This work-in-progress research paper investigates undergraduate aerospace engineering students’ perceptions of macroethics issues and education. Macroethics refers to the real-world ethical implications of engineering technology and the collective social responsibility of the engineering profession. Over the past two years, our research team, consisting of undergraduate students, engineering education researchers, and aerospace teaching faculty, have developed and implemented a one-day introductory macroethics lesson in a required sophomore aerospace engineering course at the University of Colorado Boulder, a large, public, research-intensive university in the Western U.S. One of our motivations for offering this macroethics lesson is our hypothesis that students are aware of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering but feel that their undergraduate education ignores these issues. This paper is a first attempt to gather data to investigate that hypothesis through an anonymous survey given to undergraduate aerospace engineering students. In this paper, we present initial analyses of our quantitative survey data as a basis for discussion with the engineering education research community. These results, along with future analyses and survey refinements, will inform future iterations of the macroethics lesson and motivate the need for the integration of macroethics across the aerospace curriculum.

Our research team has been working to understand how students develop and use mathematical models—the practice of engineering judgment—while completing open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs) during their undergraduate engineering science courses. We have used retrospective interviews, in which students review their work and discuss what they were thinking when they originally completed the problem, to develop a Productive Beginnings of Engineering Judgment (PBJ) Framework. This paper presents the transferability of our PBJ framework to a new data set—students’ discourse as they complete an OEMP in a small group. Examining this discourse data confirms that the PBJ Framework applies to students’ engineering judgment in-the-moment while working on an open-ended assignment. We also discuss three potential new codes for our PBJ Framework that need further exploring, and how students’ written assignments do not fully capture the engineering judgment they used when completing the OEMP with their peers.

This innovative practice full paper details the creation and implementation of a macroethics lesson into a required sophomore-level aerospace engineering course at a large research university. The primary, novel learning objective for this macroethics lesson is for students to analyze how their own ethical philosophy and personal values influence their perspective on an ethical issue in aerospace engineering. This paper begins with a review of the literature used to guide the development of this macroethics lesson. Next, the outline and content of the lesson is presented which consisted of two distinct activities. The first was an introductory presentation on ethics and identifying personal values. This was followed by students choosing an “issue brief” (written by the authors of this paper) on a current macroethical issue in aerospace engineering. The brief topics were the military-industrial complex, space sustainability and orbital debris, and space settlement and resource utilization. After reading their selected brief, students engaged in a structured discussion on the issue in which they identified and ranked stakeholders, and reflected on how their own values were reflected in their ranking of stakeholders. This paper concludes with a discussion of the impact and effectiveness of the lesson with reflections from the authors, and presents quantitative and qualitative survey data from the sophomore students who completed the macroethics lesson.

The authors present a Full Paper in the Research-To-Practice category. Educational institutions are increasingly looking toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as a means of addressing inequities with regards to student representation rates and outcomes. We recognize that the field of engineering was historically designed and continues to operate for the benefit of straight, cis, white, affluent men. Often, institutions offer supplemental programming to students who do not embody this set of identities as a means of support, seeking to more effectively integrate them into fundamentally inequitable structures. Typically, due to the top-down nature of this supplemental programming, it presents additional barriers to challenging the existence of these structures or empowering students to enact equity-centered change. Alternatively, we sought to design a program for marginalized engineering students that reduced barriers to the expression of their whole selves, including the value of their identities within the engineering educational space. Applying critical and liberative theoretical frameworks, we invited marginalized students to organize within themselves to enact changes to even the most fundamental aspects of the existing educational structure. This program, the Undergraduate Engineering Collaborative Growth Series, was implemented at a large, prestigious research university in the United States and monetarily paid students for the labor associated with their participation. It consisted of a series of workshops that aimed to support the development of a community that recognized commonalities across experiences and organized to meet their collective needs. This paper discusses the methods used to recruit and select participants for the series as well as outlines facilitation and data collection methods. The collected data forms the basis for ongoing research. In the future, we hope to expand the program to reach more students in more programs at more institutions. In doing so, the intention is to support the empowerment of marginalized students, the best experts in their own experiences, to connect forms of power to action that disrupts the barriers currently preventing them from expressing their whole, authentic selves within engineering academia.

This work-in-progress research paper describes the different ways in which undergraduate engineering students reasoned about the goals of an open-ended problem, and how this influenced the way they solved the problem. Typical homework assigned to students in engineering science courses is often well-defined textbook problems, which are very different from the ill-defined problems professional engineers solve in the workplace. Our research team has been assigning ill-defined problems in introductory engineering science courses in order to give students opportunities to engage in engineering judgement, thereby better preparing them for professional practice. This study examines how students decide to take up an open-ended problem, meaning their sense of the goals of the problem, and how this influences their actions when solving the problem. The results also include an analysis of the reasons students indicated they took up the open-ended problem in different ways.

This full research-to-practice paper examines the interaction between scaffolding and student thinking on an open-ended problem. The well-defined textbook problems typically assigned as engineering homework are very different from the ill-defined problems professional engineers solve in the workplace. These open-ended, ill-structured problems require professional engineers to employ engineering judgement. Our research team has been investigating how undergraduate engineering students make these judgements when given the opportunity through open-ended problems during their engineering science courses. This study examines how the problem scaffolding, or the design and structure of the homework problem, influences how students engage in engineering judgement while solving ill-defined and open-ended problems. Our results detail how scaffolding supported predictable behaviors, but also resulted in unpredictable engagement in engineering judgement. This unpredictable engagement can then be more explicitly scaffolded in the future to ensure that all students gain this experience.

This full research-to-practice paper is a collaboration between researchers and instructors to examine the scaffolding of open-ended problems. Most assigned homework problems are closed-ended with one correct answer and are unlike the ill-defined problems practicing engineers solve in the workplace. To begin bridging this gap, our research team of engineering education researchers and instructors have been designing and implementing ill-defined, open-ended homework problems for the past three years. This study presents instructor reflections on considerations for scaffolding open-ended problems, made after examining survey data from their own students. We present the results in six practices of scaffolding that better support students in their solving of the problems.

This full research paper examines students' epistemic affect, or their feelings about and within the doing of engineering, when encountering ill-defined problems in two of their first engineering science courses. Ill-defined problems are what students will encounter as professional engineers, but engineering students typically get little practice in their coursework at solving these types of problems. As students explained how they worked their way through the ill-defined and open-ended problems, we found evidence of both positive and negative feelings that arose, as well as descriptions of affective transitions, or shifts from one affect to another. Some of these transitions show evidence that students begin to regulate or anticipate these feelings as a result of repeated exposure to ill-defined problems. This work has implications for including the development of epistemic regulation as part of engineering students’ preparation for professional practice.

The authors present a Research Full Paper on the application of critical and liberative theories in understanding the disproportionately low student outcomes of marginalized undergraduate students studying engineering at a large, highly selective public university in the United States. In addition to looking at women students and students of color, we also examine the effects of social class on educational opportunity and performance, hypothesizing that access to financial capital is correlated to student success. In recognition of class-related structural oppression, this study introduces the framework of Freirean critical theory and other anti-oppressive frameworks as lenses through which we observe and analyze student experiences and outcomes.We pursue a quantitative study in which we investigate engineering student outcomes based on reported gender, ethnicity, and household income level. Dependent variables include degree completion rates, time to graduation, and grade point average after the first four semesters of study. We find that students of color and working class students experience lower rates of graduation, prolonged time to degree, and lower grade point averages than students who do not fall into either of these categories. These results are heavily influenced by the intersectionality of students of color and working class students, as the two groups largely overlap both in the United States population and in the engineering student body at this institution.The results support liberative theoretical claims that societal structures, such as patriarchalism, racism, and capitalism, have filtering effects that impact the opportunities available to individuals with marginalized identities throughout their lives. As incremental interventions fail to address the roots of these problems, they cannot entirely remove the debilitating obstacles facing students from marginalized identity groups; the only true solution lies in liberation from oppressive social structures. In accordance with critical and liberative theories, engineering educators can and should contribute to liberative efforts by employing pedagogical methods that challenge structural oppression.

Engineering students have little practice solving the ill-defined problems they will encounter as professional engineers. Our research team has created an Open-ended Modeling Problem (OEMP) for students to begin practicing engineering judgment. This study investigates one aspect of engineering judgment, evaluating what is a good enough solution, or reasonableness. After solving an assigned OEMP, students were asked if their solutions were reasonable and to justify their answer. This paper examines the different justifications students provided and the assignment factors that may have led to those responses. This work has implications for designing future ill-structured problems and engaging students in engineering judgment.

There is ample evidence about the positive benefits of active learning, but lecture continues to be the prevailing pedagogy in most undergraduate engineering courses. Conventionally, students' first exposure to course content happens in the classroom, and the main goal of class time is to deliver information. This paper describes one instructor's efforts to flip that convention by shifting first exposure to occur before class, thereby allowing the integration of active learning pedagogies into the class. We hypothesize that two factors will contribute to the success of this “flipped” classroom: (1) a new digital textbook, which ensures that students prepared meaningfully for class, and (2) a flexible classroom space, which helps to facilitate in-class active learning activities and student-instructor interaction. This paper discusses data, preliminary analyses from one semester, and plans for future work that address these hypotheses.

Systems engineering activities provide an opportunity for pre-college students to engage in sophisticated engineering design practices beyond commonly-accepted limits of their capability. This research qualitatively investigates how pre-college students engaged in a systems engineering activity using LEGO EV3 robotics with three learning objectives: 1) a system can be decomposed into subsystems, 2) designers coordinate activities by communicating requirements and interfaces, and 3) testing reveals problems and changes propagate to other components. The analysis was based on methods of qualitative content analysis and employed video data produced by students to describe their robot designs as well as video data collected by the researchers. While students did not use the language of systems engineering, examples show students productively engaging in systems engineering methods that relate to each learning objective. Results suggest pre-college students are capable of understanding and implementing basic systems engineering concepts representing a more sophisticated approach to engineering design.