Research on engineering work emphasizes the centrality of collaboration in practice, and research on students’ transition from school to work highlights the deep social and organizational learning new engineers experience as they build the working relationships needed to function effectively in their roles. Yet even as engineering programs incorporate communication and teamwork into curricula, little work has been done to examine how students learn to build such relationships as they move from the relational structures of school to those in contemporary workplaces. To better understand this transition, this paper draws on data from a multi-institution study that followed graduates from four U.S. universities through their first year of engineering work, including reflective journals from participants’ first three months and interviews at 3, 6, and 12 months of work. The findings highlight three critical themes that characterize participants challenges related to interpersonal communication at work: 1) building working relationships with a diverse set of colleagues, 2) managing negative relationships, and 3) interacting with appropriate confidence. The findings point to the importance of targeted mentoring and collaborative projects that emphasize workplace cultures in undergraduate education. While such learning often happens in the design projects students undertake in their final year ("capstone" or "senior design"), it also points to the need for sustained attention to these skills throughout the curriculum.

In university, students develop professionally in ways that affect their ability to find and retain jobs after graduation. Outlined curriculum goals ensure students gain conceptual understanding and practical skills, but throughout their enrollment, students also develop their professional identities in ways that are less understood. Positively formed professional identities gain students’ entrances into a professional community, making the transition to work more seamless [1], [2], however, scholars concernedly note that a large population of students face violence, natural disasters, and pandemics that disrupt their education and development [3]. This makes displaced students who are facing forced migration particularly vulnerable to an incomplete professional identity formation.Researchers have begun to study the challenges displaced students face as they develop professionally and personally towards gainful employment in resettlement contexts [4], [5], finding that displaced students negotiate and renegotiate both personal and professional identities [6], [7], [8] upon migration. This negotiation and competition of identity happens in ways that are socially embedded [9] and can impinge on students’ development.These issues may be particularly challenging for engineering students, where tightly structured curricula make disruptions even more problematic and where a sense of belonging and connection to peer groups are crucial to success [10]. However, we do not yet have a clear comparative understanding of displaced student experiences in engineering, nor do we understand how displacement contexts impact displaced student professional development broadly. To that end, this scoping literature review and research full paper seeks to summarize and characterize current research on the influences on professional identity development in displaced university students broadly, laying the groundwork for future discipline-specific research. The study describes the contextual barriers to displaced students’ professional identity development in multiple disciplines, and then focuses on engineering-specific issues and complementary supports. Preliminary findings indicate that engineering-specific nuances exist in professional identity development for displaced students based on discipline-specific values, attitudes, conventions, and approaches. Uncovering these nuances helps ensure educators better facilitate positive professional identity development in displaced engineering students across disciplines, which is aligned with the achievement of the sustainable development goals.

The objective of this full paper is to explore the interplay between engineering judgment and communication practices involved in completing an undergraduate systems engineering senior project. We view engineering judgment as an embodied process that emerges through discourse as individuals position themselves relative to both other individuals and disciplinary norms in a range of contexts. It happens, broadly, through a series of tasks and thinking processes through which students choose and formulate problems, make assumptions, select data, and adopt roles in relation to disciplinary norms in different contexts. We explore this conceptualization of engineering judgment using thematic and dramaturgical analysis of a single case. The data collected are a semi-structured 90-minute interview collected with one systems engineering senior after completion of their senior project and graduation from their degree program. These data are first coded using a thematic analysis approach, then re-analyzed using a dramaturgical approach. Our findings raise important issues about the blend of communication demands faced by practicing engineers that potentially impact the socialization of engineering students. Different communication demands require students to use different ways to navigate complexity. The varied communication forms also prompt students to view themselves as professionals with the capacity to judge and act from a position of professional authority that vary with the situational context.

This study explores recent engineering graduates' perceptions of preparedness during their first twelve weeks at work. Drawing on data from a multi-site, longitudinal, U.S.-based study, we analyze quantitative survey data collected weekly from two cohorts of participants during their first three months of work; an average of 83 participants provided survey responses each week, for a total of 998 responses and an average of 8.9 surveys per participant. Participants were asked to rate, on a scale of one to seven, how prepared they felt for given list of activities (e.g. CAD, technical calculations, report writing); the list of activities was derived from common activities in capstone design courses explicitly intended to mirror workplace tasks. The results indicate that participants generally felt well-prepared for their work in industry. In addition, perceived preparedness increases over the first three months of work as participants spend more time on the job. There are no significant differences in perceived preparedness by site, but women report significantly lower levels of preparedness (p<; 0.05) than men across all months. The findings suggest that in their transition to work, the participants in this study, while clearly recognizing their need to learn a great deal, also identified significant ways in which their education, and particularly their capstone design courses, prepared them for full-time engineering work. Set against persistent industry reports highlighting lack of preparedness among new graduates, the perceptions of the graduates themselves suggests that the definition of and expectations around preparedness may vary widely based on perspective and context, and more work is needed to understand what the term means to the various constituents involved.

The engineering disciplines are rigorous in their application of scientific principles, and these principles are the ones most directly addressed in undergraduate engineering classrooms. However, engineers are also called to make decisions that implicitly account for complex criteria, including the welfare of those who use or are impacted by the systems engineers design and the economic needs of their employers. As a result, engineering is an art that requires practitioners to routinely navigate difficult tradeoffs that require professional judgments. These judgments include economic, ethical, social, and value-based dimensions. These dimensions can be conflicting, increasing the complexity of practice and foregrounding the prominence of judgment. And often, these judgements need to be explained to colleagues, managers, and clients through a range of written documents. Yet little work to date has investigated the relationship between the writing engineering students do and the development of engineering judgement, particularly in terms of how these facets intersect in students developing engineering identities . Therefore, the overall goal of this project is to elucidate the interactions between how students' identification with the engineering profession impacts the way they convey engineering judgments to different audiences.

This full paper examines the potential for using LinkedIn profile analysis to understand engineers' everyday work activity. Calls for change in engineering education are often framed around perceptions of the changing nature of engineering work in present times. Existing research on engineering work, which draws on interviews, ethnography, case studies, or surveys, consistently highlights the social and contextual dimensions of practice, but also suggests that engineering work may have more to do with maintaining existing systems than with creative development of new systems. To add to this growing body of research, in this exploratory study we turn to a novel data source: publicly available descriptions of engineering work available on social networks and job posting sites. Such data sources, if found to be useful, could significantly expand the reach of research on engineering work and provide access to much larger data sets than those obtained through current - predominantly qualitative - methods. This study is a preliminary look at using LinkedIn for these purposes. Specifically, we ask the question, "How does data about engineering work from LinkedIn compare to findings from in-depth interviews?" To answer this question, we use interviews with 15 new engineers at six and 12 months of work, and compare them to participants' LinkedIn profiles. The interviews, collected as part of a separate study, focused on newcomers' workplace responsibilities and challenges. Analysis focused on inductive coding to categorize engineers' work experiences and environments. The findings were then compared to participants' LinkedIn profiles to identify gaps and overlaps.

To educate engineers for sustainable development, we need to help them develop an understanding of engineering work that positions sustainable development at the core of our field. But given the importance of prior knowledge and beliefs in learning, we first need to understand how students and new graduates currently perceive engineering work. To address this gap, we draw on data collected from the Capstone To Work project, that followed students from four U.S. institutions from graduation through their first year of work. In this initial exploration, we analyze responses from 76 graduating seniors and 36 early-career engineers regarding their definitions of engineering. Using thematic coding, we identified 9 different themes, which we then grouped under the three categories specified by Sinek's "golden circle" of marketing: what, how, and why. Most of responses fell into the "how" category and focused on problem-solving and design, echoing the prominent cultural narratives about engineering. But based on the findings here, we argue that engineering education would benefit from focusing more on the why-question when talking about engineers' role in society, both to better educate holistic engineers and to more effectively reach a wider audience.

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress explores that, despite calls across a range of organizations for educational experiences that help students understand the broader impacts of engineering work, engineering faculty still frequently struggle with how to help students develop this understanding. Literature offers a number of insights, practices, and approaches to what broader impacts means, but faculty are often not prepared to teach in this domain. To that end, the authors are in the process of developing a workshop for faculty at their home institution that addresses local needs and concerns. While the workshop is still in development, the process itself has raised a number of challenges associated with understanding faculty beliefs and experiences, working within local constraints and expectations, and aligning with institutional culture. Because these issues can vary by institution, workshops to support faculty development are not, we argue, a one-size-fits-all option that easily ports from one institution to another. Thus, in this work in progress, we document the process of translating existing research and teaching materials on broader impacts and social responsibility into meaningful, contextualized faculty development at the local level. Using auto-ethnography, we highlight salient features of our experiences that can help guide similar efforts at other institutions. In addition, we will have delivered and assessed the workshop by the time of conference and will share findings on the effectiveness and impact of the workshop in our presentation.

Over the past 40 years, developments in writing studies research have emphasized the importance of both process-orientation - incorporation of scaffolding through feedback and revision - and situativity - recognizing that knowledge is best learned within the context it is to be applied. Engineering faculty, however, often view writing in ways at odds with both of these developments: treating writing as something to be taught elsewhere or integrating writing into engineering courses without incorporating feedback or revision. This mismatch is problematic, because improving engineering students' writing is a critical problem for engineering education. Additionally, feedback is often unfeasible within the constraints of many engineering courses-instructor time and large student-faculty ratios. One potential way to address these concerns is to use peer feedback. An open question, however, is how instructor and peer feedback practices differ and how that difference impacts students' revising process. We present results of an empirical analysis of peer vs. instructor feedback on a writing assignment in a large first-year engineering course. Findings indicate that peer feedback was at least as effective as instructor feedback in terms of quality improvement and that trained peer reviewers give feedback that is more consistent with effective practices than untrained instructors.

This paper presents the initial findings of a design cognition study involving two groups of high school juniors: those who have taken pre-engineering courses and those who have not. Equal numbers of dyad teams from both groups engaged in design-only sessions in which they generated solutions in response to the same design challenge. The design sessions were video and audio recorded. The recordings were transcribed and then segmented and coded using the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) ontologically-based design issues and design processes coding scheme. The students' design cognition was measured from the distributions of the design issues and design processes. Both the design issues and design processes were compared between the two high school student groups. Additionally, the results of the analyses were compared to baseline undergraduate engineering students. The results of this study did not reveal significant differences in either design issues or processes between the two high school student groups. However, when compared with the baseline undergraduate engineering students, there were significant differences between these groups with respect both to issues and processes and to the cognitive effort in their problem/solutions spaces.

Hofstede's theory of national cultures has been widely used to analyze cultural differences. In this pilot study we describe our experiences applying an instrument based on Hofstede's work to determine whether his dimensions of national cultures can be mapped to academic disciplines. In this paper, we present information about Hofstede's model as well as critiques of both the model and the instrument used. We also report initial results of a pilot survey based on Hofstede's model that we administered to a sample of 687 undergraduate engineering students. Preliminary results show that the instrument is reliable and valid; in addition, we present preliminary results regarding how different engineering majors map to Hofstede's cultural dimensions.

Engineering education has a retention problem resulting in the largest proportion of students leaving the major during their second year. Most frequently citing poor academic performance stemming from a combination of course difficulty, poor teaching, and a lack of a sense of belonging, the second year has shown itself to be an important focal point for intervention efforts aimed at addressing these concerns. While university sponsored support efforts have been developed, the fact remains that oftentimes students elect not to attend, thus posing the question of whether or not the onus is on the students or the programs to engage the other. In an effort to connect these two parties regardless of circumstance, a video-based virtual mentoring intervention was developed and tested as a means to offer the benefits of in-person mentoring without the social inhibitors that prevent students from attending. This paper discusses both the development of a virtual mentoring tool as well as some initial findings regarding students' viewing preferences and outcomes of this type of interaction.

As undergraduate research has become increasingly prominent in engineering education, researchers are beginning to explore this environment in more detail to better understand both what and how students learn. While multiple factors shape student experiences, the role of mentors has emerged as a critical facet. Previous mentoring research identifies functions such as role modeling, psychosocial support and career support, but little work has been done to understand how these functions are operationalized in undergraduate research experiences within engineering or how students perceive these practices. Summer research experiences, represent a unique environment because they are short-term (typically 8–10 weeks), highly intense (20–40 hours/week), and typically take students out of their home institution making the formation of mentor/mentee relationships challenging. To begin addressing this gap, this study explores student perceptions of mentoring in an interdisciplinary summer research program in water sustainability through qualitative interview data. The data set includes interviews with 20 students, gathered over two separate summers. Using a framework developed by prior researchers, the results indicate that these identified functions are valued by students, and they recognize when these functions are not adequately supplied, this encourages that exit interviews are an adequate way to assess the functions of research mentors.

Learning of threshold concepts in courses such as statics has traditionally been a difficult and critical juncture for students in engineering. Research and other systematic efforts to improve the teaching of statics in recent years range widely, from development of courseware and assessment tools to experiential and other "hands-on" learning techniques. This paper reports a portion of the findings emerging from a multi-year, multi-institution study investigating possible links between short writing assignments and conceptual knowledge development in statics courses. The theoretical framework of the study combines elements from cognitive learning theory that have largely been studied in different disciplinary contexts: expertise (cognitive science), procedural/conceptual knowledge development (mathematics education), and conceptual change (physics education). Interview data are analyzed using predetermined codes and open coding, then explored for common themes. The results build on our previous findings that students approach learning in statics with varying emphasis placed on procedural and conceptual knowledge development and that a student's learning approach influences their perception of the written problems and the ways that they utilize them in learning. Thus, we provide evidence that the learning approach of students may be an important factor in the success of interventions designed to improve conceptual knowledge in statics.

Engineering has been shown to be an important field of study and practice for economic and technological development, as well as an opportunity for students to improve their standard of living and their communities. Engineering also has the potential to provide a powerful career path in places that suffer disproportionate economic losses from shifts in the global economy, particularly as the growth of mobile communication technologies enable virtual work and local business development in areas formerly considered “remote” or “inaccessible.” Despite these opportunities, little investigative work to date has been done on recruitment of engineering students from rural cultures that are typically underrepresented in the field. To address this gap, this paper explores two such cultures: the Central Appalachians in the United States of America and the Maori in New Zealand. We present a review of the current situation in each region, along with preliminary findings from a study of Appalachian students, to identify both similarities and differences between the two peoples that can be used to enhance recruitment efforts and provide a global context for understanding the experiences of rural cultures.

Communication remains an essential skill for engineering graduates in both academic and industry settings, and ABET considers it a key student learning outcome for accreditation. Despite numerous studies of effective approaches to integrating communication into disciplinary courses, few engineering courses apply those approaches. To address this gap, we have undertaken a multi-year mixed methods study to explore faculty and student beliefs about communication. Faculty beliefs have been reported elsewhere; this paper focuses on student beliefs. We analyzed five focus groups conducted with engineering students at partner schools. The focus groups sought to uncover students' beliefs about where and how they learned communication skills within their engineering education. Focus groups were recorded and transcribed verbatim, then coded using standard open-coding procedures. The findings indicate that while students do have opportunities to practice communication in engineering courses, they may not always have optimal opportunities to learn communication in those courses. Most notably, students desired more examples and direct instruction for communication skills, including not only samples of “good” documents but also explanations about why they were good. Identifying pedagogical gaps between faculty practice and student experiences can help us develop targeted strategies to help creatively integrate these critical skills into an already packed engineering curriculum.

In order to develop critical thinkers and capable problem solvers it is important to understand the needs of today's engineering student and design instruction to meet those needs. An important component in that discussion is the degree to which students perceive themselves as adults versus child learners. The issue is important for educators; particularly those who teach senior-level courses, because research on adult learners points toward different classroom methods than those used for children. In this paper, we focus on capstone design - a course often structured to simulate a professional work experience to understand student beliefs regarding their self-perceived orientation as an adult learner and how those beliefs are related to a) their self-perceived learning outcomes and b) the value they place on forms and frequency of feedback. To examine this impact, we draw on the concept of “andragogy.” This study utilizes student data from a 2011 survey of capstone students. The data includes student beliefs regarding the andragogical assumptions, self-reports of their learning, and perceptions of the capstone course. The findings support Knowles' andragogical assumptions and indicate that student learning in project-based courses have the potential to have higher andragogical orientations. These findings provide insight into the characteristics of the capstone student and provide opportunities for faculty to tailor teaching to meet student needs.

As government and industry leaders place increased importance on entrepreneurship and innovation within science, technology, and engineering (STEM) in higher education, courses, programs, and centers are being developed to enhance students' learning and development in these areas. Despite this growth in programming and the extensive entrepreneurship research in the literature, little research has been completed regarding ways in which students in STEM disciplines value, identify with, and are willing to participate in entrepreneurship activities. This paper presents work in progress to develop a survey and run focus groups to better understand STEM students' perceptions of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship educational opportunities. The results can be used by educators to better understand the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of students being served by entrepreneurship and innovation programming, and to identify approaches to engaging more students in this critical area.

This work in progress reports preliminary findings from a study of six teams in a well-established Problem Based Learning (PBL) curriculum. As PBL gains popularity in engineering curricula, it is increasingly important to understand faculty roles in order to best prepare faculty for this type of teaching and to effectively design meaningful learning environments. Because PBL facilitation requires skills and techniques that differ markedly from traditional content-delivery modes, engineering faculty need a clear model to describe their roles and practices in such an environment. To develop such a model, we employ the theory of cognitive apprenticeship to analyze audio-video recorded sessions of PBL in engineering.

Within capstone design courses, the relationship between faculty and students can be classified as mentoring, where instructors fulfill functions that support career and psychosocial development of the students. Unlike traditional mentoring relationships, however, matching student teams to faculty mentors is not simply a process of one mentor and one mentee choosing each other. Project, team, and course structures are all dominant factors, resulting in both cross-sex and same-sex mentoring relationships. Literature on mentoring relationships in higher education has produced conflicting reports on which match yields better outcomes. Thus understanding the implications of same-sex and cross-sex relationships can be helpful in enabling faculty to effectively support the development of all students. This study applies an empirically derived model of capstone mentoring to data from a 2011 national survey of students enrolled in capstone design courses. The survey addresses students' perceptions of faculty teaching and their self-reported learning gains, and the data analysis presented in this paper focuses on similarities and differences based on the sex-pairing. The results provide preliminary insights regarding the impact of sex differences on the capstone mentoring relationship, and thus contribute to a more complete understanding of design teaching.

This paper reports the progress of a three-year longitudinal study on the impact of design education on students' design thinking and practice. Students from two curricula at a large research-intensive state university are being studied. The control group is a major focused on engineering mechanics, which has little formal design education prior to the capstone experience. The experimental group is a mechanical engineering major that uses design as a context for its curriculum. A task-independent protocol analysis method grounded in the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) design ontology is utilized to provide a common basis for comparing students across projects and years. This paper presents results of two years of the study, which included students at the beginning and the end of their sophomore year, and at the end of their junior year. The results of analyzing and comparing the percent occurrences of design issues and problem-solution index from the protocol analysis of both cohorts are presented. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how students' design cognition is affected by a design course.

In this paper, we aim to identify different types of knowledge that needs to be conveyed during a conceptual design task. We hypothesize that different types of knowledge has different transferability in a partially distributed team setting, and thus influences team members' communication behaviors. The impacts due to different transferability of design knowledge are discussed.

Communication and teamwork skills remain top-priority outcomes for engineering graduates. Yet researchers and educators alike know comparatively little about the teaching and learning epistemologies engineering faculty employ, or about how faculty epistemologies affect the learning mechanisms of engineering students. Our research seeks to address this gap by first examining student and faculty beliefs about effective practice and transferable learning outcomes with respect to communication and teamwork, and then by developing and testing interventions to enhance the teaching and learning of these important skills. The overall study uses a mixed methods approach including interviews and focus groups with faculty and students, followed by surveys of a broader audience, and finally both qualitative and quantitative assessments of the interventions. Preliminary results from the first phase of the project indeed show a gap between faculty and student beliefs about the teaching and learning of teamwork and communication skills in engineering.

In the literature describing capstone courses, authors typically classify their work as “mentoring,” though the term has also been used interchangeably with coaching, supervising, and managing. Yet few studies define these terms concretely, and consistency across studies is unclear. This ambiguity has lead to confusion concerning the responsibilities of faculty in the course, and in turn hindered faculty development efforts. To address this gap, the present study seeks to develop a concrete description of faculty-student interactions in the capstone course. We use the term “mentoring” because it implies a relationship between a a more experienced professional and a novice, where the mentor seeks to aid in the development of the protégé. In the case of capstone design, this development focuses on the integration of engineering theory and practice and the ability to comprehend and navigate the open-endedness of design problems. To provide the design education community with a working understanding of this relationship, this study applies Kram's theory of mentoring to the context of capstone design to determine the prominent mentoring functions operating in this context, and identifies variations by engineering disciplines.

This paper presents first year results of a longitudinal study of how engineering students develop design competencies over time, and how these competencies are affected by design education. Using a task-independent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology, the authors are able to evaluate students' cognitive processes as they work in pairs to respond to a design scenario. In this paper, the authors analyze data from experiments that occurred before and after the participants completed a sophomore-level design course. The percent occurrences of design issues and syntactic design processes from the first and second halves of each of the two experimental design sessions are analyzed and compared in order to identify differences in students' design behaviors. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how sophomore students' design ability is affected by a design course.