The purpose of this Work-in-progress, research-to-practice paper is to illustrate the implementation of the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI) at an R1 university in the Northeast of the US. The RDI is a research-based NSF-funded intervention directed at first-year doctoral students in engineering programs that aims to address common student struggles such as doctoral program management, fostering advising relationships, day-to-day management activities, navigating the culture of graduate school, and finding their place in the research community. The RDI curriculum was built leveraging research findings from a large dataset from a different intervention project aimed at later-stage graduate students. Throughout this process, we studied the experiences of roughly 125 underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (URM) doctoral students and identified five themes relating to the common struggles they face throughout their Ph.D. One of the objectives of the RDI project is to disseminate our intervention to approximately 25 institutions. Over the past two years, leaders from institutions that were part of our pilot dissemination were trained in our RDI curriculum and implemented a version of the RDI in their schools. This paper describes the implementation in one of those institutions that built and adapted two different versions of the RDI based on their students' needs and the logistical constraints of their institution. Based on a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with the collaborating institutional leaders (CILs), our study showed three initial findings: 1) Both RDI models allow a supporting community to navigate the challenges in graduate school; 2) The biggest challenge for each local RDI model is logistical; and 3) The support offered to URM graduate students motivates CILs to continue implementing the local RDI.

This Work in Progress Research paper aims to shed light on the reasons that inspire minoritized students to pursue a Ph.D. degree in engineering. Thus, this study investigates the motivations that URM students give as their deciding factors for pursuing doctoral degrees. We examine the research question: How do URM students describe their decision to pursue a doctorate in an engineering discipline? To explore our question, we conducted a modified grounded theory analysis of survey data collected from 51 URM students during a summer workshop held prior to the commencement of their respective programs. Their answers to open-ended questions and other contextual details formed the basis of our data sample. Our diverse sample includes representations of students from various engineering disciplines as well as various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Our study employs the principles of Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) to analyze the environmental variables, personal outcome expectations, and other factors that influence students' decisions to pursue a doctoral degree in their respective fields. Next steps of this work will employ SCCT, as we can gain a deeper understanding of students' motivations and identify the factors that play a significant role in their decision-making processes. Continuing work in this area can be valuable to engineering graduate programs by providing insights into how URM students can be supported throughout their degrees.

Effective graduate advising relationships are critical to the success of both graduate students and faculty advisors. Despite the significance of strong advising relationships, little work has focused on promoting graduate advising as a mutually beneficial activity that creates value for both faculty and graduate students. In this special session, the facilitators aim to bridge this disconnect by sparking faculty participants' curiosity in discussing and reflecting on their current advising approaches and adapting their current advising practices to be more mutually valuable. The session will cover topics such as scaffolded mentoring, the Situated Expectancy Value Theory of Motivation and its connection to graduate advising, and evidence-based practices for effective advising. The special session is intended for engineering and computing graduate faculty advisors interested in improving their advising practices and is expected to result in revised mentoring strategies and approaches co-constructed with peer and facilitator input. The session will be facilitated by Mayra Artiles, Rachel Kajfez, Holly Matusovich, and Amanda Singer.

This full research paper documents assessment definitions from engineering faculty members, mainly from Research 1 universities. Assessments are essential components of the engineering learning environment, and how engineering faculty make decisions about assessments in their classroom is a relatively understudied topic in engineering education research. Exploring how engineering faculty think and implement assessments through the mental model framework can help address this research gap. The research documented in this paper focuses on analyzing data from an informational questionnaire that is part of a larger study to understand how the participants define assessments through methods inspired by mixed method strategies. These strategies include descriptive statistics on demographic findings and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and coding on the open-ended response question asking the participants to define assessments, which yielded cluster themes that characterize the definitions. Findings show that while many participants defined assessments in relation to measuring student learning, other substantial aspects include benchmarking, assessing student ability and competence, and formal evaluation for quality. These findings serve as foundational knowledge toward deeper exploration and understanding of assessment mental models of engineering faculty that can begin to address the aforementioned research gap on faculty assessment decisions in classrooms.

In this Research Full Paper we explore the factors that traditionally minoritized students consider when selecting a graduate school to pursue a doctoral degree in an engineering discipline. To this end, we used case study methods to analyze the experiences of ten traditionally minoritized students through interviews conducted immediately after they had selected their graduate programs, but before they had commenced their studies. Our findings show that in choosing an institution, the most salient ideals these students hold are related to the offer of funding towards their degree and an alignment with their initial research interests. However, they described having made compromises on ideals related to their personal experience and racial identity, the most prominent being finding a faculty mentor with a similar racial background, finding a racially diverse institution, or being located in a geographical location they perceived to be more amenable to their individual identities. These findings suggest that continuing to increase the recruitment of traditionally minoritized faculty in engineering schools would have a direct impact on minoritized student recruitment, by thus helping to create spaces where more of their racial identity ideals are met and fewer compromises are made. Equally important to the recruitment of traditionally minoritized students is the transparency of funding opportunities during the recruitment and application processes, and the publication of current research opportunities within the institution.

This panel session will provide findings from the Professional Engineering Pathways Study (PEPS) followed by an interactive discussion between the panel members and attendees. The interactive forum is intended for stakeholders interested in understanding undergraduate engineering students career choice pathways. The process of engineering graduates pursuing their first position after graduation has become an increasingly complex process. Understanding the ever-increasing number of career options, discerning the specific engineering skills employees desire for a position, and the variety of methods resulting in successfully receiving a job offer may be daunting for students. PEPS, a multi institutional longitudinal mixed methods study, studied factors such as career options, the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for those options, and student career expectations, values, and goals from both university influencer and student perspectives. The panel will highlight salient results anticipated to be of interest to academic advisors, career counselors, faculty, and students pursing their first position after graduation and act as a catalyst to an interactive discussion with attendees.

This research to practice full paper describes an answer to a problem described in a study completed by the Council of Graduate Schools, where data showed that doctoral students in the United States are departing from their pursuit of the Ph.D. at high rates. Additionally, the study showed that the departure rates for underrepresented minorities (URM) (i.e., African-American, Native American, Pacific Islander American, and Hispanic American) are higher, as they complete their Ph.D. at lesser rates than their majority peers. Previous research has suggested that lack of motivation during the dissertation phase is one of the leading factors for students' decision to depart. This phase of the doctoral pursuit is often characterized as lonely and filled with uncertainty about the process towards degree completion.To address this problem, we have created the Dissertation Institute. This NSF-funded research project consists of a one-week workshop for underrepresented minorities in the final phases of their Ph.D. in engineering. The goal of the workshop is to offer a practical and timely experience for doctoral students to help them progress through degree completion. The design of this workshop is grounded in research to address issues typical of the final phases of the Ph.D., help shorten students' time-to-degree and increase doctoral completion rates for URM. While similar programs already exist, the Institute differs by simultaneously collecting research data that will further the understanding of the success and value beliefs of its participants and help develop future workshops.The purpose of this publication is to present a description of the Dissertation Institute as well as the evaluation results for its first implementation which took place in the summer of 2017. The evaluation plan consists of participant pre and post surveys, observations, and individual session assessments. Preliminary results show that the Dissertation Institute increased students' success beliefs and utility and cost-benefit value in academic writing. Results also showed that students appreciated having a safe space to communicate their academic concerns with session facilitators and fellow doctoral students. Students also expressed the individualized attention from the workshop facilitators aided in the transfer of the advice received throughout the multiple sessions to their specific pursuits. Findings from this evaluation will inform future development and implementations of the Institute and help inform the design of similar workshops.

This Research Work in Progress paper presents a Community of Practice (CoP) for Metacognition research. This paper will provide a brief overview of the current state of metacognition research in engineering education. Current work in engineering will be compared to suggested focus areas in the broader study of metacognition in education. This paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the CoP the authors are working to form to support future research in metacognition in engineering. The CoP is currently formed around five major thrust areas of research: K-12 Education, Undergraduate Education, Workforce Development, Faculty Development, and Frameworks and Methods.

Broadening participation in engineering is an issue of national importance. Particularly in rural areas, otherwise capable students do not have the opportunity to envision themselves pursuing a career in engineering. To begin closing this gap, we present findings from a qualitative research study investigating the perceptions of engineering work held by rural and Appalachian youth. Fifth grade students participated in this research study as part of a university-wide program to broaden participation in higher education. Results indicate that students in this study describe engineering work primarily as involving fixing or inventing. Present in both of the two descriptions was an emphasis on technical artifacts in engineering work. This research contributes to an understanding of possible relevant approaches to engineering interventions with this demographic.

This paper introduces the Gatekeepers Study, a three-year project with the goal of examining variation in enrollment in postsecondary engineering programs for students from Virginia high schools. Our research takes a macroscopic, systemic view of an entire state's high school-to-postsecondary engineering pathway to understand how each high school performs in terms of having its students from underrepresented groups who fit an engineering academic profile actually choose to enroll in an engineering postsecondary program. We frame our research holistically to understand how the variety of potential gatekeepers — including the people, places, programs, and policies — might be positioned, tweaked, or trained to support a more diverse population of students who choose to enroll in postsecondary engineering programs. This mixed-methods research design is organized into three sequential phases and will be grounded theoretically using Social Cognitive Career Theory to guide variable identification and qualitative protocol development. We are currently in Phase 1 and will describe preliminary results.

Recently, games have grown in popularity as tools to support student learning and motivation. Accordingly, games represent one possible contributor to student motivation, an outcome of engineering education particularly important to learning and to student persistence. However, research into game-based learning - a broad term referring to the use of games in education - has been rather narrow to date, focusing on proving or disproving the effectiveness of games as learning tools. As evidence supporting games' effectiveness continues to mount, it is important that the field broaden its inquiry to provide practice-based insights that enable instructors to implement game-based learning in an effective manner. Our research seeks to address this gap by studying how engineering instructors use games in the classroom, and how these teaching practices related to student motivation to learn. The overall study will use a multiple-case study approach, including observations and interviews with instructors and their students. Preliminary results from this work-in-progress study revealed substantial variability in the teaching practices of two engineering instructors using non-digital games, and provided several methodological implications for future study of game-based teaching.

Research connected on both career goals and self-efficacy has linked each to the persistence of undergraduate students in engineering programs: self-efficacy through numerous qualitative and quantitative studies, and career goals through a recently conducted study. Additionally, research suggests that self-efficacy plays a role in the goals that individuals set, and whether they persist towards the accomplishment of those goals. In this work in progress study, we focus on how those relationships can provide researchers and educators with new ways of considering factors related to persistence in engineering programs. In this paper, we discuss results from a piloted survey, and their meaning for continued research. Initial results revealed a relationship between career goals and self-efficacy. Self-efficacy for persistence correlated significantly (p <; 0.05) to ambiguity that students have about their career goals. The next investigative steps in this study will include the collection of additional interview data. New interview data will help us build more of an understanding of how self-efficacy and career goals relate. After an interview protocol has been created, future work will focus on comparing career goals and self-efficacy to persistence data.

Students from low social economic status (SES) groups remain underrepresented in higher education and particularly in STEM fields. From existing literature, we know some of the barriers in promoting STEM careers among people in low SES groups include a lack of role models, understanding or misconceptions of STEM careers, and knowing about STEM career opportunities. The purpose of our research is to explore the potential influence of socializers on students as they make career choice decisions (primarily in science and engineering) from student's and educator's perspectives. We focused on students from Appalachia because they typically come from lower SES, are often first generation college (FGC) students, and are underrepresented in STEM fields, making their college and career choices particularly important to understand. We framed our research in Eccles' Expectancy Value Theory using data from an on-line informational questionnaire with educational stakeholders and in-person interviews with high school students from rural central Appalachia. Consistent with EVT, our findings reveal that students consider their parents and their educators as valuable socializers. Educators, however, value outreach activities provided by professionals to help students explore engineering career choices. This is consistent with a reported lack of confidence in ability to talk with students regarding engineering careers. By comparing the perspectives of students and educators, we begin to address the potential gaps of “who's doing what” with respect to assisting students as they navigate career choice decision making in high school.

Data show that doctoral students in the United States, particularly those from underrepresented groups, are leaving at high rates before obtaining a degree because of the long, arduous and uncertain road to graduation. The primary goal of this NSF-funded research project is to offer the Dissertation Institute: a practical and timely experience for doctoral students in engineering disciplines to address issues germane to shortening time-to-degree and increasing degree completion rates, with emphasis upon underrepresented minority students (African American, Native American, Pacific Islanders American and Hispanic American). The project is a mixed-method, multi-year and multi-phased study that will create the opportunity for students from underserved populations to come together and participate in an intervention designed for their benefit. The framework guiding the project is Eccles' Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT). This work-in-progress will describe the overall project and the progress to date. We are currently in Phase 1 of the project. The research question guiding Phase 1 is: From the faculty/administrator and student perspectives, what success and value beliefs support and hinder the completion of the doctoral degree for underrepresented racial minority students in engineering disciplines? Findings will inform and facilitate the design of the Institutes in Phase 2.

If the engineering education community is serious about improving its culture and climate for underrepresented groups, it is imperative to educate students about the importance of diversity and inclusion. Effectively incorporating diversity-related course content into the curriculum requires an understanding of student knowledge of and attitudes toward diversity. Accordingly, this work-in-progress explores engineering students' beliefs about the intersection of diversity education and the engineering curriculum. Informed by Eccles' Expectancy Value Theory (EVT), the authors pose the following research question: What ability-related beliefs and subjective task values do undergraduate engineering students have in relation to diversity education? This exploratory study resulted in the development of an interview protocol and survey instrument for exploring students' beliefs about diversity as it relates to engineering. Initial findings point to the need for closer examinations of student attitudes in subsequent research. Ultimately, the results of this study will directly informed diversity and inclusion efforts at our local institution.

Metacognition plays a key role in the development of an effective, reflective engineering student who is learning to solve ill-structured problems. While we have developed an intervention to engage students in their metacognitive development within existing courses, it is equally important to consider instructors' perspectives. This work-in-progress presents the results of our analysis of 14 instructor semi-structured interview responses regarding implementation issues, instructor value for the intervention, and potential implications of adapting such an intervention. Our initial analysis indicates that instructors in our sample feel confident that they can teach students about metacognition, but that they still desire secondary supports. Ease of implementation is important so that instructors do not feel they are choosing between regular course content and students' metacognitive development. Instructors valued the ability to “diagnose” where students may have gaps in their metacognitive practice and felt that it was important to have a compelling message, perhaps from peers, to communicate the value of metacognition.

This paper introduces the Professional Engineering Pathways Study (PEPS), a three-year study aimed at developing new understandings of early career engineering career preparedness and decision-making. The project takes a national perspective, drawing on data from six partner institutions across the U.S., and focuses specifically on engineering students' experiences, perceptions, and plans as they look toward their initial career steps. The project involves two critical elements. The research element uses a longitudinal, mixed-method approach to examine how engineering students explore, select, and prepare for their chosen careers. The community of practice element focuses on bridging research-to-practice by engaging administrators, faculty, and staff at the six partner institutions in data interpretation and dissemination activities. This research will help drive continuous improvement in engineering programs and universities. Preliminary results of the study will be presented at the conference.

In this Work In Progress paper, we describe an NSF-funded research project designed to generate transferable tools that can be used to teach and evaluate undergraduate engineering students' metacognitive skills. Metacognition, defined as the knowledge and regulation of one's own cognitive (or thinking) processes, is critically important to student learning and particularly instrumental in problem-solving. Nonetheless, much of the research has occurred in controlled research settings and little is known about how to help students develop metacognitive skills in classroom settings. Through this project, we are working to close this gap by creating and testing a set of interventions designed to help students develop metacognitive skills and to help faculty teach and evaluate this important skill.

Engineering is a demanding discipline and otherwise qualified students often take their talents elsewhere- either before earning a Bachelor's degree or shortly thereafter. As a result, engineering educators must provide students with adequate support to increase the chances of students successfully integrating into the field of engineering. However, little is known about the relationship between Institutional Support and Student Integration or how each construct influences the retention or early-career decision-making of engineering students. Drawing on the Model of Co-curricular Support, the purpose of this paper is to describe current efforts to develop survey instruments that can be used to investigate how undergraduate engineering students rate themselves on Institutional Support and Student Integration, paying close attention to gender and race/ethnicity. Survey instruments that are valid and reliable within this context would be useful for assessing the impact of student interventions.

The purpose of this proposed mini-workshop is to connect our research in conceptual change [Collaborative research: Getting Engineers to Talk Across Disciplines, EEC 1129447] to instructional practice. Our research suggests that one potential indicator of students' conceptual understanding across several engineering disciplines is their use (or misuse) of language. During this mini-workshop participants will be able to read excerpts from interviews we conducted, discuss how to draw inferences about student learning from these interviews, and then brainstorm how they can be more explicit about the use of language in their classrooms.

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.

As the field of Engineering Education continues to grow so does the number of research studies. In this ever developing field, it is important to understand the practical applications and implications of this growing body of work. This paper discusses the initial practical applications of one study designed to examine the motivation and identity development of Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs). Our hope is that by sharing the initial practical applications of our work in the work-in-progress format, we can better define the appropriate applications of this particular study but also contribute to the conversation of research to practice in Engineering Education.

In response to the persistent issues of retention and diversity, many colleges offer Engineering Student Support Centers (ESSCs). However, little is known about ESSC design or how these centers function alongside the engineering curriculum and within the larger systems of engineering education. Based on the current literature, there is a need to better understand ESSC design and how such centers influence the institutional experience of undergraduate engineering students. Our research seeks to address this gap by examining ESSCs of varying structure and configuration at multiple institutions. The overall study will use a multi-case study approach, which includes interviews and open-ended surveys with center administrators and engineering students. Preliminary results from the first phase of the project reveal a variety of ESSC structures and will assist us in representing the assortment of centers in the later phases of the study.

The purpose of this paper is to provide significant evidence from the literature for the use of emerging methods to study engineering students' use of metacognitive strategies when studying. We will review current research methods used to study metacognition and provide evidence that observational methods are an appropriate methodological choice when attempting to study the actual metacognitive strategies students engage in when in naturalistic settings.

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.

Many engineering programs have a common first-year curriculum required for all students. The courses tend to be large in size requiring the use of Teaching Assistants (TAs) for implementation. The responsibilities of TAs vary including lecturer, lab instructor, and grader. Despite their significant presence and varied functions, little is known about the roles of TAs as a whole across institutions. This study fills a gap in the literature by describing the roles and responsibilities of TAs in multiple first-year engineering programs across the nation, providing a foundation for future work investigating TA experiences, motivation, and identity development.

This Work in Progress paper describes a five-year study where we apply a hot cognition framework to analyze the perspectives, experiences, and practices of faculty and students with regard to conceptual learning. Although this project focuses specifically on thermal sciences, the results are expected to be generalizable across engineering conceptual domains. The project involves three sequential phases, each guided by research questions and leading to five measurable outcomes that contribute to the understanding of intentionality and conceptual change.

Research shows life experiences, specifically community-based shared experiences before the freshman year, are a key factor in professional identity growth, but few studies explore exactly what it is about these experiences that contribute to students' identity development. Our study aims to further understand exactly how this identification happens to assist faculty and program administrators in understanding what ways they can help students identify with their profession in a stronger way. Through a mixed methods research design, we will answer the following research question: How do summer preparatory programs contribute to students' development of an engineering identity? We started with a series of focus groups with participants from a summer engineering transition program which is covered in this paper and will continue in the future with additional focus group data and a quantitative survey at a large research institution and at a military academy. Ultimately, our goal is to uncover how students' develop their professional identities.

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.

Research in engineering education has shown that academic programs are often designed based on a projected image of engineering practice. However, this image may be outdated or misaligned with today's actual professional work. To develop a more complete picture, we designed the Engineering Pathways Study (EPS). EPS extends findings from the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), and in particular findings from CAEE's multi-method, multi-institutional Academic Pathways Study (APS) research project. Following-up with participants from APS, we are uniquely positioned to explore transitions to the workforce and the needs/experiences of early career professionals (ECP). Over a period of two years, our sequential mixed-methods design uses outcomes from in-depth interviews to develop a survey for a broader sampling. Currently in early phases of interviews and analysis, preliminary findings highlight connections and gaps between current career experiences and academic career preparation.