The 3Cs framework, emphasizing curiosity, connections, and creating value, was developed by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) to integrate an entrepreneurial mindset into engineering education. The framework has gained acceptance among practitioners, but the lack of explicit ties to existing theoretical literature has hindered its use in entrepreneurial mindset and engineering education research. This special session is part of a larger Kern Family Foundation-funded project to develop and disseminate a literature-based grounding for the 3Cs framework that can provide a foundation for research using the framework through existing scholarly literature. Building on scoping reviews of the literature, the session adapts the Delphi method to collaboratively operationalize each part of the 3Cs framework with members of the entrepreneurship and engineering education communities. Participants will rate their agreement with high-level constructs associated with each C, as identified from the literature, and engage in peer-to-peer discussions to reach a collective understanding of the operationalization of each C. Expected outcomes for participants include a deeper understanding of how the 3Cs framework aligns with broader theoretical perspectives in existing literature, as well as insights for leveraging the 3Cs in entrepreneurial mindset-related program development, research, and assessment. In addition, the facilitation team will use the information gathered during this and four other similar sessions to develop its literature-based foundation for the 3Cs framework, produce a set of highly citable references to support work using the 3Cs, and disseminate project findings through KEEN resources, archival publications, and public media.

This work-in-progress research explores the practice of formative assessments (FA) in the form of informal FA conversations by a high school teacher teaching engineering design curriculum in an all-girls high school in the US southwest. An observation protocol informed by the Eliciting, Students' response, Recognition, and Use (ESRU) model and Formative Assessment Cycle was developed and testing to capture informal FA practices in an authentic setting using classroom observations. The teacher observed in this study had no explicit awareness that her practices were being observed. Initial observations show a frequent utilization of informal FA practices associated with eliciting, recognizing, and using student responses to connect to learning goals in the form of FA conversations. These practices did not include clarifying expectations or sharing learning goals. Initial observations also show that the teacher frequently uses these practices to introduce new topics instead of starting such engagements to assess concepts that have already been delivered. Implications and future directions will focus on understanding how these inquisitive, informal FA practices can be used to deliver new concepts and improve student learning.

This Innovative Practice Work-in-Progress paper aims to capture a unique attempt to break down silos between two pre-college STEM initiatives. A myriad of programs has emerged to provide pre-college students with engineering or robotics experiences. Such initiatives are typically undertaken independent of one another. Engineering For Us All (e4usa) and For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) are two such programs designed to excite youth about STEM careers, specifically engineering. One provides a classroom experience, while the other is primarily extracurricular, affording informal learning experiences. The parallel missions of these two programs provided the impetus for a new partnership, e4usa+FIRST, to leverage the collective strengths of each program and expand engineering access to underserved schools. A workshop was conducted that brought together a variety of stakeholders to explore numerous approaches of blending the two programs. This paper details the design of the workshop and the five emergent blending models. The results advance an argument for the involvement of all stakeholders to create an ecosystem at the pre-college level to broaden participation in engineering education. The study has the potential to impact future motivation and design of pre-college STEM education and outreach programs.

This Work in Progress, Research paper aims to address the well-documented discrimination against people with disabilities regarding the use of technology in education. Poor accessibility standards, a lack of administrative support, and numerous other barriers have contributed to the ever-present digital equity gap for students with disabilities. The digital equity gap has continued to widen as schools continue to increase the use of virtual or distance learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research aims to better understand students with disabilities’ barriers in accessing online undergraduate engineering education by addressing the following research question: What barriers do engineering students with disabilities face in an online learning environment? The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework guides the research questions, data collection, and data analysis. A fixed item survey has been developed and is currently being used to capture the experiences of students with disabilities in engineering who participated in online learning at four-year colleges and universities across the United States. The identification of these students’ barriers will be used to inform accessibility improvements and considerations to engineering online learning.

This innovative practice work in progress (WIP) paper details the development of an observation protocol that was developed to promote pedagogical risk-taking and additive innovation. Our higher level goal is to create a self-sustaining community of pedagogical exploration through formative feedback driven by peer observation. This effort aims to break the mold of status quo professional development protocols with questions specifically designed to ensure educators are receiving targeted, desired feedback, while engaging observers to think about how they might apply something similar in their own classroom(s). Attempts to test this protocol unearthed deeper concerns about observations and faculty reluctance to be observed. This underlying anxiety and concern associated with observations needs to be addressed, particularly during the pandemic. In this paper we share our process of developing this protocol, our pilot testing of the protocol, barriers encountered in further testing of the protocol, and literature that explains faculty reluctance to peer observation protocols that will help guide future efforts.

This Work-in-Progress paper details the innovative practice of providing high school counselors with a hands-on engineering professional development (PD). Prior research shows that counselors are often unprepared to advise students about engineering pathways. This is primarily due to the lack of information and training provided to counselors about engineering. A PD was designed to educate high school counselors about engineering education and the overall engineering profession. A total of 15 counselors completed the five-week PD online during the summer of 2020. A subset of participating counselors ($\mathrm{n}=5$) was interviewed six months after the PD to examine how their practices had changed following the PD experience. Initial findings suggest that counselors changed how they viewed engineering as a more inclusive field beyond just a discipline for those who excel in math and science. This led to adjustments in their counseling and recommendations regarding engineering to ensure that any student with an expressed interest would be aware of the opportunity.

This Research Category - Full Paper presents initial emergent themes from our quest to understand the construct of intuition. Our work uses theories of expertise development and dual-cognitive processing frameworks to provide a theoretical grounding to define discipline-specific intuition. We hypothesize that intuition can be observed in disciplinary experts through discussions of experience and decision-making processes. Interviews were conducted with professionals in three fields - engineering, nursing, and business management - that engage intuition in decision-making. A comparative analysis of emergent themes is presented to understand similarities and differences in use and definition across these disciplines. Parallel grounded theory and critical incident technique approaches were used to identify perceptions and incidents of intuition. Results suggest that intuition can be defined as a "sense of knowing" that is context specific and at least partly attributable to experience. Inclusion of multiple fields and comparisons across disciplines form the foundation for our future work focusing solely on engineering intuition.

This Research Work in Progress paper presents a case study that demonstrates how a secondary school teacher with a non-STEM background identifies parallels between the engineering design process and music creation to embrace teaching an engineering course for the first time. Multiple interviews and classroom observations were open coded using a two-cycle coding approach to reveal four themes: overcoming imposter syndrome, connections between engineering and music, challenges encountered, and changes in practice. These themes highlight the processes involved in transferring a pedagogical philosophy that can inform future efforts to explore the necessary preconditions for bridging seemingly disparate and unconnected content areas. Further exploration building on these findings will inform efforts to broaden the pool of teachers capable of teaching pre-college engineering classes.

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper presents the collaborative efforts made by three NSF-funded Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) to synthesize common tools for educational program evaluation. The aim of the NSF ERCs is to achieve transformative changes by integrating engineering research and education with technological innovation within areas at the frontiers of science and engineering (e.g., NSF's 10 Big Ideas). Such centers across the nation study and innovate within their technical area using similar structures and implementation strategies, including the coordination of educational endeavors. Independent partners are enlisted as part of these centers to evaluate education and diversity impacts annually. Each center typically performs this task in isolation from other such centers. The effort required to create resources for such evaluation outcome can result in redundancy and an inability for psychometric analysis due to small available populations within a single center. This paper elaborates on the ongoing efforts of this collaborative research aimed at addressing these issues by creating a streamlined, customizable, and standardized set of evaluation instruments that can be applied to any ERC evaluation.

This panel session combines principles from graduate student socialization and intergenerational mentorship to provide a unique opportunity for early career scholars and pioneers in engineering education to interact face-to-face. Pioneers will serve as panelists and give their personal tips and reflections on networking and mentorship. Session attendees will then meet with the pioneers in a roundtable format, to ask questions, seek advice, and get feedback. This work builds on the National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Education Pioneers Project, which documented the stories of more than 40 engineering education pioneers through online profiles. The intended audience for this panel includes graduate students, junior faculty, and other individuals interested in the engineering education community. Expected benefits include better understanding, increased belonging, and new or enhanced interest in engineering education. Future efforts associated with this session include understanding the impact of such exposure to the pioneers on attendees and exploring the possibility of offering this event at future engineering education conferences.

This Research Work in Progress Paper presents a pilot study focused on understanding how faculty take pedagogical risks in 2nd and 3rd year (mezzanine level) engineering courses. Broadly, we are interested in understanding ways of making widespread changes in the mezzanine level of the curriculum. The purpose of this exploratory research is to develop an understanding of faculty pedagogical risk-taking through observations, interviews, and artifact analysis. The primary data for this project are observations of four mezzanine level engineering courses. During the observation we took detailed field notes and collected course handouts, lesson plans, or other course materials. After the lesson was completed, we conducted a post-observation teacher interview to learn about the broader context of that lesson within the class, how the lesson has evolved over time, and plans for that lesson in future courses. This work in progress serves as a pilot study to better understand how to capture pedagogical risk-taking in the classroom. Analysis of observations, field notes, and course material is being utilized to develop data collection techniques and investigation protocols for the future exploration of pedagogical risk-taking.

This research full paper presents a mixed methods study in developing the professional skills of engineering postdoctoral scholars and graduate students. It has been well documented that mentorship ability is crucial for mentee-mentor pairs in educational settings. The ability to be a mentor is a valuable professional skill for postdoctoral scholars and graduate students regardless of the career path taken following their education. How postdoctoral scholars and graduate students themselves develop an ability to mentor has not been widely researched. National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers (ERC) provide summer mentoring opportunities, including Research Experiences for Undergraduate Students (REU), Research Experiences for Teachers (RET), and Young Scholars Program (YSP), for postdoctoral scholars and graduate students to learn and practice how to be a mentor. A major challenge associated with this opportunity is the belief that such activities are not a valuable time investment. This belief can come from both the postdoctoral scholar or graduate students and their advisors. This paper presented a mixed methods study to investigate how practicing mentorship impacts the development of various professional skills for those involved in ERC Summer Programs.

Engineering students in a project-based curriculum are expected to learn and apply the engineering design process to their course embedded projects. Practice of embedded skills typically occurs through embarking on a new project context provided by an instructor. It is a rare occurrence for students to participate in experiences that break-up the process into smaller chunks providing low-pressure instances to practice. The following work-in-progress describes a practice-then-apply scaffolding approach to teaching engineering design. The engineering design process was broken down into three phases: (1) discovery and ideation, (2) concept development and selection, and (3) realization and experimentation. Each phase was presented to students via a mini-project that inserted students into the design process at various stages of the design. The mini-projects afforded students with opportunities to practice and expand their understanding without always having to start at the beginning. A final project embedded throughout the course provided students with the opportunity to apply what they had learned in the mini-projects. This scaffolded approach methodically slowed the process providing a unique design learning experience with explicit design activities.

Well-designed formative feedback can enhance both instructor teaching and student learning with "two-way" feedback. The project goal was to use web-enabled tools and resources that facilitate the strategies, practices, and assessments that use frequent formative feedback to improve student attitude, learning, and achievement. The research question is, "What is the effect of formative feedback, engagement pedagogy, and web-enabled resources on student outcomes across diverse settings?" The web tools included: a two-way student-reflection and instructor-feedback web data collection tool; a web vocabulary building tool with e-flash cards and e-vocabulary games; and a slide sharing site that has the slide sets from each tutorial video. Assessment was done for student: resource use with Student Resource Value Survey (SRVS); attitude and impact with a Student Impact Value Survey (SIVS); achievement with a Materials Concept Inventory (MCI); and persistence with a week-2 to week-15 head count. Results showed: large changes in certain resources from SRVS; very positive values of motivation and utility from SIVS; a 36% moderate Hake gain from the MCI; and 97% persistence. Overall, it has been demonstrated that the principles and tools of a web and engagement curricular enhancement model can have good outcomes with the potential for implementation in other disciplines.

An alternative to the traditional classroom structure that has seen increased use in higher education is the flipped classroom. Flipping the classroom switches when assignments (e.g. homework) and knowledge transfer (e.g. lecture) occur. Flipped classrooms are getting popular in secondary and post-secondary teaching institutions as evidenced by the marked increase in the study, use, and application of the flipped pedagogy as it applies to learning and retention. The majority of the courses that have undergone this change use applied learning strategies and include a significant “learning-by-doing” component. The research in this area is skewed towards such courses and in general there are many considerations that educators ought to account for if they were to move to this form of teaching. Introductory courses in computer programming can appear to have all the elements needed to move to a flipped environment; however, initial observations from our research identify possible pitfalls with the assumption. In this work in progress the authors discuss early results and observations of implementing a flipped classroom to teach an introductory programming course (CS1) to engineering, engineering technology, and software engineering undergraduates.

Class instruction is a living and ever evolving process aimed at providing students with a quality education. Instructors are responsible for analyzing their courses to ensure that delivery of information is effective. Changes made are usually based on student assessments; however, our reactions to assessments are flawed without student insight. One method to obtain student feedback is through muddiest point reflections. This activity asks students to reflect on what was just taught allowing students the opportunity to share what was “muddy”. This mixed-methods study provides vignettes from faculty members on their use of muddiest point reflections and an assessment of what value students associate with such an intervention. Faculty members who have used this approach say it drives change within their classes. The analysis of student value beliefs revealed muddiest point reflections as an intervention that positively impacts interest, attainment, and utility value without negative cost. The appeal of muddiest points was also evident with 77% of students hoping to see muddiest point reflections in another class and 93% agreeing to recommend their course experience to a friend. These findings suggest that students agree more than disagree that muddiest point reflections are a valuable addition to their educational experience.

The increased dependence on computer programming in engineering has made it essential for engineering students to learn about programming throughout their undergraduate education. In the same vein, computing students benefit when given an opportunity to learn more about engineering design and systematic thinking. This paper discusses how one college embedded computing and engineering into a combined first-year introductory course. The course fuses computing and engineering using game design and robotics as an offering for both cohorts of students to work together in a multidisciplinary environment. Over the course of the semester, students learn introductory computing and engineering design concepts by designing games and robots using informatics tools to solve design challenges. Interdisciplinary teams consisting of computing and engineering students work together to prototype a game design idea and then bring that idea to life using robots as part of their final project.

Assessing student learning is a key component to education. Most institutions assess learning using a score-based grading system. Such systems use multiple individual assignment scores to produce a cumulative final course grade, which may or may not represent what a student has learned. Standards-based grading offers an alternative that addresses the need to directly assess how well students are developing toward meeting the course objectives. The course objectives are the focal point of the grading system, allowing the instructor to assess students on clearly defined objectives throughout the course. The system assesses how well students become proficient in the course objectives over the duration of the course. This study extends the use of standards-based grading at the K-12 level into the realm of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Five STEM courses pilot tested the integration of a standards-based grading system to investigate how it impacts affective and cognitive student behaviors. The results suggest that a standards-based grading system increased student domain-specific self-efficacy, was perceived as valuable, and helped students develop more sophisticated beliefs about STEM knowledge.

Innovation is critical to our economic and social prosperity. We rely on industry, university, and government employees to develop, modify, and implement innovative ideas while navigating ambiguous problem contexts, overcoming setbacks, and persisting in competition with courses of action. Research has shown that self-efficacy, or an individual's belief in their ability, influences the pursuit of and persistence in challenging work. This suggests that self-efficacy is critical for innovation. Despite resource-intensive efforts to foster innovation in organizations, we inadequately understand how to measure the impact of these interventions on individuals' judgment of their own innovation ability. We present the initial development and validation of the first survey measure for Innovation Self-efficacy (ISE), or the belief in one's ability to innovate.

Traditional forms of mentoring offer graduate students a support system to assist them through their education. Many times these traditional forms of mentorship can be augmented by other support mechanisms. This phenomenon is especially true in engineering education because of the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline. In this work, we explore engineering education graduate students' self-reported value in regards to their participation in a multi-institution peer mentorship program. Further, we identify if and in what ways such a program supports graduate students' development towards becoming emerging scholars in the field of engineering education.

Modeling is a pervasive feature in any engineering curriculum that is rarely taught as an explicit topic to engineering learners. The implicit inclusion of modeling often results in conceptions of models being primarily descriptive - visual and physical representations - that originate from everyday and coursework use. A broader understanding of modeling is achieved when students are given opportunities to learn about the predictive nature of some modeling applications. Exploratory studies have shown that significant shifts occur in the modeling conceptions of senior engineering students when taught an explicit modeling intervention. Descriptive-centric conceptions remained prevalent with an additional focus on predictive mathematical models. The following work in progress describes the next steps of our study focused on expanding earlier findings. Student, and additionally faculty conceptions, will be observed to gain a greater understanding of modeling conceptions.

The discussion of a philosophy of engineering and/or engineering education has encouraged the community to try and bring some coherence to the field. This select and annotated bibliography is one resource intended to enhance and continue the conversation. In conjunction with a preparatory review, this bibliography introduces the 2011 FIE special workshop on the subject of exploring the philosophies of engineering and engineering education. This work extends what has been done during the 2007, 2008, and 2009 FIE conferences. Focus is brought to bare on research and theoretical readings that discuss a philosophy of engineering education; the engineering identity crisis; differentiating engineering, science, and technology; engineering science verse engineering design, engineering epistemology, philosophy and practice of the engineering curriculum; philosophy in the engineering curriculum; engineering ethics; and engineering culture. Each of the focus areas is introduced with a list of annotated references that present current ideas, beliefs and findings related to these areas.

Graduate students engaged in engineering education research have always informally networked in small clusters at engineering education themed conferences. As the graduate student population has grown, so too has a widespread desire to develop a larger, more formalized student network. An effort supported by engineering education faculty and interested graduate students is currently underway to create a formal consortium to network and support students. This paper provides a brief overview of the tentatively planned programs and events that demonstrate the progress to date of the Graduate Engineering Education Consortium for Students (GEECS). Presenting our early development is intended to provide a basis for our decisions to date. Exhibition of the consortium through this media also intends to raise awareness and attract other students who may not be aware of the planned consortium and the benefits and resources that it may provide to enhance their experience.