Grounded theory is a well-accepted research methodology within engineering education research and regularly provides new insights contributing to the expansion of this field. The wide range of grounded theory usage and tradition allows researchers to implement grounded theory methods and methodologies in different ways depending on the needs of the research. This variety contributes to the richness of grounded theory and makes it a tool of value to engineering education researchers, but can also prove to be overwhelming and confusing to novice researchers new to the use of such methods and methodologies. This paper describes the experiences of a novice researcher in their process of implementing constructivist grounded theory as a methodology. This methods paper is developed within a larger qualitative study aiming to gain better understanding engineering student's motivation to engage in design activity within the context of a capstone course project. This paper will consider the various methodological implications of engaging with grounded theory, specifically how these often-tacit implications can be a challenge to a novice researcher. Examples of processes such as developing a semi-structured interview protocol, conducting in-depth interviews, and initially coding data will be expanded upon to reflect the researcher's experiences and thought processes when learning about and implementing this new methodology. Research quality, specifically research quality in qualitative research will be discussed and introduce important considerations such as researcher positionality and sensitizing concepts when engaging with constructivist grounded theory. We will use the initial interviews of three mechanical engineering student participants as the basis for our process description. Initial findings emerging from the initial coding of these interviews will be presented and discussed. By transparently sharing our experiences with grounded theory, we hope to make apparent some of the subtleties associated with such methodology and assist other novice researchers in their journey conducting grounded theory research.

As online learning grows in popularity, educators must learn how to engage their students effectively in this format. Previous studies indicate that students who actively engage in their learning experience more significant academic progress than those who are less actively involved. Active engagement is especially crucial in online settings, where students may feel detached and disengaged from course instruction. Because STEM educators may struggle with understanding all the complexities surrounding social and cognitive engagement in online learning environments, it is particularly relevant to measure it in this context. It is essential to measure student engagement in such a way that instructors can make valuable insights leading to the implementation of effective instructional strategies. Therefore, the development of suitable tools to assess student social and cognitive engagement in STEM is a pressing requirement for both research and instructional purposes; this study seeks to develop such a scale. Established procedures were implemented for scale development, including construct definition, item pool generation, measurement format, a comprehensive overview of the item pools, and scale validation procedures. The definition of constructs began with the study of relevant literature, followed by a series of interviews with 33 students. A detailed analysis of the data gathered by the relevant resources and the interviews helped create an item pool, followed by the development of a survey. The survey was implemented, and 184 responses were completed. This paper reports on the processes and findings of the scale development. In terms of scale validity, the research team obtained supporting evidence through the implementation of multiple iterations of the survey, providing evidence of the reliability and accuracy of the developed scale. The factor structure of the measures was confirmed with exploratory factor analysis. Through a confirmatory factor analysis, the scale showed the best empirical fit consisted of five factors: Course Knowledge, Availability, Connectedness, Interactivity, and Metacognition. Building on previous research, this study revealed that developing multiple constructs were relatively similar to each other. Our scale will be useful in assessing student social and cognitive engagement in online STEM courses.

This Work-In-Progress paper summarizes insights from early research activities related to a National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project investigating faculty adoption of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) in engineering classrooms. We are investigating EBIPs in engineering classrooms because, although instructors are interested and willing to adopt them, uptake by engineering faculty is lagging. To understand what is driving limited incorporation of EBIPs, our research objectives are anchored in our overlying goal of examining the lived experience of engineering faculty as they seek out and try innovative teaching practices (i.e., EBIPs) in their courses. This paper reports insights from early exploratory interviews with engineering faculty around their experiences with trying EBIPs. We report on general patterns observed during the early stages of our analysis of the interview transcripts with three engineering faculty (n = 3). We discuss how our analysis informs the next steps of our overarching investigation and briefly discuss the broader significance related to the context of faculty approaches for implementing EBIPs into their engineering courses.

This Research to Practice Work in Progress Paper presents an exploration of unlearning of practicing civil engineers. Unlearning is a necessary process to keep engineers abreast of ever-changing socio-technical and professional demands by replacing odd knowledge with a new one, which is coherent with their knowledge structures and practice contexts. This paper explores the unlearning of fundamental engineering concepts within 95 practicing civil engineers by investigating their performances on and attitudes towards Statics Concept Inventory. The analysis of their performances on the inventory revealed that many of them did not retain, use, and need this fundamental engineering concept in their practices. It appears that when engineers begin their professional careers, they also start giving up parts of their learned knowledge including many fundamental engineering concepts to acquire new knowledge suitable to their expertise and practice contexts of teams and organizations.

This study aims to address how change agents assist engineering instructors in adopting new curriculum. During a two-day workshop, 16 mechanics of materials instructors from community colleges and universities around the Pacific Northwest developed hands-on activities and models that they later implemented in their classrooms. Five additional instructors became interested in the materials developed at the workshop through their interactions with some of the instructors that attended the workshop. After the workshop and during the academic year, a change agent was assigned to each instructor. The change agents communicated with their instructors on a regular basis in order to identify any needs the instructor had for implementing their new materials. Interactions between the instructors and change agents were tracked through the change agents' personal notes on their interactions and two semi-structured phone interviews held during and after the term in which the course was taught. Instructors most often requested assistance from the change agents in how to manage and use some of the materials. These interactions indicate that a change agent working in a pull-model approach encouraged the instructors to be more engaged in the change process throughout their entire course and therefore benefited their teaching and course effectiveness.

This study reports the factor analysis of Statics Concept Inventory (SCI) data collected from 95 practicing civil engineers in the Pacific Northwest. In comparison to students' responses reported from previous studies, the analysis of the engineers' data yielded a different number of underlying latent traits and different loading patterns of the SCI items on each trait. The study revealed that engineers' responses to the SCI might reflect the conceptual coherence associated with knowledge of engineering practice. The engineers' combination of discreet concepts into broader and meaningful concepts in this study might provide the evidence about experts' characteristics in processing, organizing, and storing knowledge in chunks. Understanding the experts' knowledge structure would help inform the development of curricular materials and assessment instruments for undergraduate engineering education.

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.

The purpose of this proposed mini-workshop is to connect our research in conceptual change [Collaborative research: Getting Engineers to Talk Across Disciplines, EEC 1129447] to instructional practice. Our research suggests that one potential indicator of students' conceptual understanding across several engineering disciplines is their use (or misuse) of language. During this mini-workshop participants will be able to read excerpts from interviews we conducted, discuss how to draw inferences about student learning from these interviews, and then brainstorm how they can be more explicit about the use of language in their classrooms.

While epistemologies have long been of interest in other fields, they have only recently begun to receive attention within engineering education. In particular, engineers' personal epistemologies (PEs) are a significant but understudied facet of engineering and engineering education. PEs are individuals' beliefs and attitudes that consciously and subconsciously affect the ways they think about knowledge, learning, and the validity and justification of arguments. PEs encompass various dimensions of knowledge: where it comes from, how it is created, how it is organized, how universal it is, etc. Likewise, despite their significant role in structuring thought and action, metaphors have received scant attention within engineering education. The work that does explore metaphors in engineering education focuses on issues of underrepresentation. Metaphors are not mere linguistic devices, but rather play central roles in cognition and categorical perception. Therefore, this paper draws on epistemological and metaphorical work from other fields in order to analyze the metaphors employed by engineering students in discussions of their personal epistemologies.

Adoption research has guided the development of a classification and rating system for assessment instruments valuable to the engineering education community. The ASSESS website enables users to search for instruments that measure outcomes of interest and that possess desired characteristics. The website classifies instruments by outcomes assessed, technical features, instrument format, and administration parameters. Instrument descriptions and ratings are displayed in forms useful to both experienced and inexperienced users seeking instruments for specific needs. The user community contributes to ASSESS by rating instruments and suggesting others for development or inclusion. ASSESS developers invite user input to make ASSESS highly valuable to the engineering education community.

National calls have been made for the identification of preconceptions and misconceptions in science and engineering. Identifying misconceptions can provide a basis for improved research-based curriculum development and implementation. The recognition of false beliefs and flawed mental models of these concepts can also contribute to theories of conceptual change. The purpose of this research was to identify misconceptions related to open channel flow. During spring and fall of 2011, out of 91 students from two sections of `Water Resources Engineering' course, 50 students were interviewed, and 41 students were given a pre/post test. The goal of these open-ended interviews and pre/post-tests was to obtain detailed data on students understanding of open channel flow concepts. Results suggest students have misconceptions relating to the hydraulic and energy grade line (HGL/EGL), flow transitions, and flow profiles. Many students have the correct terms of the HGL and EGL but lack understanding of where the terms re on an open channel flow profile. A large percentage of tested students revealed false beliefs relating to transitions. For example, more than 50 percent of tested students drew a decrease in water depth for a subcritical drop, rather than an increase in depth. Students also had difficult in labeling subcritical, critical, and supercritical places along flow profiles and how water flows over or under different weir structures. Repairing these fundamental misconceptions is essential for students to be able to apply these concepts in diverse situations and learn more advanced topics.

Changes in students' personal epistemology are especially important for engineering educators to examine because they may affect the way students learn and their ability to adapt to engineering education learning environments and culture. Despite the large amount of theoretical research that has been done concerning students' conceptual change, little research has been done concerning their epistemological change. This study is a preliminary effort in identifying students' beliefs about knowledge and their effect on learning and successful comprehension of engineering concepts. The cohort consisted of 10 Civil Engineering students in a sophomore level Statics class, and each student participated in a 90-minute interview. The questions were based around an epistemological framework currently in development, which includes six separate dimensions but allows for examination of the ties between the dimensions. Analysis was completed in multiple stages, and involved two researchers co-coding for inter-relater reliability. Most students viewed knowledge as very simple, certain and objective. However, many students felt that different people had different knowledge of statics because of their different backgrounds and learning. These beliefs may be leveraged to support pedagogical practices of proven effectiveness such as peer-tutoring or other active learning methods.

Conceptual change is often approached with a concrete epistemology in which students must replace their misconceptions with correct conceptions. Drawing upon the literature and our research, we propose that we need a new, discursive epistemology that describes conceptual change as language acquisition.

This paper describes the first-year progress of a TUES Type 2 project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that supports scholarly innovation in engineering education. The project, known as the Appraisal System for Superior Engineering Education Evaluation-instrument Sharing and Scholarship (ASSESS), builds on a precursor NSF CCLI Type 1 project, the Inventory of Evaluation Tools for Engineering Education Projects. The paper reports on the process and framework for developing ASSESS as a sustainable library of superior evaluation instruments that promote scholarly innovation in engineering education. The online database supports information storage, retrieval, and input as well as expert review and user feedback. Adoption research currently being conducted will determine factors that influence broad utilization of the database. Feedback is invited from the community to produce a user-friendly website that enables engineering educators to locate and implement tools that can be used to credibly evaluate the impacts of engineering education innovations.

Successfully preparing students to become practicing engineers requires the development of their conceptual and epistemological approaches to the world around them. This paper describes a robust, flexible and empirically testable framework developed to characterize engineering students' conceptual understanding and personal epistemologies as they develop from their sophomore year to their second year of engineering practice. The strength of the framework lies in the balances struck between firm commitments that can be confirmed or falsified, and open-endedness where existing theories are too contradictory to warrant such a commitment. The frameworks were developed through literature review drawing from the fields of cognitive science, educational psychology, science education, philosophy and learning theory.

The study of students' preconceptions and how they affect their learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields is of nationally recognized importance. There are, however, various and contradictory theoretical approaches to conceptual change, and none of them have been rigorously applied in the context of engineering education. This paper is part of a larger study drawing on existing sets of data from a wide range of engineering content areas to develop a theoretical explanation of conceptual change in engineering education. In the work reported here we re-analyze students' understanding of concepts about axially loaded members (from mechanics of materials) and Boolean logic (from digital logic). Previously published analyses of these data argue that the context of a problem or question effects students' reasoning about that concept. These contexts can range from the presence or absence of figures or diagrams to the social contexts of the problem. We explored three potential theoretical explanations for the context-sensitivity of student reasoning: (1) a perceptual cues theory, (2) a domain specificity theory, and (3) a language-based theory. It is argued that these competing theoretical explanations do not contradict each other as much as they overlap, and potentially productive syntheses of the theories are proposed as directions for future work.