning programs for students.This paper uses mediated …

Parents As Critical Influence: Insights From Five Different Studies, Brianna L. Dorie, Tamecia R. Jones, Meagan C Pollock, Monica Cardella

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Parents play a number of roles in engineering education: they can motivate children’s interest in engineering in early childhood, as well as later when their child is in the process of selecting a major at college, they can provide support in learning engineering concepts and thinking skills, and can serve as role models if they themselves are engineers. Several empirical studies have shown that parents play a significant role in the occupational aspiration and career goal development of their children. In addition,parents’ own beliefs and aspirations have been found to be important factors in children’s career and academic aspirations. In …

Capturing The Design Thinking Of Young Children Interacting With A Parent, Brianna L. Dorie, Monica Cardella, Gina Navoa Svarovsky

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Children have often been labeled as “natural engineers” whose curiosity about the world around them evokes comparisons to skills used by professional engineers and taught to undergraduate engineering students. Building towers out of blocks, taking things apart and figuring how things work are a part of childhood and have been considered to be precursors to engineering thinking.However there has been considerable debate around what engineering looks like for young children. Can young children engage in design and if so, what does that look like? How can we differentiate “design” (especially “modeling” or “create”) activity from normal everyday play?Several design models …

Structured Pairing In A First-Year Electrical And Computer Engineering Laboratory: The Effects On Student Retention, Attitudes, And Teamwork, Nicholas D. Fila, Michael C. Loui

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

This paper describes a simple technique, structured pairing, for organizing student teams in engineering instructional laboratories. This technique was adapted from pair programming, which was previously found to improve student confidence, satisfaction, and retention in computer science. A study of structured pairing was implemented in a large required course for first-year students in electrical and computer engineering. Six laboratory sections implemented structured pairing, and the other seven laboratory sections operated in a traditional way (i.e., unstructured team interactions). Data were collected from a student survey, two focus groups, and course enrollment records. Structured pairing students reported significantly higher confidence in …

Engineering And Engineering Education As Spiritual Vocations, Julia D Thompson, Mel Chua, Cole H. Joslyn

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Spirituality and engineering (education) are often kept in separate compartments in our lives. They may slip out occasionally for conversations during ethics classes or service learning projects, but speaking -- and living -- our spiritual/religious values as engineers and engineering educators/researchers is still uneasy territory for many. The spirit of free inquiry and reflection that permeates the liberal arts urges us to integrate our spirituality into the human and natural worlds we inhabit. How do we bring such thinking into the technical realms?In this session, we will describe our personal journeys toward engineering education and how we actively and reflectively …

A Tale Of Two Design Contexts: Quantitative And Qualitative Explorations Of Student-Instructor Interactions Amidst Ambiguity, Monica E. Cardella, Patrice Buzzanell, Antonette Cummings, Delean Tolbert, Carla B. Zoltowski

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Designers develop design skills and knowledge through experience and feedback – feedback from colleagues, clients, supervisors, users, stakeholders, the success or failure of a solution, and design educators. In this project, we focus on the feedback provided to mechanical engineering students completing their undergraduate studies and industrial design graduate students during design reviews. The design coaches (educators and industry clients) and design students must negotiate ambiguity in the process. The students must reduce ambiguity in the sense of providing clear details as they communicate their design work, reduce ambiguity in the coaches’ perceptions of the design work quality by providing …

Polysemy In Design Review Conversations, Georgi V. Georgiev, Toshiharu Taura

Design Thinking Research Symposium

This paper examines the role of polysemy, defined as the quality of having multiple meanings, in design review conversations. It examines the polysemy, particularly of nouns, involved in a dataset of design review conversations with reference to design ideas. The purpose is to determine whether polysemy is related to successful development of design ideas and more creative design outcomes. The results show that the polysemy of nouns involved in the conversations of the finally developed, successful, design ideas exceeds in the most cases the average polysemy involved in the conversations pertaining to the unsuccessful design ideas. Furthermore, the polysemy of …

Viewing An Interdisciplinary Human-Centered Design Course As A Multiteam System: Perspectives On Cooperation And Information Sharing, Elizabeth S. Fleming, Alexandra E. Coso

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Many design projects, including human-centered design (HCD) projects, incorporate multiple teams cooperating within what is referred to as a Multiteam System (MTS) environment. These teams mutually rely on resources and processes provided by other teams. As an MTS increases in complexity, knowledge is distributed to more individuals. While effectively distributed knowledge increases creativity and productivity, it is also can hinder team effectiveness. Team members may fail to exchange relevant information or to integrate pertinent information into reasoning for design decisions. Our research addresses information sharing among teams and individuals in HCD by examining interactions between and within the MTS (i.e., …

Making Design Pedagogical Content Knowledge Visible Within Design Reviews, Robin Adams, David Radcliffe, Tiago Forin, Mel Chua

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Design pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is the content-specific specialized teacher knowledge that connects the how (pedagogical knowledge) and what (content knowledge) of teaching design. In this study, we make visible the design PCK in three student design reviews: choreography, undergraduate industrial design, and mechanical engineering. We use cognitive apprenticeship and teaching-as-improvisation frameworks to characterize PK, and design judgment, design task strategies, and process management strategies to characterize CK. We identify and describe four patterns of design PCK: scaffolded articulation, driving for meaning and guidance, breaking the 4^th wall to create a teaching moment, and “suggest don’t tell”. Theoretical implications …

Dimensions Of Creative Evaluation: Distinct Design And Reasoning Strategies For Aesthetic, Functional And Originality Judgments, Bo T. Christensen, Linden J. Ball

Design Thinking Research Symposium

The datasets provided as part of DTRS-10 all relate to what may broadly be labeled as ‘design critiques’ in an educational context. As such, we chose to center our theoretical analysis on the evaluative reasoning taking place during expert appraisals of the design concepts that were being produced by industrial design students throughout the design process. This overall framing for our research allowed us to pursue a series of research questions concerning the dimensions of creative evaluation in design and their consequences for reasoning strategies and suggestions for moving further in the creative progress. Our transcript coding and analysis focused …

Higher Order Thinking In Design Reviews, Craig D. Howard, Colin M. Gray

Design Thinking Research Symposium

In this study we have grappled with how higher order thinking emerges in early stage design reviews, using an undergraduate dyadic review and a graduate review in a small group setting. Narratives, gambits and justifications emerged through a content analysis as forms of higher order thinking common in the reviews. We then mapped these reviews onto common frames of reference employed by teachers and students. Results depicted stark differences in the linguistic routines of the two teachers and two different sets of students. Each focused their higher order thinking from a primarily different frame of reference. Conclusions relate to opportunistic …

Influences Of Feedback Interventions On Student Concept Generation And Development Practices, Seda Yilmaz, Shanna Daly

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Design teaching in many disciplines relies on feedback as a primary way for students and instructors to communicate. Our work focused on identifying feedback types in three different design disciplines (dance choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering) and analyzing how those feedback types encouraged students to take convergent or divergent paths with their design ideas. We then compared feedback types and encouragement of convergence or divergence across the three disciplines. Our findings showed many common types of feedback used across the three disciplines, regardless of variance in context and expectations. However, the findings also revealed a high frequency of feedback …

Describing Creativity In Design Across Disciplines, Llew Mann, Yasemin Tekmen Araci

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Creativity is an essential aspect of design thinking. Being able to describe creativity and creative processes is important for developing future designers. While much research has been undertaken describing creativity in design, there is very little investigating how creativity and creative thinking varies across disciplines. A coding scheme involving six separate codes was developed initially from the literature, refined and then used to describe how creativity and creative thinking was apparent in the DTRS 10 datasets of Junior Industrial Design, Graduate Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering, Choreography and Entrepreneurship. Based on this analysis, conclusions on how creativity and creative thinking varied …

Exploring The Role Of Empathy In A Service-Learning Design Project, Nicholas D. Fila, Justin L. Hess

Design Thinking Research Symposium

The emergence of empathic design has inspired growing discourse on the role of empathy within design. While research on empathic design acknowledges the presence of empathy in design practice, little attention has been paid to its underlying mechanisms and how these mechanisms operate within the designer’s mind throughout the design process. In this study, we used the service-learning data set to develop an emergent empathic design model. We collected and analyzed any instances in which designers evidenced empathy for the end users. We kept empathy loosely defined due to the exploratory intent of this study and the recognition that empathy …

Pre-College Engineering Participation Among First-Year Engineering Students, Noah Salzman, George Dante Ricco, Matthew Ohland

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

In recent years, engineering content is increasingly appearing in the K-12 classroom. This growth can be attributed to increased acceptance of engineering as an area of study at the K-12 level, the growing inclusion of engineering content in state and national educational standards,and the growth of outreach activities intended to increase students’ interest in pursuing degrees and careers in engineering. As pre-college engineering programs grow, first-year engineering students are arriving in university engineering programs with significant prior exposure to engineering content and practices. Despite this growth, little research exists that explores the prevalence of participation in these programs or the …

Building Effective Partnership Networks When Working Internationally, Lindsey Anne Nelson

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Building Effective Partnership Networks In order to engage communities around the world, engineering educators must build networks with relevant community organizations. Many factors can compound building effective networks. Organizations have different philosophies about how engineers should undertake community engagement. These philosophies include convictions that engineers should develop low-cost products suitable for markets in marginalized communities, engineers should devise clever solutions to help people living in poverty meet basic needs, engineers must effectively respond to socio-cultural considerations when proposing solutions, and engineers should work to empower local artisans who have already begun seeking solutions to pressing problems.Additionally, university programs have to …

The Distribution Of Family-Friendly Benefits Policies Across Higher Education Institutions: A Cluster Analysis, Corey T. Schimpf, Joyce B. Main

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Cluster Analysis of Family-Related Benefits Policies across U.S. Academic Institutions Although the under-representation of women in science and engineering tenure-track faculty positions is often linked to the conflict between childcare responsibilities and the normative academic tenure-track pathway, previous studies have tended to focus on individual life choices,rather than the effects of institutional-level policies and structure. More recent research on work/life policies in higher education have pushed our understanding of how organizational structure and political climates at the department and institution levels influence the ability of faculty members to integrate career and life responsibilities. Many post-secondary institutions offer more generous work/life …

A Cross-Case Analysis Of Disciplinary Identities Communicated Through Design Reviews, Senay Purzer, Nicholas D. Fila, Emily C. Dick

Design Thinking Research Symposium

In post-secondary educational settings, discourse is a mechanism by which students develop occupational identities as they engage in a particular community that communicates attributes of their prospective profession. This study focuses on revealing disciplinary identities and how they are conveyed and negotiated during interactions between design students and project reviewers. We draw upon Gee’s identity framework and focus on the enactments of disciplinary identity in three different disciplinary settings: choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering. A cross-case analysis indicated differences that were epistemological (e.g., subjectivity of reviews) and similarities in ways instructors modeled institutional identities. The results have implications for …

Learning And Becoming In Design Reviews, Lisa D. Mcnair, Marie C. Paretti, Cassandra Groen

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Drawing from the prior work of McNair and Paretti (2010), this study investigates how language practices and design artifacts mediate the interactions among novice and expert designers to shape the nature of design, and specifically design learning. By analyzing data collected from two design courses in different fields, this study addresses two research questions: 1) how do language practices mediate the interactions between design mentors and design learners; and 2) how do design artifacts mediate these interactions between mentors and learners? Drawing on activity theory and discourse analysis, we use these questions to explore how students work with experts to …

Integrating Information Into The Engineering Design Process, Michael Fosmire, David Radcliffe

Purdue University Press Books

Engineering design is a fundamental problem-solving model used by the discipline. Effective problem-solving requires the ability to find and incorporate quality information sources. To teach courses in this area effectively, educators need to understand the information needs of engineers and engineering students and their information gathering habits. This book provides essential guidance for engineering faculty and librarians wishing to better integrate information competencies into their curricular offerings. The treatment of the subject matter is pragmatic, accessible, and engaging. Rather than focusing on specific resources or interfaces, the book adopts a process-driven approach that outlasts changing information technologies.

After several chapters …

The Humanistic Side Of Engineering: Considering Social Science And Humanities Dimensions Of Engineering In Education And Research, Morgan Hynes, Jessica Swenson

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Mathematics and science knowledge/skills are most commonly associated with engineering’s pre-requisite knowledge. Our goals in this paper are to argue for a more systematic inclusion of social science and humanities knowledge in the introduction of engineering to K-12 students. As part of this argument, we present a construct for framing the humanistic side of engineering with illustrative examples of what appealing to the humanistic side of engineering can look like in a classroom setting, and opportunities for research that examines the dynamics the humanistic side of engineering introduces into engineering learning and teaching. The illustrative examples are drawn from interactions …

Secondary Students' Conceptual Understanding Of Engineering As A Field, Devlin B. Montfort, Shane Brown, Victoria Whritenour

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Researchers have long been interested in how to recruit and retain more and more diverse students into engineering programs. One consistent challenge in this research is understanding the impacts of interventions from the point of view of the student, and how their preconceptions may influence that effectiveness. This study investigated how secondary students understand the concept of engineering, including what engineering is and what engineers do. The purpose of this work was to describe students’ conceptions of engineering, and to determine how those perceptions relate to student interest in engineering careers. The investigation was founded on the theoretical framework of …