ENGE at ASEE 2023
Over 20 research posters were presented by Virginia Tech Engineering Education faculty, graduate students and alumni during the 2023 annual conference for the American Society of Engineering Education.
The posters in this collection highlight the latest research from across the field of engineering education, including:
- disrupting the status quo of who gets to be an engineer;
- gamified approaches to discovering solutions for engineering problems;
- broadening engineering participation;
- secondary data analysis in engineering education research; and
- inclusive engineering classrooms.
Explore the collection and check back on our LinkedIn for more research updates.
ENGE Faculty & Graduate Student Research
Responsive Support Structures for Marginalized Students in Engineering: Insights from Years 1–3
The purpose of this NSF CAREER project is to advance understanding of the navigational strategies used by undergraduate engineering students from marginalized groups. Our goal is to identify insights that can be used to develop responsive support structures, prevent further harm, and address actors who perpetuate an unjust system. Our project will benefit the engineering education ecosystem by illuminating ways to transform engineering education into a learning environment that values and uplifts all of its participants. Our poster will present an overview of our: 1) conceptual model informing our data collection; 3) workshop development and implementation; and 3) instrument revision and piloting.
To identify cognitive processes involved in solving engineering related problems, the current study investigates how students engage in problem- solving and attempt to use mechanical objects. Participants were selected based on their grades on the three problems and invited to participate in a think aloud protocol study. To ensure that all students have the opportunity to participate in the study, everyone was invited and those who identified interest were invited to the study. The researchers also ensure participation from students in the categories of low, average and high performance on the three problems. Using a think-aloud protocol, 60 selected participants (30 from the control group and 30 from the experimental group) were observed about how they verbalize their thoughts during the problem-solving activity. We will present the initial coding procedure and initial emerging themes in the work-in-progress paper.
Organizational Partnerships S-STEM Research Hub
The objective of the Research on Organizational Partnerships in Education and STEM (ROPES) Hub is to advance understanding of organizational partnerships that support academic pathways for domestic low-income engineering students. Partnerships across the education system are essential for improving STEM; achieving the systematic, structural, or sustainable change desired by programs such as NSF’s Scholarships for STEM Students (S-STEM) program is seldom achieved by individual isolated units and often requires partnerships across silos within an academic institution (i.e., intra-institution partnerships) and across institutions (i.e., inter-institution partnerships). However, how such partnerships are built, designed, and sustained remains a great challenge facing the field.
The rapid pace with which advances in computing are being made in recent years has resulted in an increasing need for a competent computing workforce. Yet, the rate at which postsecondary students are choosing to pursue computing disciplines is lagging, creating a deficit of computing professionals. This project, funded by the NSF DUE/HSI Program, is focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI) courses and an interdisciplinary certificate that will expose all college students to AI while building capacity for the development of a four-year degree in applied AI. The project aims to serve the national interest by increasing community colleges’ (CC) capacity to attract and train students in AI.
Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly global environments of contemporary engineering present new challenges to effective engineering ethics training. With the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ethical and Responsible Research (ER2) program, a collaboration of investigators from Virginia Tech, University of Pittsburgh, Delft University of Technology, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University are conducting a mixed-methods project examining the effects of culture and educational experiences on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students. To gauge students’ ethical reasoning skills and moral dispositions and to measure any change in these, we administer the Engineering & Science Issues Test (ESIT) and the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) to engineering students longitudinally over four years.
This work-in-progress paper shares ongoing findings from a mixed-methods systematic literature review that seeks to examine the retention of women in the engineering professoriate. We identified literature from EBSCOHost and Engineering Village that discussed women in the engineering professoriate in relation to either retention or persistence or both, as explicitly stated in their abstract. Following an initial review of 191 titles, 48 papers passed our inclusion criteria; further qualitative analysis of abstracts yielded 31 papers, which underwent a full paper review. Our ongoing findings suggest the following: a) research on the retention of women in engineering professoriate is being supported by grants and funding opportunities; b) the reviewed literature documented six barriers faced by women in the engineering professoriate: isolation of women faculty, work/life balance, inequitable distribution of service, underrepresentation of women faculty, implicit bias, and departmental resources; and c) although journal scholarship on this topic is not limited to popular engineering education publishing venues, conference scholarship are mainly from those popular in the field, such as the ASEE Annual Conference and the Frontiers in Education Conference. Future work will share the extent to which the reviewed literature discussed interventions to recruit or retain women in the engineering professoriate, and whether these interventions vary by the type of institution.
Iron Range Engineering Academic Scholarships for Co-Op Based Engineering Education
The Iron Range Engineering (IRE) STEM Scholars Program provides a financially sustainable pathway for students across the nation to graduate with an engineering degree and up to two years of industry experience. Students typically complete their first two years of engineering coursework at community colleges across the country. Students then join IRE and spend one transitional semester gaining training and experience to equip them with the technical, design, and professional skills needed to succeed in the engineering workforce. During the last two years of their education, IRE students work in industry, earning an engineering intern salary, while being supported in their technical and professional development by professors, learning facilitators, and their own peers.
In this paper we describe the system’s architecture, data processing steps, and preliminary results. We demonstrate the utility of the system by applying it on an open-ended question from a scenario-based assessment targeting systems thinking in domain general contexts. This instance of the scenario was administered to undergraduate students across disciplines as part of both a statistics and introductory humanities course. Given students’ numerous undergraduate disciplines and knowledge domains, this presented a varied and challenging dataset.
Our preliminary results suggest that pre-processing of textual content can improve the speed and reliability of scoring when compared to unassisted human scoring with the same scoring guide. As natural language processing methods continue to advance, applications to augment textually focused assessment like scenario and case-based should continue to be explored.
Broadening participation in the skilled technical workforce is a national priority given strong evidence of growing critical vacancies in engineering coupled with the urgent need for this workforce to better reflect the rich diversity of the nation. Scholars and activists often call for increased focus on education access, quality, and workforce development among rural Appalachian communities, noting that students from these communities are under-represented in higher education generally, and engineering careers specifically. Investing in preK-12 education, engaging youth as valued members of their communities, and cultivating workforce opportunities such as in advanced manufacturing have all been highlighted by the Appalachian Regional Commission as vital to strengthening economic resilience.
Lessons Learned Doing Secondary Data Analysis in EER
This paper reports on a project funded through the Engineering Education and Centers (EEC) Division of the National Science Foundation. The project is aimed towards building understanding in the engineering education research (EER) community about the potential value of secondary data analysis (SDA) as well as developing guidelines for using this research approach. Changing the paradigm of single-use data collection will require actionable, proven practices for effective, ethical data sharing, coupled with sufficient incentives to both share and use existing data.
The purpose of this project is to investigate how the development of a framework for Connecting the Professional and Educational Communities (ConPEC). This is aimed at improving the accessibility of construction industry practitioners to instructors, so as to ensure greater interaction of students with their communities of practice (COP). This improved interaction is targeted at enhancing the disciplinary perception and professional identity development of construction engineering students by inducting them into experts’ ways of thinking, knowing, and reasoning. The ConPEC framework will provide instructors with equitable access to the construction COP by intelligently matching the practical course support needs of instructors with the offerings of industry practitioners. The practice knowledge gaps in construction engineering education would be addressed by increasing access to industry practitioners to bridge the gaps. The framework is ideally suited for creating this learning environment as it consists of platforms and layers that allow for advanced searches using machine learning algorithms as well as complex data analysis.
Community colleges are often touted as cost-effective pathways to four-year universities for academically talented low-income students. However, four-year institutions often play an insignificant role in turning this promise into reality.
The primary project objective of VT-NETS is to determine how a four-year institution can play an active role in increasing the success and efficiency of engineering transfer throughout the full community college-to-bachelor’s degree pathway, increasing attainment of A.S. and B.S. degrees in engineering by low-income students. From a research perspective, we have analyzed both academic and non-academic factors that promote student access and progress through this pathway and have identified and sought to mitigate specific barriers through revised practices and policies.
Our NSF Research Initiation (RIEF) grant focuses on the role of professional engineer identity formation in the construction and communication of engineering judgments in writing. This paper reports the preliminary results of this research as a thematic map obtained from the analysis of 10 semi-structured interviews obtained from five senior systems engineering students in the capstone project at the lead author’s institution. Our thematic map illustrates the role of social practice in the creation and re-creation of engineering knowledge. And they also suggest a need for greater integration of social and professional praxis in fundamental engineering curricula in order to better prepare students with an awareness of the embodied and enacted communicative practices involved in professional engineering work.
The complex nature of the construction industry in the twenty-first century cannot afford an education through trial and error in the real environment. However, recent advances in computer science can help educators develop virtual environments and gamification platforms that allow students to explore various scenarios and learn from their experiences. This study aims to address this need by assessing the effectiveness of guided active exploration in a digital game environment on students’ ability to discover systematic solutions for fundamental problems in construction engineering. To address this objective, through a research project funded by the NSF Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), we designed and developed a scenario-based interactive digital game, called Zebel, to guide students solve fundamental problems in construction scheduling.
Engineering Interventions in My Science Classroom: What's My Role?
This work in progress paper draws on data from year one of a multi-year project aimed at integrating engineering into middle-school science classes. The expectation that middle school teachers integrate engineering into their science curriculum may be challenging as engineering-related content has not historically been part of teacher preparation. Particularly in rural areas, in-service teacher training relative to engineering may be absent or difficult to access due to proximity or financial or time costs. Therefore, it is important to develop effective professional development (PD) that works within the actual teaching context and makes few demands on teachers beyond their regular workload. In partnership with teachers and local industry workers in rural and Appalachian areas, the [de-identified for review] project developed extended classroom engineering activities for students that also serve as teacher PD relative to teaching engineering in locally relevant ways. As part of this work, a qualitative analysis was conducted to understand how teachers, from their perspectives, envisioned their role during the interventions. Data were collected prior to and after interventions (within an academic year) to further understand if, and if so, how, teacher perspectives of their role changed. Results reveal three initial roles; classroom manager, learner, helper, and unsure. The post intervention data revealed all teachers indicated being a “learner”.
CAREER: Disrupting the Status Quo Regarding Who Gets to Be an Engineer—Highlights from Year 2
The overarching research question guiding this study is: What combination of insights and actions form a robust, actionable change model for broadening participation in engineering and set Colleges of Engineering on a viable path to parity? Using a multi-case research design that is framed by Kotter’s Leading Change theory and Acker’s Inequality Regimes as theoretical foundations, this CAREER award aims to uncover the change strategies institutionalized by four exemplary COEs to improve Black and Brown students’ access to engineering education and careers. The institutions included in this study are: 1) Florida International University, 2) University of Maryland- College Park, 3) University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and 4) George Mason University. Semi-structured interviews with university personnel, focus group interviews with students, on-campus observations, and publicly-available reports make up the database associated with each case.
Alumni Research
Now in its second year, this project has conducted a nationwide recruitment of students with salient minoritized identities via email distributed through relevant organizations, campus support centers, and snowball recruitment. Most of our target twenty (20) student participants have been interviewed once using a semi-structured protocol that focuses on their experiences in engineering education. Interviews are being transcribed, de-identified, edited for conciseness, and re-recorded by student actors. In the coming year, recorded interviews will be validated in focus groups with faculty members who represent a range of familiarity with diversity and inclusion topics. These focus groups will prompt faculty participants to listen to embedded student narratives and provide feedback using Likert-type and open-ended response questions.
In an effort to bridge the gap between social scientists and engineering entrepreneurship practitioners, the authors are conducting a two-phase study. Phase 1 of the study involves conducting a Delphi study to identify the top entrepreneurial attributes of professionals and researchers who lead ESPs. Phase 2 of the study includes conducting workshops with social scientists who study the attributes and ESP leaders. The goal of the workshops is to identify assessment frameworks grounded in social science theory and literature that will guide in the measurement of the attributes. This session will focus on the results of the Delphi phase.
Delphi study is a common research technique used to achieve consensus among experts (Hasson, Keeney, and McKenna, 2000). Seventy-three participants who lead or have led an ESP, have conducted research in entrepreneurship education, or act as administrators for relevant entrepreneurship programs were invited to participate in the Delphi study.
Considering the increasing demand for engineering graduates, understanding what is limiting students from completing their degrees has been a consistent question posed in the literature. The nontrivial variance in pathways students take in obtaining an engineering degree, especially in cases where students abandon their studies, suggests that longitudinal datasets can hold a wealth of information to uncover factors contributing to attrition. Accordingly, this project uses existing data to explore curricular factors that create barriers for different students by leveraging a new framework for quantifying the impact of such factors, Curricular Analytics. Curricular Analytics uses network analysis to measure sequencing and interconnectedness in a plan of study. The sum of these factors for all courses in a plan of study, called structural complexity, characterizes a measure of the curriculum’s complexity.
This paper presents the process of adapting existing power engineering courses in two collaborating institutions with new modules on distribution systems, renewable energy systems, and data analytics. The curriculum redesign centers not only around the inclusion of these topics of interest, but on incorporating situative pedagogy strategies, in an effort to help students place topics into context and equip them to grasp effects of the emerging changes and technologies. Beyond the traditional curriculum of theory and labs, the collaborative effort combines the resources, research, and diverse student perspectives to enhance the curriculum of both programs.
Graduation rates among transfer students are lower than students entering four-year programs in year one, and the TranSCEnD program was deliberately designed to provide these students with academic, social and financial support. Three major components were included to improve cohort-building and thereby impact success. Students admitted to the program (1) engaged in a group summer bridge project, (2) completed a single-term success seminar, and (3) were provided a scholarship for continued informal engagement with the comprehensive TranSCEnD team throughout their years at UTK. The NSF-supported project has entered the fifth and final year of the program and the results of the effort show positive impacts on transfer student success.
This presentation will focus on the survey and interview data that has been collected in the second year of the project and the website that has been developed to further engage faculty and other institutions and partners interested in the study. This second year of this study will also see the creation of a decision matrix to aid faculty and instructors to further promote and support the implementation of inclusive practices in engineering classrooms. The continued refinement of the menu and creation of both the website and decision matrix are the next steps in the development of an inclusive classrooms toolkit that can be used across all engineering classrooms and curriculums.
The current study sought to understand how graduate women biology, environmental engineering, and geosciences mobilized bonding and bridging social capital to access academic and professional pathways. Specifically, this case study investigated 13 women in master’s programs participating in a National Science Foundation (NSF) S-STEM program and interdisciplinary community of practice, focused on a wicked problem [specific problem and title masked for review], incorporating a variety of strategies (e.g., mentoring, research opportunities, community engagement, coursework) to ease transitions into and through master’s programs. Data sources included semi-structured interview data, program documents (e.g., grant proposal, evaluation and annual reports), and participant observations at roundtable workshops used to examine this phenomenon.
We developed a web-based IDE known as the Archimedes platform for capturing flowcharts and a persistent trace of student programming and design data. Using this application, we conducted an investigation of introductory and intermediate students’ programming process patterns using the Python programming language. Student programming event data was collected based on a custom event compression system for capturing events such as CREATE, UPDATE, DELETE, RUN_SUCCESS, RUN_FAIL, and various browser-based events for detecting external behavior, such as copying and pasting from external sources. Using this data, we seek to validate an additional IDE-based metric called the Timeline of Program Development. We define this as a sequence of events for categorize programming skills by looking at students’ programming behavior and actions taken over time. A timeline of events records events such as time spent designing, writing, updating, running, or deleting code. This poster illustrates the programming process patterns captured and analyzed through the Archimedes platform. It is our hope that this data will be used as a method to better understand student’s programming behavior.
This poster presentation aims to discuss the process of the design of the RDI, its implementation across five U.S. institutions, and our initial research findings regarding doctoral student development. We share findings from pre/post-surveys, longitudinal focus groups, and individual interviews to show insights into the transition students face when entering the engineering PhD. The rich dataset will aid in the understanding of URM students’ transition to the Ph.D. process. In this poster, we present a summary of our efforts and discuss our plans to help more institutions adopt the RDI as part of their incoming student orientations.