This full paper builds on the work of the first author’s PhD dissertation that explores undergraduate Chemical Engineering students’ perspectives on why they chose to enroll at a higher education institution in the US. The research brings together capabilities approach and engineering higher education literature in the aim of highlighting students voices. Current literature tends to discuss engineering as a profession, and the history of that profession, and less focused on the purpose of engineering as a degree in itself, which this work aims to change. Capabilities Approach framework, also referred to as the Human Development Approach is concerned with the question of what a person is able to do and be. It also provides a perspective on thinking about purpose of education in terms of instrumental, intrinsic, and social values.The paper draws on data from a larger project which is focused on the experiences of students studying Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in England, South Africa and the United States of America. We use some of the data from the Chemical Engineering students in the United States in order to explore students’ perspectives on the purpose of enrolling in a higher education institution and obtaining an engineering degree. Each case is built around a higher education institution, whereas the embedded units of analysis focus on the students' narratives. The study particularly explores the phenomena from a longitudinal perspective by analyzing data from four different students from the time they enroll in those institutions to the time they graduate, summing up to a total of sixteen interviews. The paper particularly focuses on answering the following research question:RQ: What are the held perspectives of undergraduate Chemical Engineering students towards the purpose of higher education in the US?Primary results show a variety of perspectives and reasoning why students pursue an engineering degree. Conforming to societal expectations, securing a job, as well as learning and developing on personal levels all came up and will need to be further investigated. This research is set to address the problem of the neglect of the students' voices in the literature, and to address the lack of research on higher education within the engineering education space.

This is a full research paper. Intentional decision making around course design and execution by instructors is a very important aspect of teaching and learning. Understanding instructor beliefs about knowledge and their students is critical for any educational endeavor in that instructor beliefs often guide how they choose to structure their course and what they choose to evaluate. However, despite all the rhetoric on the need to improve teaching in engineering education, there are surprisingly few close-up studies on what contemporary instructors are doing in their classrooms. A further limitation is that most studies take place in one country which then comes to stand in for a sort of universal context. We seek to understand how instructors’ knowledge and beliefs about disciplinary knowledge shape the design of instruction, assessment and perception of students. This work studies how engineering instructors in three different countries use their knowledge of disciplinary concepts and beliefs about teaching and learning, i.e. pedagogical content knowledge, to design their courses and teach content. We are interested in understanding how the different national and institutional contexts make possible potential differences in approaches to teaching.

Broadening participation of students and faculty is a goal of many engineering programs. In order for participation to be broadened, newcomers who are outsiders must be welcomed into an existing community and it is vital to welcome these new members. But little is known about behaviors that help newcomers feel at home. This study shares insights gained from the reflections of now-established members of the engineering education research (EER) community as they look back at the beginning of their EER career. The data comes from semi-structured interviews with participants of a series of NSF-funded summer workshops held in the mid-2000s designed to introduce participants to the emerging field of engineering education research. The interviews were conducted 10 – 11 years after they participated in the workshops and sought to capture their career and research trajectories since the workshops. Looking back at the start of their EER career trajectory, participants stressed the importance of the relationships that they formed with other participants, workshop facilitators, and other EER members. Thematic analysis of the transcripts revealed three themes which we are calling contributor, approachable, and sharing. The paper details specific, meaningful actions that resulted in the newcomers feeling welcome and provides recommendations for those interested in broadening participation.

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress Paper focuses on an interdisciplinary course with the title Create! which draws in students from a range of years and disciplines to engage with ill-structured real-world problems. The study aimed to characterize students' reflective and metacognitive processes as they engaged in these team-based challenges. The data for the study came from “freewrites”, which were regular assessments which required students to respond to reflective prompts. The study utilizes the IDEALS model for characterizing the stages of metacognition. Using data from six exercises, this exploratory study works with just over 75 responses to find which of the IDEALS stages were represented in student reflections and what form these took. The findings show detailed contextualized reflections across each of the IDEALS stages. The study supports the value of this team-based project-centered course structure for stimulating metacognitive reflection in an interdisciplinary context. It also confirms the validity of the IDEALS model for characterizing metacognitive processes.

This innovative practice, work in progress paper investigates constructive alignment in a first-year engineering course. Constructive alignment describes a course environment where stated course outcomes are in alignment with what students learn in the course. This study develops a novel method to explore the extent of constructive alignment. Drawing on minute papers which were already incorporated in the course, the study uses student responses to a final minute paper which required students to reflect briefly on what they learned in the course. Qualitative analysis of 189 responses determined four main themes, with two of them featuring prominently in some detail: teamwork and problem-solving. This was important evidence of alignment as these are key outcomes of this project-centered course. A further interesting finding was that students see programming as a focus for their learning but don't explicitly link it to the modeling of an engineering system as stated in the course learning outcomes.

This Work in Progress paper reports on preliminary work in a new longitudinal project which tracks engineering students as they progress through four years of their undergraduate degree. It focuses specifically on students' engagement with disciplinary and professional knowledge, in domains of basic science, engineering science, and engineering design. The project centers on annual in-depth interviews that will be conducted with students recruited from the first year in a selected engineering program (Chemical Engineering) at two selected US bachelors' institutions: one a rural-based public land grant research university, and the other an urban public research university with a more diverse student intake. To highlight the distinctive features of the ways in which engineering graduates are formed, the project tracks in parallel a sample of students from a closely related science program (Chemistry/Biochemistry). The first year of data collection in this project is completed, and this paper will provide early reflections on the research design, specifically the ways in which student interview data can be used to show development of agency through engagement with knowledge.

According to change literature, the multiplicity of levels and structures that exist within an organization makes organizational change a difficult process. Similarly, many challenges face any attempt to foster change in engineering education, due to the various layers that make up the field. Looking at the evolution of engineering education research (EER) as a field and the individual pathways of engineering education researchers, EER scholars have discussed a model for engineering education reform that draws from Palmer's Movement Approach to change. This special session introduces Palmer's approach as a framework to look at reforms that have already occurred, and envision possible paths for action toward desired changes.

Among previous work on the benefits of active learning and engagement strategies when implemented in engineering learning environments, Chi's interactive, constructive, active and passive (ICAP) framework provided a way of categorizing learning activities. ICAP hypothesizes students' cognitive processing increases as they engage in active learning activities. The ICAP framework focuses on observable overt learning activities instructors can implement within their classrooms to increase student engagement and deep learning. With interactive activities being the most desirous of the four, Chi characterizes the various ways in which classroom activities span the passive to interactive continuum. The ICAP framework describes cognitive processing as being at its highest when students engage in meaningful dialogue about the topic with their peers and/or instructor. However, while Chi and colleagues operationalized each construct of the framework and subsequent theories of the level of student engagement, there is a lack in the development of instruments that can measure the level of cognitive engagement associated with these constructs. Consequently, this study is aimed at operationalizing the construct of cognitive engagement. This is the first phase in our attempt to develop an instrument that can be used to measure the cognitive processes associated with each construct of the ICAP framework.

The nature of teaching evaluation is, more often than not, determined primarily by the results of surveys based on students' evaluation and, sometimes, peer evaluation ratings. However, previous work has highlighted that in most cases student evaluation surveys are the main and/or only method used to evaluate teaching. This led to the critique of using student evaluation surveys as insufficient as a stand-alone method of evaluating teaching. These criticisms are based on the fact that instruments designed for students to evaluate teaching commonly consist of the same set of generic closed-ended questions and lack the ability to appropriately judge the multi-dimensional nature of teaching and learning. Additionally, the focus of teaching evaluation is theorized to differ based on the type of institution (which are doctoral universities, baccalaureate and associate colleges). With this in mind, this study seeks to explore current approaches to evaluate teaching in engineering departments. Based on the call for multiple approaches to evaluating teaching in higher education this research seeks to answer the following questions “what are the current approaches to assessing teaching evaluation and how are these approaches similar or different based on institution type?” As part of a larger study, this paper will describe the teaching evaluation practices within three types of institutions aforementioned. The goal of this study is to provide stakeholders with a repository of teaching evaluation practices. The authors also posit that having a broad spectrum of teaching evaluation approaches is highly valuable in improving teaching and student learning in the engineering community.

Some researchers have discussed that despite the implementation of active and engaging learning strategies to the teaching process, students still experience difficulties learning complex circuit concepts. Propositions from the literature credit the difficulty students face when learning circuit concepts to the following factors: 1. pre-conceptions students bring to the classroom which most times lead to the development of misconceptions, 2. the lack of engaging learning environments within which students can interact with the new material being taught, and 3. the difficult and complex nature of electric circuits. This study was designed to investigate how complex circuit concepts such as complex forcing function, phasors and sinusoidal steady-state analysis are taught in an introductory course. The research questions that guided this work were “What are the instructional strategies used to teach complex circuit concepts in an introductory circuit course? What characteristics are emphasized as important in the learning of complex circuit concepts?” The results of this study are significant to the field of engineering in that this study contributes to the body of literature on complex circuits and students' conceptual understanding.

In 2007, Borrego published her groundbreaking work “Conceptual difficulties experienced by trained engineers learning educational research methods”[1] that described five conceptual difficulties engineering faculty encountered as they began to learn about rigorous research in engineering education. Since Borrego's research was published the engineering education departments have been formed and a new generation of engineering education researchers has emerged. These researchers must tackle the same paradigm shift that faced the engineering faculty in Borrego's study. The research question that guided this study was: “What conceptual hurdles still exist for the new generation of engineering education researchers?” PhD students in Engineering Education were asked to reflect on their conceptual difficulties during the first semester of their PhD courses and write an end-of-semester reflective paper that summarizes their cognitive journey. The summative reflections were coded using Borrego's conceptual hurdles as a framework. The results of the present study can inform those entering the engineering education research community by highlighting areas that remain problematic and offer strategies that emerging scholars have used to make sense of educational theories and methods.