This Work-in-Progress research paper presents the examination of the impact of COVID-19 interruptions on first-year engineering students' intentions to persist and whether their intentions varied by race/ethnicity and financial need status. Of 7,159 first-year students involved in this study (pre-COVID$n{=}$3,660, COVID cohort$n=3,499$), The results indicated students in the COVID-19 cohort had higher persistence than the pre-COVID cohort. Regardless of the cohort, Asian students were more likely to persist, Black students were less likely to persist than White students, and students who received financial aid were less likely to persist than those without financial need. Furthermore, Black students and students with greater financial need were less likely to persist- across both cohorts. Although, COVID-19 appears to have not exacerbated these already existing gaps. Concerning the retention status across cohorts by financial need status, our findings revealed that the relationship between financial need status and retention status was not different between the two cohorts. Discussion and implications are discussed.

In this work-in-progress study, we describe a development of an instrument aimed at capturing engineering faculty's perceptions of and confidence in teaching laboratory intensive online courses. Whether they want to or not, engineering faculty are being asked to design and deliver laboratory intensive courses remotely. Among the reasons are the most recent Covid-19 pandemic and the increasing number of programs and degrees offered in distance or on the Internet. A typical engineering education laboratory environment has been substantially evolved because of the advancements in communication technologies. Virtual realities are the most recent inventions where students and teachers can interact with one another similar to how they would interact in physical laboratory environments. Most of the tools and machines used in the laboratories will soon be simulated in those environments. It is not well studied and documented in the literature what the engineering faculty perceive about the quality of their teaching and what their self-efficacies in designing laboratory intensive online courses are. After the Covid-19 pandemic lock-down, majority of the engineering faculty have experienced teaching lab-intensive courses online. Those experiences led the engineering faculty develop some perceptions about the feasibility or the quality of their teaching, and beliefs about their capabilities and skills to offer the courses. To capture those perceptions and capabilities, a valid and reliable instrument should be developed. In this paper, we report and discuss the findings from a study aimed at developing a valid and reliable instrument to capture engineering faculty's perception of and self-efficacy in teaching laboratory intensive online courses. The survey items were specifically written to capture engineering faculty members' experiences with teaching laboratory intensive online courses and their beliefs and confidence in teaching them effectively. The newly designed instrument was administered to a group of faculty on campus. We ran tests to compare the faculty's demographics and their average survey scores and reported the significant findings.

Enculturation to engineering is a topic of interest to professional organizations such as ASEE or IEEE. Enculturation can be understood as the process by which students are assimilated into the engineering culture. This culture involves the base knowledge, practices, and values shared by the community of practicing engineers. Both the culture and its assimilation are somewhat obscure and often attributed to role-modeling and hidden curriculum. Nevertheless, undergraduate students are expected to undergo this assimilation process, and by the end of a five-year program, they behave, talk, and do what engineers do. An approach to this process is the well-established model of engineering identity. This model of identity, however, limits its scope to the intrinsic process occurring in the student without paying much attention to the support systems expected to welcome and nurture students into the profession. Enculturation is a relatively new model that proposes both intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting this assimilation of students. During the Spring of 2022, a team of researchers at a U.S. Southwest institution applied a survey to operationalize the extrinsic factors of a recently outlined engineering model of enculturation to understand the impact of COVID on engineering students. Eight Likert-based questions were asked to 534 engineering undergraduate students at different school year classifications (e.g., sophomore, junior, or senior). The model of enculturation tested eight extrinsic factors involving (1) engineering design, (2) teamwork, (3) engineering profession, (4) ethics, (5) engineering communications, (6) mathematical/physical modeling, (7) problem-solving, and (8) algorithmic/computational thinking. Additional Likert-based questions asked students about the perceived impact of COVID on their educational experience. The research questions guiding their investigation were: (a) How are the dimensions of enculturation to engineering changing across engineering undergraduate classifications?, and (b) How is enculturation associated with the COVID impact on students? Preliminary results show that six of the factors (namely 1–5 and 7) increase by students' school classification. This means that students in the lower years of their undergraduate program perceive their enculturation, as portrayed by factors 1–5 & 7, less than students at more advanced stages of their program. In terms of the perceived impact of COVID, only two factors showed negative correlations with this perceived impact The factors were ethics and algorithmic/computational thinking. In other words, the worse the student's perception of COVID's impact on their educational experience, the less they endorsed their enculturation in the impact of society of their technical solutions and their use of programming languages. While these results show encouraging applicability of the enculturation model, it can only be considered a first approach to a more fully developed model. The researchers expect to engage the FIE community in a discussion leading to a more refined enculturation model.

This full paper describes an innovative approach to teaching professional skills in engineering classrooms using the medium of theatre. Professional skills are not frequently or explicitly taught in engineering classrooms, especially those that are addressing issues of bias or discrimination. We provide two examples of how our interdisciplinary team implemented in-person theatre scenes and virtual interactive theatre scenes to directly address gender discrimination and bias in engineering teams. In both settings, engineering students first watched student actors perform a scene of a highly dysfunctional team. Two trained facilitators then helped the student audience identify and address the dysfunction. In the in-person scenes, engineering students were invited to join the scene as an additional team member to try to redirect or to directly address the conflict as the actors replayed the scene. After the scene, the facilitators asked the rest of the students to identify what they liked about the approach. In the virtual performances (enacted due to COVID interruptions), the engineering students asked questions of the actors to understand and resolve the underlying issues. In both settings, the facilitators end by debriefing the activity with the engineering students. To adapt to the virtual setting, we modified the script so that the students were working as a team in a virtual setting (e.g., a zoom meeting) and added an additional facilitator role to manage the online platform. In both formats, the students attended, observed, participated, and brainstormed effective ways of collaborating and communicating with their peers. The online version has been easier to implement and is able to host more students. Thus, we have continued to use this format even though classes are now fully in-person. In this paper, we walk through the roles of each of our interdisciplinary team leads, the nature of the facilitator training, and the details of implementing this training. Further, we describe the evolution from conception to institutionalization of these efforts into the first-year engineering experience. Finally, the interdisciplinary team from the participating universities share lessons learned and practical tips on how to initiate similar efforts at other universities.

Increasing gender inclusion in computer science programs is an important step in addressing the systemic biases in our discipline. We present the results of using Interactive Theatre Scenarios as an intervention to help students engage in critical thinking about gender bias issues. The scenarios are run by a professional theater group who presents a scenario displaying gender bias on a first iteration, then discusses the scenario with students, and an additional iterations allows students to participate as protagonists to alter the outcome. Using surveys after the scenarios, the results suggest the use of interactive theater intervention to be successful, with most of the students believing the scenarios helped them be cognizant that they need to be aware of and address bias issues in computer science.

In the summer of 2015, a five-day professional development workshop was held at West Virginia University Institute of Technology, located in Montgomery, West Virginia, with the objective of providing systematic training of project-based learning to high school math teachers. Twenty-two teachers participated in the workshop. Instructors of the workshop were faculty members from West Virginia University Institute of Technology, West Virginia University, and West Virginia State University. The workshop's focus was project-based learning, which employs projects closely related to real-world applications to facilitate delivering abstract concepts. Specifically during the workshop, the participating high school math teachers learned designing engineering projects, mapping engineering projects to Next Generation math standards/objectives, and assessing the outcomes of project-based learning. Each participating teacher is required to implement at least one engineering project in his/her math class and the results will be collected by the superintendents of the three participating school districts. The workshop has two primary hypotheses: (i) teachers who participated in the workshop will increase their self-efficacy toward implementing project-based learning, applying engineering and technology to address content standards and objectives, and using assessments to inform instruction, and (ii) project-based learning will improve students' self-efficacy and learning effectiveness in math, and in turn, will increase their interest/intention to pursue STEM disciplines. The impact of the workshop on teachers is determined through surveys and interviews. Social Cognitive Career Theory is applied to evaluate the impact of project-based learning on the participating teachers' students. Results of the surveys, interviews, and student performance will be presented at the conference.