More than just location: how engineering undergraduate students choose their schools and programs

Critical thinking is considered a necessary learning outcome for all college students and essential for academic and career success. There are many challenges to developing a comprehensive approach to teaching and assessing critical thinking skills. Although the literature has many examples of the incorporation of critical thinking and assessment into courses, longitudinal studies following engineering students through their undergraduate career are lacking. This study assessed the impact of using the Paul-Elder Critical Thinking Framework to enhance undergraduate students’ critical thinking skills with the hypothesis: There will be a significant increase in undergraduate students’ critical thinking abilities from the freshman to the senior year with the explicit and strategic incorporation of critical thinking assignments. The research question was, “How do the critical thinking skills of undergraduate engineering students change as they progress through the engineering program with the explicit and strategic incorporation of critical thinking assignments?” The study was a descriptive, longitudinal study of three engineering student cohorts as they progressed through the four year undergraduate program. The study was approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board. There was a statistically significant increase in critical thinking scores over the four years for each of the three cohorts. Integrating and evaluating critical thinking assignments into engineering curricula is possible, but a major challenge to critical thinking assessment using a holistic rubric is training engineering faculty in their use. The results are encouraging, and participating faculty agree; but sustaining these efforts to imbed critical thinking assignments throughout the engineering college curriculum will require effort and administrative support.

Higher education has emphasized global education as a strategic goal over the past few decades, yet little empirical data has been collected to inform the decisions of global education. Engineering schools have integrated global experiences into programs with limited knowledge regarding the effectiveness of their program planning and capacity for supporting internationalization. Research is needed regarding strategies that support effective global programming and how outcomes of these strategies can be evaluated. Through three separate studies, this research addresses how engineering educators may implement, assess, and evaluate effective global engineering education programs. Using concept mapping, the first study will engage international engineering program facilitators to develop a framework that highlights effective global engineering education strategies and their evaluation. Data Envelopment Analysis will then be utilized to measure the relative effectiveness of global engineering education programming strategies using indices and outcomes identified in the framework. Using Latent Profile Analysis, the third study explores engineering global preparedness patterns among undergraduate engineering students as well as evaluates the relationships of engineering global preparedness with different student, institutional, and global programming variables. The anticipated results of this research are evidence-based global engineering programming strategies and systematic evaluation methods for international engineering program facilitators and educators.

The work in progress presents a study on undergraduate engineering students and project-based learning (PBL) to understand community impact that supports research-to-practice using data analytics in higher education. This study expands on data analysis and visualization applications in PBL using Watson Analytics. In applying the decision techniques, the classroom environment outcomes and community impact are key to engineering education goals. Our approach will provide a framework to explore predictive models and the outcome of PBL techniques in engineering education to draw a conclusion with regard to decision methods and factors (e.g., the engineer design process). In using the smart data analysis and visualization tools such as Watson Analytics, the specific areas analyzed could contribute and aid in the learning environment. From this assessment, the PBL decision techniques within the classroom environment and the overall relationship to the industry created new methodologies (techniques) to explore community impact using data analytics. These practices are assessed from detail statistical analysis and the dataset for predictive modeling of the user community. As such, this study serves as a baseline in developing models to improve PBL methods using data analysis in engineering and aviation education for the examination of community impact.

This full paper supports areas in the innovative practice category about engineering education and how it has been challenged with integrating labs and experimental practices for student-learning in a traditional setting. The study was created to integrate gamification in the classroom and lab environments for experimental learning with regard to policy that supports safety instructional training within engineering education. Our objective was to identify an approach to promote engineering policies using app development techniques for gamifying lab and classroom practices. This approach also promoted awareness among participants in order to ensure a safety culture designed for learning methods. The gamification techniques were deployed to support engineering courses based on tools involving instructional expectations, policies and procedures. The safety instructional policy was encouraged in student learning by implementing an interactive learning process that identifies specific instructional tools for classroom and lab assessment. This concept of gamification was introduced to engineering practices in order to integrate set policies and course procedures for interactive learning within approach for building a mindset in an educational environment. The gamification concept was used to promote a safety culture and has improved the quality of learning by engaging students in meaningful practices. The concept has also reinforced safety standards for undergraduate engineering students in course and lab instructions. The course and lab instructions were implemented for the purpose of managing and promoting awareness among participants as a systematic approach to foster safe practices in engineering education. Overall, gamification has engaged undergraduate engineering students both inside and outside the educational environment. The undergraduate engineering students would often overlook, ignore or misinterpret the safety practices due to the lack of awareness and safety importance. The gamified approach has identified common malpractices concerning safety instructional policy and guidelines for classroom and lab operation. Gamification of safety instructional policy has created self-awareness to undergraduate engineering students and the influence of safety training procedures was mapped to student-learning outcomes. This technique has had an impact on students, faculty, staff and other support personnel in interacting with classroom and lab equipment through the understanding of operational guidelines and procedures that support engineering education.

Impact of Upgrading Equipment for Strength of Materials Labs on Student Perceptions, Motivation, and Learning

In this Work In Progress in the Research Category we present a qualitative study that explores how computing instruction experiences may mediate the progression of social and cognitive factors associated with career development in community college engineering students. The rapidly evolving technological landscape has created an increased need for an engineering workforce with computing skills. Traditionally, policymakers, educators and researchers have focused on K-12 and four-year secondary institutions as the primary arena for addressing our workforce development needs. However, community colleges, which enroll over one-third of U.S. undergraduates, represent an important, and not yet fully utilized resource for training future engineers. However, there is a dearth of engineering education research that seeks to critically understand the experiences of community college engineering students in learning computational skills. To address this gap, our study includes semi-structured interviews with first- and second-year students enrolled in an engineering program at a public two-year institution in the midwestern United States. Our work is informed by a social cognitive career theory (SCCT) perspective from which we examine how engineering course learning experiences involving integrated computing instruction influence students' self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations. In alignment with SCCT, our analysis will aim to identify personal attributes and external environmental factors that mediate students' differential responses to computational instruction. This pilot study is the first part of a larger research effort directed towards learning how to support students as they navigate the community college pathway to engineering.

This chapter explores how undergraduate engineering students are broadened in their education through the inclusion of non-core engineering content, such as business modules, in their curriculum in order to develop critical thinking skills and self-knowledge of what it means to be an engineer. The goal of the chapter is to provide a commentary on the level of interaction, from design of courses to design of curricula, between business faculty and engineering faculty, and the results of that interaction. This chapter sets out to (i) explore whether there appears to be a place in engineering education curricula for reflective critique of assumptions related to business thinking, and why; (ii) discover what kinds of business issues are reflected in engineering education curricula, and for what purpose; (iii) explore the degree of business hybridization in engineering degree programs; (iv) ask who teaches business issues within engineering education? To this end a taxonomy of engineering enlightenment is proposed, and this is used to discuss evidence of broadening within engineering curricula. The approach adopted is to: review all relevant engineering degree programs in Ireland, based on their publicly available program information; examine the accreditation reports for these same programs; and then survey deans from colleges or schools of business to examine whether the business college/school is involved in the education of engineering students in the institution or university. If yes, how the business college or relevant business faculty are engaged in the design of engineering curricula. In order to enable a comparative discussion, the chapter will focus on Irish engineering programs that seek accreditation from Engineers Ireland for professional engineering. A number of hybrid engineering programs of study are also explored, and their apparent strengths discussed, including hybridity limits.

Background To become qualified engineers, undergraduates must develop a contextualized epistemic cognition (EC) during the engineering design process (EDP), but little is known about their EC in the authentic EDP. This study aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of the EC and reported epistemic changes of undergraduate engineering students who served as EDP mentors in a secondary-school STEM-based community service-learning (CSL) project in Hong Kong. Harnessing the epistemic analytical model of Aims, Ideals, and Reliable Processes (AIR), this study qualitatively analyzed interviews with 11 undergraduate engineering students about the EDP during their mentorship experiences. Results Based on the empirical data, we refined the AIR model to AIRK by adding a new component, “K” (Knowledge resources), to better interpret undergraduate engineering students’ EC during the EDP. Furthermore, by analyzing undergraduate engineering students’ reflections on their epistemic changes through mentorship, we identified six aspects: (i) from learning theoretical knowledge to transforming knowledge to address societal needs; (ii) from an assignment-focused to a user-centered mindset; (iii) from recognizing the optimal solution to embracing the necessity for continuous improvement; (iv) from completing code to thinking creatively; (v) from a technology-centric mindset to valuing communication and collaboration; and (vi) gaining more interconnected STEM knowledge. Conclusions Our resulting AIRK model could provide a conceptual tool for understanding undergraduate engineering students’ EC in the EDP. The findings on reported epistemic changes demonstrated that mentoring secondary students in STEM projects could foster undergraduate engineering students’ EC development, revealing that the approach of university–school–community partnership can be practically sustainable and beneficial for adoption.

Generic competences are essential for engineers’ career advancement. However, different approaches for managing these competences across educational programmes in engineering exist. Our research aimed to explore the perceptions of undergraduate naval-engineering students enrolled in an elective leadership subject of the most relevant generic competences in the engineering profession. This study also identified their perceptions of developments and areas needing improvement. Applying the inductive method, the study was conducted through a content analysis of 63 portfolios used by undergraduate students at a polytechnic Spanish university. The findings conveyed that ‘collaborating and teamworking’ and ‘managing and leading’ were the most relevant groups of generic competences identified as important for career development. To enhance generic competence training in engineering education, our results propose an integrative perspective of these as a framework. The results reinforce the call for a better understanding of generic competences and metacognitive and conative endurances, supporting a more personalised integration of a holistic view of educational programmes in engineering.

This Full Research Paper reports findings from a narrative-style study about undergraduate engineering students' beliefs about smartness and identity. Extant research has demonstrated that conceptions of smartness and ability impact students as they navigate engineering at the collegiate level. Through our work, we aimed to better understand the nuanced interaction between these constructs to better support students through their undergraduate experience. For this work, we utilized narrative-style interviews to collect students' stories about their experiences and struggles in school. Interviews were conducted with seven participants, all of whom indicated on a recruitment survey that they had experienced academic struggle in their first year of an undergraduate engineering program. We analyzed the interviews using three-limits of-and developed a resistance part analytical memos and thematic analysis to identify emergent themes. Through our analysis, we aimed to address the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students describe their educational trajectories with respect to beliefs about smartness and identity? Three major findings of this study are; 1.) messages about smartness in educational systems have implications for students' identity as smart and beliefs about smartness, 2.) social experiences have a significant impact, particularly for the female students, on identity and beliefs about smartness, and 3.) students recognize the limits of-and developed a resistance to-normative indicators of ability (i.e., GPA). Our research contributes a more holistic understanding of the formation of beliefs about smartness and identity in the educational trajectories of undergraduate engineering students along with insight into the complex interaction between beliefs about smartness and identity. An implication of this study is that given the pervasiveness of identity and beliefs about smartness, they are almost never explicitly addressed in formal undergraduate engineering education and therefore should be considered by engineering education professionals when developing undergraduate engineering courses and curricula.

The usage of videos in undergraduate students’ engineering education has gained importance in recent years. Videos, which are used as a supportive tool in traditional engineering education, have become a source of information in online learning environments. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of educational videos on engineering undergraduate students’ laboratory applications and its examination of opinions developed within the scope of e-learning. For this purpose, the sample consisting of 50 undergraduate students from the civil engineering department has been used for this research. Pre-test and post-test process conducted within the scope of in this research were resulted in a meaningful difference after the analyses of Paired Samples t-Test (p=0.02) was made. This result shows that online learning platforms in engineering education and educational videos positively affect the students’ attitude. In addition, it is found out that educational videos affect the learning process as a useful educational source. Moreover, the instructors’ educational videos, which are Digital Learning Materials, positively impact the students’ motivation during the courses.

The emergence of the recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to the migration of traditional learning to distance learning platforms which have become the common teaching method among educational institutions. The effective implementation of this online learning method depends on various factors affecting learners’ satisfaction. The current study examines the relationship between learners' satisfaction on distance learning and factors (online learning self-efficacy, anxiety, fear of COVID-19) that impact students’ remote learning experience among undergraduate engineering students in Jordanian public and private universities. Data was collected via an online survey measuring students’ baseline of distance learning satisfaction, online learning self-efficacy, anxiety, and fear of COVID-19 which was distributed between June to August 2020. The participants in this study were 505 undergraduate engineering students (353 males, 152 females) who were mostly Jordanian (92.6%) with an average age of 21 (SD = 1.86). There were 298 participants from public universities (59%) and 207 from private universities (41%). Findings reported a significant gap between public and private universities students’ distance learning satisfaction, online learning self-efficacy, and anxiety level while the students’ scores on fear of COVID-19 was insignificant. Students in private universities were also reported to have higher baseline rates for all the constructs involved in this study. Furthermore, the online learning self-efficacy scores significantly predicted the distance learning satisfaction level among undergraduate engineering students when other constructs were treated as a constant. The findings of this study offer important implications for instructors in considering self-efficacy skills when working with undergraduate students. Limitations and recommendations for future research were also outlined.

This study explores undergraduate engineering and education students’ perspectives on their interdisciplinary teams throughout the rapid transition to online learning and instruction from a face-to-face to a virtual format. In this qualitative study, students’ reflections and focus groups from three interdisciplinary collaborations were analyzed using the lens of Social Cognitive Theory. COVID-19 created a dramatic change in the environment such that the most immediate and direct impact on students’ experiences was on the environmental aspects of Bandura’s triadic reciprocal determinism model, which then triggered behavioral and personal responses to adapt to the new environment. Subsequent evidence of reciprocal effects between environmental, behavioral, and personal factors took place as students continued to adapt. Results suggest that the modifications made to transition the project fully online were meaningful experiences for students’ learning and teaching of engineering through teams. This interdisciplinary partnership provided both pre-service teachers and undergraduate engineering students with the opportunity to learn and practice content and professional skills that will be essential for success in future work environments.

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) in science and engineering offer a number of positive outcomes to the students who are able to participate, including increased retention, clarified career goals, and development of problem‐solving skills. There have been a number of calls for research that investigates the experiences, identity, and cognitive develop of students who participate in UREs. In addition, recent work in other areas suggests that undergraduate students' perceptions often differ from those of faculty, graduate students, and staff, suggesting the need for research that considers the students' perspectives within these experiences. As such, in this constructivist grounded theory study, we sought to develop a contextualized model relating researcher identity and epistemic thinking for undergraduate engineering students engaged in research experiences. Data were collected from interviews with 20 undergraduate engineering students with research experience at six institutions. Coded interview transcripts were used to create structured memos that included a participant description, summary of salient concepts from theoretical frameworks and/or themes, and connections to other participants. These structured memos served as the data set used to develop the grounded theory model. This work establishes that (1) students' initial dispositions and beliefs about research influence their perceptions of researchers and themselves as researchers (researcher identity), (2) researcher identity can dissolve or solidify through UREs, (3) researcher identity affects and is affected by students' reflection on research practices, and (4) social interactions and context shape knowledge of research and researchers, researcher identity, and interest in research. Our work expands existing identity and epistemic thinking theories by investigating how students establish a researcher identity, conducting a context specific study of epistemic thinking, and exploring the relationships between these two constructs.

Engineers in construction and manufacturing are expected to be able to work with and lead diverse, multidisciplinary teams. Engineering students entering the workforce must be not only technically competent, but also possess skills in working with other people. These traits are frequently lacking with newly graduated engineering students due to the highly technical focus of their curriculum. The opportunity to develop Emotional Intelligence skills is limited. This research proposed that Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) undergraduate students may possess a higher level of Emotional Intelligence than Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) undergraduate students. The research also proposed that if differences were observed, that causal influences could be identified. Undergraduate engineering students at The Citadel completed The TalentSmart Emotional Intelligence Appraisal® along with demographic data and a variety of questions regarding their undergraduate experience. This research included freshman and senior students in Civil and Environmental (CEE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The Citadel. These surveys suggested that undergraduate engineering students increase their EI score as they advance from Freshman to Senior year. The surveys also suggest that Electrical and ComputerEngineering (ECE) Majors do not advance in their EI scores from Freshman to Senior year as well as Civil and Environmental (CEE) majors. A positive connection was established between work experience and the impact on higher levels of EI. A positive correlation for growth in EI score was also demonstrated for students who attended high schools with smaller graduating classes. Based on the results of this research, the paper proposes CEE and ECE faculty place increased emphasis on encouraging students to pursue summer jobs, internships, and similar extracurricular programs. Both CEE and ECE faculty should evaluate their curriculum with an eye towards inculcating learning opportunities for EI into course work. Additionally, faculty and admission officials should give at least equal consideration to admitting students who graduate from smaller schools that may offer less college prep courses that may appeal to admissions officials.