This Work in Progress (WIP) seeks to examine Micro-Credentials (MCs) as a vehicle for an emerging transformative pedagogical movement in engineering and computing (EC) at a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI). MCs are short and concentrated, personalized, competency-based courses that allow learners to gain proof of qualification by demonstrating their mastery of skills, knowledge, and behaviors deemed essential by various stakeholders. Constant technological advances and changes have resulted in a growing interest in MCs as a means of generating new growth opportunities and addressing gaps in specific competencies and skills. MCs may not only equip students entering the EC workforce with the advanced skills needed, but also offer the transition to more successful and diverse career paths. As such, there is a need for higher education institutions to understand the potential value, explore the offerings, and consider effective MC designs. To gain a deeper understanding of students' motivations and the diverse decision-making factors behind students' decisions to enroll in MCs, this WIP employed the Expectancy-Value Theory. The authors used collaborative inquiry to investigate: (1) who MC courses appeal to and what their motivations to enroll are; (2) when these courses can be taken; (3) how MC digital badges impact the learner's career choices and professional development; and (4) the potential outcomes from acquiring an MC digital badge. The findings of this study highlighted (1) the valuable role of MCs as a vehicle for acquiring skills and competencies; (2) the varying levels of awareness and familiarity with MCs and their benefits to students; (3) the lack of integration of MCs with EC curricula; and (4) lack of dissemination of MC offerings at the academic institution. Results evinced the intrinsic value of MCs in fostering skill enhancement, professional development, and consequently career advancement. To this end, it is crucial to further examine MCs to assess their long-term feasibility and effectiveness in higher educational institutions, as well as to serve students in achieving academic and professional success.

This Research work-in-progress (WIP) presents the preliminary analysis of how undergraduate engineering students incorporate their backgrounds and experiences into their design approach. Like practicing engineers, students draw from their lived experiences to support their design process. This WIP uses Community Cultural Wealth to capture the extent to which local connections and cultural networks (i.e., community capital) influence the design considerations of students from a Hispanic Serving Institution. Preliminary results analyze the design process of three mechanical engineering undergraduate students in their first semester of a Capstone Design course. The students participated in a focus group interview, where they were asked to complete a design task and respond to follow-up questions. This WIP focuses on a community-driven analysis of students' design approach and considerations solely within the focus group interview. This study aims to inform the development of more inclusive and culturally responsive learning environments that enable students to purposefully leverage their backgrounds within their design process.

This work-in-progress (WIP) research paper seeks to explore the diverse backgrounds and experiences of engineering instructional faculty (EIF) and what motivates them to pursue their current positions at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). Full-time, professional-track faculty focusing on either teaching or research, who are often not eligible for tenure, are a growing population in higher education and remain an under-explored and under-supported group in engineering. Of those in teaching-focused positions, these professional-track faculty typically teach critical courses within a student's curriculum, such as first-year, introduction to engineering, design, or other foundational courses. Therefore, to understand the impact their various backgrounds, and personal and professional experiences have on their current positions, this WIP describes an exploratory study aimed at communicating the motivations of these EIFs for transitioning into professional-track faculty positions at HSIs. Preliminary data analysis suggests that even with a diverse educational and work background, EIFs share motivational factors, such as a desire for work-life balance, enthusiasm for teaching, enthusiasm for learning, and enthusiasm for their engineering discipline that played an important role in their decision to pursue an EIF position at an HSIs.

This work-in-progress research paper shares preliminary results from exploring faculty perceptions and beliefs about students' backgrounds in engineering at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). Faculty enhance or hinder learning through their interactions with students. Fostering an asset or supportive-based mindset in the classroom is crucial to supporting students' learning. As part of a larger multiple case study, preliminary results from a qualitative analysis of faculty interviews indicate that most faculty fostered a supportive-based mindset (e.g., intentional approaches to help students or alleviate challenges), an emergent theme regarding students' backgrounds, while others gravitated towards asset-based perspectives. Despite these findings, a few faculty members also expressed deficit-based mindsets. Therefore, this study seeks to enable the design of faculty development opportunities at HSIs informed by understanding faculty perspectives of their students' backgrounds.

This Full Research paper uses resource network analysis to explore what resources faculty use when they make changes to their pedagogy, and how an engineering education “guild” is situated among those resources. The process of influencing pedagogical change can be understood as lying along a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is the dissemination model, where research is simply made available and instructors are expected to seek out new tools. On the other end is the propagation model, where researchers, developers, and instructors work as one cohesive team to get innovative tools into classrooms. While each of these models and the instructor resources associated with them have been separately studied and defined, approaches on the spectrum between them remain understudied. Engineering education guilds employ an approach that falls along the dissemination-propagation spectrum; they use both dissemination and propagation techniques to influence pedagogical changes. Despite lack of formal research on the subject, engineering education “guilds” have become an increasingly popular vehicle for pedagogical change in engineering education classrooms. One such engineering education guild is the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), which is focused on integrating entrepreneurial mindset (EM) into engineering curricula. By constructing resource networks for educators who have been exposed to KEEN, we aim to understand the role of KEEN among the myriad resources used by engineering educators when they integrate EM-related content into their classrooms. Results suggest that engineering education guilds are central to the resource networks of faculty looking to innovate their pedagogy, with the most popular resources all falling under the guild's umbrella. These resources are also strongly interconnected, especially during the integration process. However, the resources networks of those who saw successful, complete, sustained adoption reached beyond the guild's umbrella, forging connections with a variety of other materials from different sources.

This highly interactive special session has two goals: developing a deeper understanding of current research on engineering practice, and connecting and growing a diverse and vibrant scholarly community interested in this topic. There has arguably never been a more exciting time to examine engineering practice. In addition to a strong employment outlook for most engineering specialties, engineering careers are being reshaped and reimagined by rapid technological change, intensified globalization trends, new cross-disciplinary interactions, demographic shifts, and changing organizational structures. Colleges, universities, and organizations such as ABET, Inc., the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are leading the charge to improve the alignment of engineering education with the demands of professional practice in response to these trends, potentially revolutionizing how current and future engineers are prepared as innovators, leaders, and change agents. Yet, not much is known about the diverse and multi-faceted realities of modern engineering practice and how this knowledge can be used to improve the education and training of engineers across career stages. Through presentations, networking opportunities, and group discussions, the special session will focus on using research on engineering practice to transform engineering education and the workforce.

This work-in-progress, innovative-practice paper describes the creation and first two iterations of an experimental course which aims to develop a process-focused approach to integrated quantitative engineering analysis in early stage engineering students. The goal of this two-semester course is to improve the confidence and competence of our students in choosing and applying the tools of quantitative analysis to solve practical problems throughout their time in college and beyond, including in other course projects, senior capstone experiences, internships and in their careers. The course is led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty, in a project-based format, including in the presentation of fundamental concepts in mathematics. The course is run studio style, with emphasis placed on the process of engineering, improving students' self-directed learning skills, and encouraging peer and near-peer learning. Overall, we observed a high level of engagement in the course, with student-chosen final projects that involved significant analysis and self-directed learning of new tools and approaches.

Those instructors charged with teaching design-oriented and design project courses oftentimes depend on their own professional judgement and experiences to provide guidance and feedback to young undergraduate and computing students. However, most are not trained as teachers per se. This special session will provide opportunities for participants to share their experiences, reflect, and contribute to a “playbook” of teaching and design coaching “moves” to help students navigate the of ten times ambiguous learning experiences associated with design activities. The special session provides for a lot of participant engagement, interaction, and role playing. Results from this special session will be reflected back to our intellectual community in a future FIE paper.

The field of engineering education has initiated a focus on ensuring engineering education research is disseminated and implemented within the classroom. Numerous researchers have investigated the reasons for the adoption of evidence-based practices, or, more often, the lack thereof. The Professional and Organizational Development (POD) network community is an underutilized potential ally for ensuring the implementation of engineering education research due to their focus on organizational change and improving teaching practice. Using the Diffusion of Innovation framework and best practices for adoption, this session will guide faculty in envisioning a wide variety of channels for moving engineering education research into the classroom. Participants in this special session will brainstorm ways to encourage collaboration between these two communities culminating in a "message in a bottle" to the POD community to help them understand the activities and needs of engineering education researchers. This message will be delivered to faculty development professionals, centers for teaching and learning, organizational change specialists, and others in the POD community at their annual conference in November 2015.

This panel will address the challenge of promoting dispositions towards and mastery of model-based reasoning and modeling practices. Free-body, circuit, and multi-unit process diagrams are fundamental engineering tools for transforming poorly articulated and ill-constrained problems into manageable, solvable problems. For engineers in industry or research, free-form sketches commonly inform back-of-the-envelope estimations and calculations, while more formal diagrams and computational models are essential to design decision-making. This panel will explore the cognitive dimensions and learning challenges associated with modeling as a way of engaging and understanding the world. The panel will start with unpacking the cognitive demands/loads associated with transforming a text to a diagram. We will then present research on student modeling across a spectrum of first year courses to capstone design and across three sub-disciplines - biomedicai, chemical and aerospace engineering.