This Full Innovative Practice Paper explores an intervention in which undergraduate engineering students participating in engineering education research (EER) conduct a meta-analysis of their own learning journeys through a unique reflection process that engages qualitative education research methods and engineering design principles. This work expands on our previous research on factors that impact engineering students' learning journeys, including but not limited to gendered learning experiences, the influence of external and internal narratives on engineering students' identities, and conforming and non-confirming motivations and behaviors that affect engineering students' learning journeys. While our previous work allowed engineering undergraduate scholars to cultivate a deep understanding of the qualitative research paradigm's intricacies and reflect on other engineering students' learning paths, this innovative practice invites them into a space of continuous - albeit informal - reflection on their own learning trajectories. Specifically, we have designed and implemented an innovative practice that allows for EER students' metacognitive development as they learn about themselves through reflection on the learning of others in their education research and by integrating this process with engineering design practices - a more habitual paradigm for engineering undergraduates. The following prompts guide the EER students' engagement with this intervention: What are the EER students' motivations to engage in this innovative practice's reflective activities? How has the engagement in this innovative practice influenced their perspectives on their learning journeys? What are the EER students' emergent sense-making narratives about themselves resulting from participation in this reflective contemplation? This paper describes the process and artifacts resulting from this design-based qualitative meta-analytic practice that range from art-based representations to storytelling to mind maps. As is evident in the artifacts produced and further explored in this paper, the EER students' engagement in this innovation had and continues to have a profound, lasting positive impact on their learning journeys as engineers and undergraduate education researchers.

In this Work-in-Progress Research Paper, we explore students' emotions and motivations in a game-based learning (GBL) environment. GBL has been shown to be effective in improving students' cognitive and non-cognitive learning outcomes, including emotions and motivations. In this study, we focus on the Cone Penetration Testing module of GeoExplorer's virtual learning environment, which has been shown to enable civil engineering undergraduates to develop key competencies necessary to problem-solve and make critical on-site decisions. This paper examines the impacts of GeoExplorer on students' emotions and motivations by asking: (1) How, if at all, do students' self-reported emotions shift through experiencing Geo-Explorer, and how does GeoExplorer contribute to these shifts, if at all? and (2) What is the connection between students' self-reported emotions and their self-reported motivational attitudes, both before and after they engage with GeoExplorer? Responses from 60 participants about their emotions and motivations pre-and post-engagement with GeoExplorer were analyzed. Inductive methods, including open coding and the constant comparative approach, were used to analyze the following emotions-based survey item: Thinking about your experience over the past week in the course, what particular emotions and/or thoughts about the course both inside and outside the classroom stand out for you? Deductive analytical practices, including closed coding, were used to analyze the following motivations-based survey item: What factors contributed to your motivation over the past week in the course? Consistent with literature, our preliminary findings indicate an interrelationship between GBL experiences and shifts in students' reported emotions. We also determine a link between these emotional shifts and motivational changes from pre- to post-engagement with GeoExplorer. It is the interplay of these three elements - GBL experience, student emotions, and student motivations - that is at the center of this work.

This Work-in-Progress Research Paper centers on game-based learning and its impact on student motivation as a function of their self-defined demographic factors. Specifically, this work investigates the game-based learning experience of civil engineering undergraduates engaged with the Cone Penetration Testing module of GeoExplorer, a virtual learning environment that simulates in-field learning about the structural properties of soil, providing students with the opportunity to practice competencies and mindsets associated with real-world data collection and analyses. In this paper, we explore the impacts of GeoExplorer on student motivation by addressing the following research questions: (1) How, if at all, do students experience identifiable motivational shifts over the course of their engagement with GeoExplorer? (2) What is the interplay between engagement with GeoExplorer, demographic factors, including students' racial, ethnic, and gender identities, and student motivation? and (3) How can game-based learning environments best address the needs of students with different motivational attitudes? Preliminary analyses of 60 response pairs to the pre- and the post-GeoExplorer engagement surveys from 2021 were analyzed. Deductive analytical practices using ‘a priori’ qualitative coding, based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) of motivation, were used to examine the following survey item: What factors contributed to your motivation over the past week in the course? Please give specific examples of activities, interactions, emotions, thoughts, etc. that may have contributed to your motivation. While our early findings indicate distinct differences in students' motivational outcomes between the pre- and post-survey, no clear patterns in motivational shifts are identified across the board, suggesting that the GeoExplorer experience may have impacted each student's motivation uniquely. However, patterns emerged between students' pre-survey motivation types, based on demographic factors. Additionally, unique shifts in motivational attitudes between the pre- and post-surveys were found to occur within each demographic grouping. These findings and challenges in performing this study are further discussed with a proposal for possible future directions.

This Work-in-Progress Research Paper examines the use of contemplative pedagogy for cultivating empathetic and compassionate learning environments in engineering education. Contemplation - often associated with heightened awareness and presence of mind - is comprised of such practices as deep listening, beholding, and meditation, which engage participants in intentional reflection, consideration, and thoughtful observation. Contemplative pedagogy supports participants, individually and collectively, in engaging deeply with themselves and the world by emphasizing empathy, compassion, self-compassion, and creativ-ity. Traditional engineering education engages students predom-inantly in cognitive ways of knowing. In comparison, contem-plative pedagogy creates learning environments that transcend cognition, thereby infusing emotional and embodied knowing into the educational paradigm. Such learning spaces can empower students to access their whole selves in their educational journeys and foster empathy, compassion, self-compassion, and ultimately, belonging to the learning process and learning environment. This paper describes two participants' journeys in one undergraduate physics foundation course delivered at a small, private, non-traditional, engineering college, where students were invited to engage with course content through contemplative pedagogy, including approximately weekly reflective assignments. Each assignment invited students to engage with meditation, curated contemplative activities, and contemplative readings in addition to the technical content. Two of the eighteen students enrolled both consented to participate in the study and engaged with every reflective assignment. Participants' data were analyzed as an instrumental case study using narrative and thematic approaches to allow for emergent phenomena to surface. We find that contemplative pedagogy offers students a scaffolding to reflect on themselves, the world, and the relationship between the two. As well the transformative power of contemplative pedagogy is affected by the participant's focus and orientation toward contemplative practices: one student focused on internal growth and experienced feelings of empowerment through improved connection with themself; another student focused on facilitating growth in others and did not perceive transformational changes.

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper describes a five-year sustainability intervention in an introductory engineering design course. With the aim of preparing future engineers, undergraduate engineering education is shifting environmental sustainability from the outskirts of the student experience to the center of curricular structures. For example, student engagements with environmental sustainability, referred to as “sustainability” in this paper, are moving from co-curricular experiences (e.g., Grand Challenges Scholars Program) to required coursework. Efforts to identify and inculcate sustainability-related knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as behaviors, beliefs, and mindsets needed by engineering graduates are advancing. This transformation, while critical, can be challenging for institutions, instructors, and students alike, and results from early implementers of sustainability-related curricular experiences can inform these efforts. We present an intervention integrating ecological system design practices. Our innovative practice lies in pursuing holistic treatment of environmental sustainability in a core required introductory course enlivening disciplinary practices with student-centered pedagogy. For the purposes of preliminary assessment of this intervention, we reviewed students' engagement with sustainability during the course, their post-experience sustainability beliefs and attitudes, and the course assistants' narratives about their engagement with the students focused on sustainability. Preliminary results indicate a limited affinity for autonomous engagement with sustainability practices. Potential emerging explanations include differing perspectives between students and instructors on what constitutes impactful sustainability practice, a lack of a supporting context for establishing personal beliefs, and a lack of support for developing course-related ideas of the self and sustainability. Our experience has implications for early STEM curricula involving environmental sustainability. Requiring sustainability knowledge, skills, and abilities development ensures all students experience certain practices, but does not ensure their adoption into professional identities. We propose highlighting the course's hidden curriculum and focusing on the social architecture, establishing a more explicit community-of-practice container to enable more authentic sustainability participation.

In this Work-In-Progress research paper, we expand upon our previous analyses of engineering students' learning journeys using narrative analysis and grounded theory. This study investigates participants' narratives of their conforming and non-conforming motivations, decisions, and the results of making those decisions as pivotal learning moments in their journey of learning. The following research questions drive our exploration: (1) In what ways does the predetermined path of learning serve as a motivating factor in students' decisions to conform? (2) How do external narratives relevant to one's learning journey contribute to conforming motivations and a participant's decision to conform to predetermined paths, specifically in the decision-making processes of women-identifying participants? (3) What are the underlying reasons for students' conforming and non-conforming behaviors and the ensuing results of each decision in terms of happiness, agency, personal power, and identity development? We use a semi-structured and open-ended interview protocol to interview four students (two men- and two women-identifying) about their learning journeys. Our initial findings suggest that when students engage with the sense of personal power, while carefully investigating external narratives presented to them, they feel more satisfied with their choices and more motivated to pursue their chosen path.

This Work-in-Progress research paper focuses on the game-based learning environment of GeoExplorer, a digital learning tool that simulates Cone Penetration Testing (CPT) – a field test that civil engineers conduct to understand soil properties. This paper aims to investigate the gendered patterns of student interaction with GeoExplorer, if any, and the associated gendered patterns of content comprehension and self-efficacy related to one's ability to pursue CPT in the field, if any. As such, we ask: (1) How, if at all, does gender affect a student's belief in their ability to apply skills gained through engagement with GeoExplorer in real world environments? and (2) How, if at all, do prior gaming experience and gender impact the GeoExplorer play experience? Four open-ended semi-structured interviews regarding students' experience with gameplay, gender identity, and learning were analyzed. Preliminary analyses used narrative and grounded theory approaches. Our early findings indicate a lack of student insight on the role of their gender identity on their gameplay experience and the presence of a gendered impact of gameplay on student learning and self-efficacy in carrying out CPT in the field.

In this Work-in-Progress research paper we report on the process of and findings from a secondary data analysis (SDA) investigation that builds on a primary study about the role of First-Year Engineering (FYE) experiences on students' engineering identities and community. The purpose of this SDA work was two-fold: we aimed to train undergraduate engineering students in qualitative methods and understand the process of SDA investigation as a training tool; and build on and expand the primary study's findings. The SDA team was composed of one of the original researchers and three new scholars – a faculty member and two students from an undergraduate-serving institution. The original study sites were two large research-focused institutions that differ in their FYE curricular content and structure. The data sources included pseudonymized transcripts of interviews with students during their second year, as well as institutional demographic data including participants' major and self-identified gender. Thematic and grounded theory approaches were used as the primary analytical tools. Our analyses identified four emergent themes summarized as: (1) feelings of inadequacy and creation of strong bonds with peers; (2) students' perceptions of societal definitions of engineering and their effects on students' career choice and engineering ability; (3) students' perceptions of their own engineering identity and how it aligns with that of society; and (4) formation of support networks and their impact on student's FYE experiences. Furthermore, despite differing FYE structures, we found that students from both institutions describe similarly their engineering identities, including lacking confidence in their engineering identity and concern about external perceptions of what makes an engineer. Finally, we found that SDA serves as a training tool to support the development of undergraduate engineering students using qualitative methods.

This Special Session will provide a theoretical and experiential understanding of contemplative pedagogies and how they can be used to create learning spaces that foster belonging. Contemplative pedagogies embrace all aspects of students' authentic selves to create more inclusive learning environments that honor and engage diverse ways of knowing and being. By providing an introspective frame for engaging with course content, contemplative pedagogies allow students to integrate their identities and experiences into the learning process, thereby finding greater meaning and connection to the world around them. In engineering education, contemplative pedagogies have been shown to have a myriad of benefits including enhancing learning, well-being, productivity, self-awareness, empathy, and communication. In addition, contemplative pedagogies engender trust and belonging by inviting students to co-create their learning experiences in compassionate learning spaces. This Special Session will invite participants to engage with contemplative pedagogies while also gaining the knowledge and skills necessary to apply them in their own local contexts. Specifically, through both interactive lecture and experiential practice, participants will be introduced to a set of contemplative pedagogies that are transferrable to diverse learning environments. This session is intended for all audiences who support students' learning so that they can engage these practices in fostering a personal and collective sense of belonging for their respective student populations.

Geotechnical engineers work with a complex material. Unlike steel or concrete, soil is heterogeneous, and its properties are difficult to predict. As such, judgment plays a significant role in geotechnical engineering practice and the design process is unavoidably iterative. This WIP starts with geotechnical engineering as the origin for defining engineering judgment, but the emerging theory can service all engineering decision making. The process through which aspiring engineers practice engineering judgment in their education remains a research area in its adolescence. Members of industry posit that experience is essential for competent engineering practice, but traditional engineering education practices provide few opportunities to acquire such experience. The GeoExplorer project is a mixed reality "mock internship" that allows students to get preliminary experience with field testing through a mixed-reality game-based learning environment. The CPT module of GeoExplorer was designed to both develop and measure gains in engineering judgment. The importance of defining engineering judgment with respect to engineering education standards became clear when designing this module to serve undergraduate engineering classrooms.

In this Work-in-Progress paper, we use narrative analysis and grounded theory methods to investigate and expand on our previous analyses of engineering undergraduates’ learning journeys. This study examines the ways in which students process their unique learning experiences to form an individual narrative identity, contributing to a larger understanding of themselves and their identities as learners in the engineering education context. In particular, we focus on how one’s minoritized identity or identities in engineering education are linked to how their narrative identity is formed. Our preliminary analyses of interviews with four engineering students identify a correlation between their majority or minority identity (based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social and cultural capital) in the engineering education and their learning journey narrative type. Specifically, students with majority identities hold an ‘academic-centered learning journey narrative’ about themselves that is focused on academic schooling, whereas learning journey narratives shared by students with minoritized engineering identity or identities are holistic in nature and are focused on life experiences. These two ways of narrating one’s learning journey represent the types of stories students tell about their learning and their current learning experiences. This work serves to underlie and support engineering educators as they create equitable and holistic learning environments for all students.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper focuses on digital game-based learning (DGBL), which refers to the use of a virtual environment to support students’ learning. In this exploratory study, we examine how students engage with GeoExplorer, a digital game-based learning environment that simulates Cone-Penetration Testing (CPT), an on-site test used in geotechnical engineering to investigate soil properties that students typically don’t have access to. In GeoExplorer’s CPT activity, students participate in a virtual internship in which they examine several sites with varied types of soil. This paper investigates DGBL environments by leveraging Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to ask the following research questions: (1) How do "freedom" and autonomy within GeoExplorer encourage students’ new emergent learning strategies? and (2) How do emergent learning strategies in GeoExplorer support students’ confidence as they self-guide their learning? Ten open-ended semi-structured interviews were performed with civil engineering students from three U.S.-based institutions. The data are analyzed using narrative analysis and a grounded theory approach. Our preliminary findings indicate that, while GeoExplorer is intended as a complement to in-person learning, it serves both as a complement and supplement to the online learning that helps to engage students during the pandemic. Students share that a felt sense of "freedom" within GeoExplorer encourages them to engage in different emergent learning strategies, such as repetition and trial and error. Students also describe that these emergent learning strategies promote knowledge retention and understanding, and further support their confidence in performing CPT. Our preliminary findings provide opportunities for students to practice autonomy and develop competency – two out of three basic psychological needs in SDT – in their educational processes.

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper introduces contemplative practices as a way of creating compassionate and empathetic learning spaces in engineering education. Contemplation refers to thoughtful observation, reflection, consideration, or intention, sometimes associated with deeper awareness and sense of presence. As such, contemplative practices – both individual and communal, internal, and external – allow for an emergence of deeper meaning of self and the world through the development of compassion, empathy, connectedness, and creativity. Newly emerging in higher education, contemplative pedagogies bring students’ authentic selves into the learning process, fostering a personal and collective sense of belonging, inclusion, and engagement of all student’s diverse ways of knowing and being. This is particularly important in today’s engineering education where the disinclination to include diverse students’ senses of self as they uncompassionately learn to build the technology of the future is harmful for that same future they attempt to build. This paper presents an Innovative Practice that brings together a plethora of contemplative pedagogies in two undergraduate engineering courses – a Physics Foundation and an intermediate-level Social Science courses. To assess the effectiveness of this innovation, we use students’ weekly reflective assignments that demonstrate an emerging sense of trust and belonging. We also find that contemplative pedagogies create a scaffolding for students’ development of compassion, self-compassion, and empathy – educational outcomes that are otherwise absent in their engineering education. Students report a sense of palpable personal growth and self-discovery as well as an opportunity to reexamine science and engineering through the lenses of their diverse ways of knowing and being. Many reflect on a sense of integration of one’s sense of self into an otherwise sterile engineering education devoid of subjective, caring, and heart.

This Work-in-Progress paper focuses on the qualitative aspects of a larger mixed-methods study about GeoExplorer, a game-based learning aspect of a mixed reality educational environment where students participate in a mock internship with the goal to complete a geotechnical mission involving Cone Penetration Testing, a civil engineering field technique students traditionally get very little exposure to due to its complexity and cost. This work seeks to understand how mixed reality learning environments, specifically game-based learning, support (i) creation of individualized hands-on learning opportunities, particularly during the pandemic-driven remote learning paradigm, and (ii) students' development along various noncognitive axes - confidence and motivation. Methods of narrative analyses and grounded theory are used to identify emergent themes in interviews with 10 undergraduate civil engineering students who experienced GeoExplorer in their required geotechnical engineering courses. Our preliminary findings indicate that the GeoExplorer activity was perceived by students as a novel learning experience, particularly welcomed in a time of remote learning, that motivates them to engage more with content and creates individualized hands-on experiences. Students describe how the activity affects their perceived confidence, often gendered, regarding their ability to perform civil engineering fieldwork. Further analyses of these findings may shed light on the ways in which mixed reality learning environments support equitable learning opportunities for all students.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper uses methods of narrative analysis and grounded theory to examine how engineering students make sense of their individual learning journeys through the process of narrating stories of their learning. In particular, we examine four engineering students' sense of belonging, and how emergent constructs of knowledge affect their belonging in the academic and workforce spaces they navigate. We identify three emergent types of knowledge: academic, relational, and emotional. Our analyses indicate that academic knowledge aligns with more masculine identities and forms of expression, while relational and emotional knowledge align with feminine identities and forms of expression. Emergent findings suggest that students may feel included or excluded from academic and workforce spaces based both on the kinds of knowledge they value and on their gendered identities.

Game-based learning has long been heralded as a promise to transform education into a more engaging and experiential paradigm. Its implementation in engineering education has thus far shown that promise, yet more evidence is needed for widespread adoption. Our work focuses on issues of equity, inclusivity, and diversity, thus surfacing the question of whether game-based learning benefits each and every student. To date, these issues have not received much attention in game-based learning educational research landscape, despite its poignancy, given today's global social climate and the systematic lack of equity and diversity in engineering education. With a focus on gender and race/ethnicity we reflect on the outcomes of implementing game-based learning environment in undergraduate geotechnical engineering courses (n = 362). We find evidence that game-based learning supports positive outcomes and provides an equitable learning environment. However, we also note several challenges that are further discussed.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper explores the ways in which students make sense of their individual holistic learning journeys. Using methods of narrative analysis and grounded theory, this study examines how engineering students incorporate their unique moments of learning into a unified narrative of their growth and evolution, and furthermore, into an overall unified sense of self and identity. In particular, we explore how study participants respond to external narratives of learning that are suggested for them - whether these are their parents' stories about them, or students' sense of how they are perceived by the academic structures they inhabit. Our data indicate that students either find that external narratives resonate with their sense of self - consonance, - or fail to align with their understanding of self - dissonance. The process of interacting with and making sense of external narratives then helps shape students' understanding of their identity and their sense of self.

In this pre-conference workshop, we present the ways in which contemplative and mindfulness practices can serve to democratize engineering education. Contemplative practices allow individuals to gain a deeper understanding of themselves, others and their context by integrating the body - both, its physical and affective expressions - and mind. Despite the benefits of these practices for creating learning environments that are authentic, purposeful, holistic, and inclusive, these pedagogies are underutilized in engineering curricula. In this workshop, we will provide an immersive introduction to contemplative practices to co-create a sense of what engineering education environments can look like when they employ mindful, affective, and embodied ways of knowing. Participants will leave with a toolkit of contemplative practices, including sensory and visual meditation, deep listening, beholding, contemplative movement, and critical reflection, which will equip them to reimagine the ways in which they promote students' capacity for self-awareness and reflection in their own learning contexts. Rooted in the practices of mindfulness, these strategies allow the co-creation of environments that are more conducive to learning and inclusive of all ways of knowing and being, thereby democratizing engineering education.

This Research Full Paper investigates how students experience “gender-balanced“ engineering environments and how alumni narrate the stories of their experiences in such “gender-balanced“ engineering environments. Using the grounded theory approach, this study examines interviews of engineering alumni about their experiences in a “gender-balanced” educational environment. Using two emergent constructs, awareness and impact, we take a detailed look at how gender has shaped the participants' undergraduate and post-graduate experiences. These constructs suggest that having parity in the number of men and women in an engineering institution is not sufficient for creating equitable environments for men and women to thrive.

This Work-in-Progress paper presents a framework for students' holistic learning, growth, and development recently created at and for Northeastern University. The Student Assessed Integrated Learning (SAIL) initiative was introduced for the first time to 179 first-year students who had not designated their major prior to entering the University. Our preliminary data indicate that most students felt the SAIL framework informed how they viewed their past experiences and helped them to shape their academic, personal, and/or professional goals. Further data collection and analyses to investigate the SAIL framework's effectiveness in helping students articulate and shape holistic learning is ongoing.

In this Work-in-Progress paper we examine students' situational motivation in introductory STEM courses through analysis of survey responses about students' experiences in a required course at each of two large public institutions. The students in each course convey different perceptions of course relevance: learning-performance relevance and temporal relevance. Learning-performance relevance, exclusive to Course A, refers to students' perceptions of course content and activities as relevant to their performance, which in turn serve as necessary prerequisites for achieving future academic and professional goals. Temporal relevance, described primarily by students in Course B, pertains to students' non-performance-based perceptions of course content as applicable to their long-term academic and professional careers, as well as their personal intellectual growth. We posit that understanding the ways in which students perceive the relevance of course assessments, content, and activities to their near- and long-term future aspirations may allow for improved instructor support of intrinsic motivational attitudes in STEM classrooms.

Work-in-Progress. “I felt so dumb, and it's not fair that I cannot grasp this information to save my life, and other people can with no problem.” Why do some students feel empowered in the classroom, and feel they have control over their own learning, while others do not? Our qualitative investigation is a part of a larger mixed-methods study about students' situational motivations in introductory STEM courses. We used grounded theory to analyze students' responses to surveys about emotion, course relevance, and motivation. We investigated two emergent phenomena we called “internalization” and “externalization.” Our definitions of these are based on a student's perception of who or what influences the outcomes of their activities: the students themselves, or external factors such as the instructor, peers, or the educational system as a whole. Our findings indicate that (1) internalization correlates with cognitive autonomy, students' perception of course content having high personal relevance, and group projects in project-based learning environments; and (2) externalization correlates with lecture-based environments and students' perceptions of lack of personal relevance in the course content. Our analyses suggest that project-based learning environments may serve to empower students, but only when course content is found to be relevant.

This work-in-progress paper investigates how interest in teaching develops. Through a reflective process prompted by interview questions, study participants define teaching and share narratives about their teaching and learning experiences. By comparing participants' cognitive constructs of teaching with their descriptions of teaching as an action, we identify two emergent discourses: consonant discourses, in which theoretical and practical models of teaching are aligned, and dissonant discourses, in which definitions and actions are in tension with each other. Preliminary analyses indicate a connection between an observed interest in teaching and consonance, as well as between reflection and development of consonance.

Work in Progress. Introductory, or “weed out” chemistry courses are well-known for deterring undergraduate students from pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Specifically, students' motivations resulting from experiences in these courses can influence STEM retention. Using grounded theory, our preliminary analysis of qualitative data collected in an undergraduate chemistry course has identified “faculty care” as an emergent construct of importance to student motivations. Our emergent definition of care is students' perception that their instructors recognize and communicate actionable steps towards self-improvement or illustrate concern, encouragement, or relational interest for the students in academic and non-academic settings, or in an unexpected, personal way. We found that students hold gendered interpretations of faculty care, and these interpretations may give rise to gendered motivational attitudes. This work raises questions about the ways specific classroom activities or faculty-student interactions allow faculty to communicate a sense of care for their students and thereby affect students' motivational attitudes in their classrooms. More broadly, this work may have implications for our understanding of the ways faculty can address gendered patterns in STEM participation.

Instructors often cite student motivation as a critical component of successful learning experiences, or a key barrier to student engagement in the classroom. Given motivation's influence on identity and well-being, and the important relationships between motivation and learning outcomes such as creativity, critical thinking, self-regulation, and performance, it is reasonable to assign student motivation a place of relative prominence within the complex learning system. In this workshop, we explore our individual and collective mental models for student motivation in the classroom. Specifically, we explore two distinct perspectives on the value of motivation: motivation as a means to other learning outcomes, and motivation as a developmental end point. In addition, we consider how instructors' beliefs about and expectations for student motivations inform the design and implementation of learning experiences, and how different motivational orientations may create productive or destructive dissonance in the classroom, or threaten certain educational goals or outcomes.

Work-in-Progress. Students' contextual motivation in introductory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses has been a focus of many recent studies; this work provides a new lens to this work by investigating students' situational motivations. Grounded theory is used to analyze survey responses from ten students in an introductory STEM course at a small private technical school that features project-based learning environments. Analysis resulted in an emerging relationship between assessment and a behavior we call externalization. We observe a co-occurrence between externalization and problem-set-related assessment; the co-occurrence indicates that some students may not feel as though they have control over their progress and performance on problem sets and it is this lack of control that the students report to be frustrating and amotivating. Additionally, we observe that blame is presented either as externalization or non-externalization while credit is almost always non-externalized. The two presentations of blame suggest that students might externalize to cope with negative affective experiences. The results of this study may have implication for design of STEM courses with motivations as both means and ends in students' learning processes.

In response to the well documented lack of highly qualified STEM educators in the United States, this work seeks to understand how to increase interest in K-12 STEM teaching among engineering students. This paper presents a preliminary framework and findings exploring factors that motivate the choice of a teaching career among the alumni of a small engineering college. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between the ways in which study participants defined “teaching” and “teacher” and their post-graduate interests and pursuits. Fourteen subjects participated in semi-structured, open-ended interviews designed to elicit an understanding of their definitions of teaching as well as the experiences and influences that shaped those definitions. Preliminary analysis suggests that participants with very narrow views of teaching and learning are averse to teaching, while those with broader definitions are likelier to engage in teaching, teaching-related careers, or consider them in the future.

A capacity for self-directed learning (SDL) and lifelong learning is widely recognized as an important outcome for today's engineering graduates. Key to SDL is the development of self-reflection abilities, which enable students to critically evaluate learning tasks and contexts, to adjust and adapt their self-regulatory processes to new environments, and to maintain motivation and persistence in the face of difficulties. The purpose of this study is to explore how undergraduate engineering students engage with self-directed learning during their first two years of college. Grounded theory is used to analyze responses of 10 students to 12 surveys administered across two institutions over two years. Data reveal that student reflection on self-directed learning experiences is prompted by different factors. Moreover, we find that one of the more important factors in eliciting various levels of reflective practice is a set of challenges students face in learning environments. Specifically, the three types of challenges emerging from the data are those associated with (1) lack of cognitive freedom in course content, (2) perceived poor performance on traditional assessment, and (3) specific learning environments. Further analysis reveals that students reflect at different cognitive and metacognitive levels in different learning contexts. We argue that with proper pedagogical support, reflective practice can be encouraged in all educational contexts facilitating students' cognitive development.

This paper presents an exploratory case study of the interest and participation in teaching, teaching related activities, and research on education among students and alumni at Celadon College, a small engineering school focused on education reform. Prompted by a lack of qualified STEM educators in the United States, this study investigates how to increase interest in education as a career path among STEM undergraduates. A mixed methods analysis of survey responses from 231 students and alumni reveals that, compared to the national average among engineering graduates, subjects at Celadon College are more than twice as likely to indicate interest in becoming K-12 teachers. Analysis indicates that two major factors influence students' position towards teaching and the desire to teach: the development of pedagogical awareness and participation in informal peer teaching. Our analysis suggests a link between institutional academic and non-academic cultures and students' interest in K-12 teaching. We conclude by sharing a set of questions for further investigation and discussion with engineering education community.

In recent years, engineering education has been increasingly emphasizing teamwork to solve "real world" problems. However, teamwork as an educational tool has been called into question. Our study seeks to understand how team discourse constructs a unique team culture, established in the early stages of the teaming process. We investigated four co-ed teams of first-year engineering students in an introductory design course. Discourse analysis was used to break team discussions down into countable units for quantitative and qualitative analysis. We found that despite the preemptive team-related intervention regarding gendered role differentiation and the importance of pursuing individual learning goals, all four teams faced challenges in co-constructing knowledge within the first few weeks of the teaming process. Careful faculty scaffolding is needed to support team formation and maturation throughout the entire teaming processes to foster development of successful communication. We discuss the four "failure modes" encountered in this study as models-in-use and propose possible intervention approaches.

Understanding student motivation is an essential aspect of effective course design. Since motivations are related to learning outcomes ranging from critical thinking to creativity to lifelong learning, helping students develop positive motivations toward learning is critical for the engagement and success of tomorrow's STEM graduates. In this workshop, we explore the specific roles that instructors may play in influencing students' activity-level, or situational, motivation. The workshop offers an opportunity for instructors to directly apply motivation theory and empirical research findings to practical course design, and to identify specific ways in which they may positively influence their students' motivational responses in the classroom.

Understanding individual classroom culture is essential for constructing effective learning and teaching contexts. Largely underutilized in STEM classrooms to date, discourse analysis can serve as a tool to uncover, understand, and shape unique classroom culture. Used as a reflective tool, discourse analysis can enhance pedagogical understanding of quality and quantity of student participation and acquisition of knowledge. This workshop offers participants an opportunity to engage in a hands-on learning experience about ways to create learning opportunities for all students. The participants will learn the process of discourse analysis and will create a step-by-step plan to use this research perspective to comprehend what actually happens in their own classrooms so as to enhance interactions creating an effective learning and teaching context.

Every classroom constructs its own culture through the interactions of all participants, students and instructors. This culture, often covert or invisible, has a direct impact on students' opportunities to learn. Therefore, it is critical that instructors understand their classrooms' interaction patterns and their effect on student learning. We suggest that discourse analysis may serve as a tool to enhance instructors' understanding of their classrooms and to serve as an intervention particularly useful for junior faculty as they are beginning their teaching career. To this end, this paper (1) describes the theoretical foundation of discourse analysis and (2) demonstrates its application, effectiveness, and applicability in STEM classrooms, particularly at the introductory level, the time when students make their first steps in negotiating `academic literacies'.

Being a computer science and engineering student is experienced differently by male and female students; gendered interactions affect the development of academic and professional role confidence as well as professional identity. In this hands-on special session, participants explore concepts of gender schemas, privilege, and identity using a range of interactive activities. We have found these concepts useful in framing discussion with our students and in understanding and improving student experiences. The session introduces and obtains feedback on a Gender and Engineering Exploration Kit, which the participants are encouraged to review, use, and share at their home institutions.

The engineering student experience is understood to differ for male and female students; gendered interactions affect the development of academic and professional role confidence, as well as engineering identity. The purpose of this session is twofold. First, we aim to introduce participants to concepts of gender schemas, privilege, and identity using a range of interactive activities, including brainstorming and structured discussion. Second, we intend to share information about and obtain feedback on a Gender Discussion Exploration Kit, which the participants will be encouraged to review, use, and share at their home institutions.

The purpose of this study is to determine how introductory Project-Based Learning (PjBL) courses affect the self-efficacy of first-year engineering students. Grounded theory is used to analyze twelve interviews with first-year students about their experiences in two PjBL courses, Engineering Design and Physics Laboratory. Data indicate that students' self-efficacy within each course is correlated with the extent to which their course goal perceptions align with those intended by faculty. In Engineering Design, students' recognition of the faculty's intended course goals corresponds to higher levels of self-efficacy. Conversely, in Physics Laboratory, students' low self-efficacy is correlated with a large gap between their perceived and faculty intended course goals. Analysis further reveals that this difference in course goal perceptions may stem from the variations in the courses' contingent scaffolding. Finally, our findings suggest that students' self-efficacy may be further supported by dynamic course scaffolding that allows for an increase in students' autonomy throughout a course.

Understanding personal learning goals and perceptions of engineering is critical in encouraging students' interest in the field. This work defines engineering in terms of the students' course-related learning outcomes (e.g., skills and knowledge) described in the latest version of the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000). We argue that aligning students' perceptions of course task value with the EC2000 should enhance students' perceptions of the engineering profession and increase their interest in the field overall. Using student interviews from a larger study of instructor and student experiences in three undergraduate engineering programs, this study is guided by the following questions: 1) What are students' perceptions of the skills required by the engineering profession? 2) How do these perceptions compare to the skill set defined by ABET EC2000? 3) How do these perceptions affect students' assessment of course value and interest in the relevant coursework? Two required introductory engineering courses, Physics Laboratory and Engineering Design, are investigated. The ensuing theoretical framework is placed in the broader context of Eccles and Wigfield's expectancy-value model, specifically focusing on utility value. Our findings indicate that students' perceptions of the skills and knowledge required in professional engineering diverge from those defined by ABET. This disparity is negatively correlated to the students' assessment of the required coursework utility value. The absence of perceived utility then contributes to the students' lack of interest in their courses.