Research demonstrates a growing mental health crisis in graduate education, which can contribute to productivity, departure, and well-being issues. To address this crisis and advocate for systemic change, this project explored faculty perceptions about graduate student mental health and how these perceptions intersect with direct action when student mental health challenges arise. We were guided by phenomenological inquiry to explore how faculty attitudes (n = 3) about mental health shape programmatic and individual decisions around supporting mental health. We thematically analyzed interviews discussing stress and mental health focused on faculty experiences. Faculty interviews demonstrated varying attitudes toward graduate student stress and mental health. Faculty desires to engage in discussions about stress or mental health were on a wide spectrum, often with work productivity guiding these discussions. Further, faculty highlighted levels of discomfort with engaging in discussions about mental health, especially with the students they work closest with. Findings indicate a need to foster faculty skill and comfort with engaging with students about their mental health while also providing clear institutional policies that support these actions to address the mental health crisis.

The research paper examines how engineering doctoral students describe their awareness and experiences with stress and mental health during their graduate studies. Despite the known bidirectional relationship between stress and mental health, there is limited research on how engineering doctoral students rationalize the disparity between the health consequences of chronic stress and the veneration of academic endurance in the face of these challenges. Given the dangers of chronic stress to physical and mental health, it is important to understand how students perceive the purpose and impact of stress and mental health within overlapping cultures of normalized stress. We conducted semi-structured interviews to understand participants' awareness, conceptualizations, and interpretations of stress and mental health. The research team analyzed interview transcripts using content analysis with inductive coding. Overall, we found that our participants recognized behavioral changes as an early sign of chronic stress while physical changes were a sign of sustained chronic stress; these cues signaled that participants needed additional support, including social support and campus mental health services. These findings support the need for greater mental health awareness and education within engineering doctoral programs to help students identify and manage chronic stress.

This full research paper investigates how faculty understanding and preparation to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom affects students” understanding of these topics and abilities to create inclusive teaming cultures. Inclusive teaming is an essential part of engineering education and one of the key ABET student outcomes. However, students are rarely given the skills needed to effectively support truly equitable teaming environments. This ethnographic case study uses data from a single-institution with a core mission of diversity, equity, and inclusion embedded in the vision, mission, practices, and pedagogy. Multiple sources of data were collected including observations, interviews, surveys, and artifacts. This study focuses on the faculty$(\mathrm{n}=6)$and student interviews$(\mathrm{n}=12)$conducted in Spring 2019. Together, these multiple streams of data provide key insights into particular faculty attitudes, philosophies, and practices that support students” development of DEI capacity.

This full research paper explores how the remote engineering education environment influences the ways students come to see themselves as engineers. We answer the research question “What aspects of the remote engineering education environment support or fail to support undergraduate engineering identity development?” Participants included 32 freshman and sophomore students during the fall and spring semesters of 2020. Focus groups used a semi-structured protocol to encouraged participants to reflect on their identities, motivation, and success. Participants' experiences with the remote education environment organically emerged throughout the focus groups and were analyzed using directed content analysis to develop codes and themes. The analysis was guided by a conceptual framework that considers figured worlds, communities of practice, and engagement with the environment. Two themes emerged and emphasized the physical and social environment as influential to identity development. Both themes were connected by a subtheme of realness in which participants described the online education environment as not feeling real and hard to engage with.

The research reported here explores the variance in engineering master's degree seeking students' graduate engineering identity (GEI) as it relates to key factors such as advisor relationships, a thesis project, a paid research assistantship, belonging to a lab, and previous research experiences. This is part of a larger study exploring engineering graduate student (EGS) experiences through motivation and identity frameworks to elucidate why some students persist in the engineering discipline. GEI includes three identity domains of engineer, researcher, and scientist with each containing sub-constructs of performance/competence, recognition, and interest. Utilizing multilevel modeling, variance between individuals and universities is found in the scientist/recognition identity domain/sub-construct for master's degree-seeking students. Advisor relationship and research experience explain significant portions of the variance for both individuals and universities. Implications for engineering graduate programs, faculty and universities are presented.

This WIP research paper describes the experiences of engineering graduate students (EGSs) who changed labs following experiences of bias in graduate engineering education. Experiences of bias may contribute to EGS leaving the field of engineering. As part of a larger multiphase research project to explore the influence of bias on EGS engineering identity (EI), qualitative interviews (n = 30) were conducted exploring EGSs' experiences of bias. These interviews engaged participants in discussions about their social and personal identities (e.g., sex, race/ethnicity) and explored their perceptions of and experiences with bias. This study focuses on four participants who discussed changing research labs in response to experiences of bias. This paper describes data from these participants as it relates to their experiences of bias, lab change, and differences in their new labs, highlighting the nature of bias experiences and their pervasive effects. Participants described experiences of bias leading them to change their research lab. They reported experiences with advisors, peers, and other faculty that made them feel unwelcome in engineering as a field due to their race or gender. Feelings of not belonging in a lab led this sample of EGS to change labs in an attempt to remain in engineering while removing themselves from negative experiences. We argue that institutions should provide opportunities, understanding, and guidance for students to change labs, and briefly discuss how this might be accomplished. Overall, we offer a perspective that has not been explored in the engineering education literature - specifically, changing labs as an alternative to dropping out or leaving the field in response to experiences of bias.

The purpose of this work in progress (WIP) research paper is to examine the relationship between engineering doctoral students' perceptions of their research task difficulties and advisor relationships. We used identity-based motivation (IBM) as a theoretical framework for this study. Specifically, we consider the construct interpretation of difficulty as it can serve to motivate or demotivate students. In a nationally representative survey, students ranked the level of difficulty they experienced conducting research tasks, such as writing and presenting. They also noted how they regard different aspects of their student-advisor relationships, including communication, expertise, and overall positivity of the relationship. Linear regression was performed to examine how the participants' perceptions of their student-advisor relationships predicted their perceptions of research task difficulty (n=1152). Results showed a weak but significant correlation between these variables, suggesting that student perceptions of their advisor relationships may be one of many variables that influence students' perceptions of research task difficulty. Through better understanding of the influence of doctoral students' perceptions of their advisor relationships on their perceptions of task difficulty, we can begin to create guidelines to improve advisors' interactions with their doctoral students to address long-standing persistent issues.

The purpose of this full-length research paper is to explore the motivation profiles of engineering doctoral students (EDS) and their effects on student persistence. A Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) identified five profiles across four constructs from the Future Time Perspective (FTP) framework, with three straightforward profiles (Low, Average, and High) and two mixed profiles (Low Connectedness and Low Multiplicity). Two between-subjects ANCOVAs were run to test for differences in difficulty ascertaining degree progress (DADP) and intentions to persist (IP). DADP differed significantly by profile assignment, F(4,1137) = 21.38, p <; .001, Partial-eta squared =.07, as did IP, F(4,1136) = 12.26, p <; .001, Partial-eta squared =.04. This indicates that there are distinct motivation profiles among EDS with implications for student progress and persistence. Differences between the five profiles and their effect on DADP and IP will be discussed in further detail, along with recommendations for faculty and advisors.

This research category Work in Progress study explores the relationship between research experience and engineering identity development in the engineering graduate student population. Preliminary data from a national survey of engineering graduate students is used to explore correlations between research experience and domains of graduate student identity related to being an engineer, scientist, and researcher. Our analysis shows that the recognition subconstruct of researcher and scientist identity domains are significantly positively correlated with research experience. The recognition subconstruct of the engineer identity domain is not significantly correlated with research experience. The future analysis plans beyond correlation are discussed, and implications for the engineering education community are proposed.

This full research paper presents a pilot study exploring how mid-year engineering students' perceptions of their future careers shift over one academic year. Perceptions of future careers determine many academic decisions students make, affecting student recruitment, persistence, and performance in engineering. Understanding how students' perceptions of their future careers change will give researchers, practitioners, and academic advisors insight into what influences students' choice of engineering major and what they choose to focus on in their courses. Students in sophomore engineering courses (n=71) took a survey measuring the clarity of and attitude towards their future career goals at two time-points, 2-3 semesters apart. Participants' perceptions shifted between four distinct ways of thinking about the future. Most participants shifted to either a well-defined and positive perception of their future possible career or an ill-defined less positive perception of their future possible career.

The impact of technology on workforce development and socioeconomic prosperity has made K-12 computing engineering and STEM in general a national educational priority. However, the integration of computing remains obstructed by resources and lack of professional development to support students' learning. Further challenging is students' STEM attitudes and interest do not matriculate with them into higher education. This issue is especially critical for traditionally under represented and underserved populations including females, racial/ethnic minority groups, and students of low-socioeconomic status (SES). To help mitigate challenges, we developed an unplugged (computer-less) computing engineering and robotics lesson composed of two introductory computing concepts, sequencing and decision-making, using a small robot arm and tangible programming blocks. Through students' sequencing of operations, debugging, and executing complex robotic behavior, we seek to determine if students' interest or attitudes change toward engineering. Nine one-hour introductory pilot lessons with 148 students, grades 6-10, at two public middle schools, and one summer camp were conducted. We measured students' engineering interest and attitudes through a 15 question pre- and post-lesson survey and calculated aggregate factor scores for interest and attitudes. We found low-SES students' a priori interests and attitudes tend to be lower and more varied than those of their high-SES peers. These preliminary results suggest that the integration of introductory computing and robotics lessons in low-SES classrooms may help students reach similar levels of engineering interest and attitudes as their high-SES peers.

This research category full paper seeks to understand if feelings of belonging differ according to student demographics for first-year engineering students. Engineering has maintained a stable profile (i.e., white, masculine, and male) for many years, despite national trends in higher education. Multiple researchers have demonstrated that increased diversity leads to improved communication skills, creativity, and problem-solving capabilities, all goals that directly align with engineering's core values. The lack of diversity within engineering has resulted in a culture which produces engineers that are underprepared and lacking the skills required to work in an increasingly diverse and global engineering market. Engineering's cultural attitude towards diversity has created environments where students, especially underrepresented minorities (URM), feel that they do not belong despite meeting the academic requirements. To better understand feelings of belongingness within engineering education, the research team set out to answer the question: How do feelings of belongingness differ across demographic characteristics for new (second week) engineering students, enrolled in a first-year first-semester engineering course? Our results demonstrate that neither disability status, race or sexual identity significantly affect how new engineers report their perception of belonging. Female students entered engineering feeling that they belong but at a level significantly lower than their male peers. This suggests that there is still much work to be done in the K-12 environment to cultivate female students' interest and confidence in engineering, as well as room for improving the welcoming of all students into engineering education.

The purpose of this research category work-inprogress paper is to explore the relationships between laboratory groups (specifically, the number and types of students) and the development of engineering, science, and researcher identity among engineering graduate students (EGS). We analyzed preliminary data collected as part of a national survey (current n = 826, 38% of sample target). Our sample aligns with student demographics nationally, with the majority of participants identifying as White (50%) or Asian (32%), male (63%), domestic (62%), and heterosexual (89%). A 3x3 MANOVA found a significant interaction between the type of recognition and the number of students in the lab, F(6,1166) = 2.29, p = .034, ηp2 = .012. Univariate analyses indicated that it was scientist recognition, F(2,584) = 3.52, p = .005, ηp2 = .018, that was significantly affected by the presence of undergraduate researchers. Specifically, participants with 2-3 and 4+ undergraduate lab mates had significantly higher scientist recognition ratings than participants with 0 or 1 undergraduate lab mates. There were no effects on engineer or researcher recognition, and no effects on scientist recognition related to graduate or postdoctoral students. These results suggest that EGS benefit from working with undergraduate students, but the relationship is complex and not always linear. Additionally, the lack of effect on engineer recognition has implications for how EGS identify and relate to fellow engineers in graduate school. Future analyses will identify trends in the overall lab composition and explore their impacts on recognition and engineering identity in more depth.

This research-category full paper investigates the relationship between first-year engineering students' career aspirations and attitudes towards engineering. Career aspirations describe students' beliefs about professional roles they might perform in the future. Attitudes towards engineering were measured using engineering identity, belongingness within engineering, and specific motivation constructs. Examining the intersection of aspirations and attitudes allows educators to understand how students' intended career choices are related to their perceptions of their educational experience. Using survey data from 2,916 students at four large public universities, we found that an interest in industry-based careers was associated with high engineering identity, belongingness, and motivation scores. We found that gender had a moderate effect on aspirations and attitudes. Additionally, we found that an interest in mechanical engineering was associated with increased certainty in an engineering/industry career, while interests in biomedical engineering, non-engineering STM majors, and non-STEM majors were associated with decreased certainty in an engineering/industry career. These results have implications for the current discourse around how engineering students make decisions about their future careers.

This Research Work-in-Progress paper presents a systematic literature review of existing work within graduate STEM education. Recently, engineering education researchers have begun to join the conversation of STEM education through studies exploring student attitudes and minority student experiences, among others. However, there is no centralized publication source for graduate STEM education leading to an under-saturated picture of existing research that causes researchers interested in graduate education to scour disparate sources to gain the necessary background to undertake their research. By conducting a systematic review of the existing literature, this work aims to give future researchers in graduate education a stepping off point for exploration understudied areas in graduate education. We conducted a search of the Journal of Higher Education and Frontiers in Education (FIE) proceedings from 2008-2018. Six articles were found that explored three factors that influence graduate student experiences. The factors are as follows: internal (e.g. advisor), programmatic (e.g. teaching assistantship) and external (e.g. family and future career). We have documented the initial conversations that have occurred in two sources. These results show graduate education as a relatively understudied area, but those seeking to do work in this area, can now more clearly understand the conversations that have occurred.

The purpose of this research category, work in progress (WIP) paper is to qualitatively test and refine our motivation-identity conceptual framework within the doctoral engineering teaching assistant (DETA) population. We developed our motivation-identity framework through previous qualitative research investigating doctoral engineering students' future goals where identity emerged through their discourse. To capture multiple roles in graduate programs, we chose a DETA population to test our integrated framework for transferability. A codebook containing codes, categories, and themes that we created through our past research will be used to test our framework on a DETA population. We collected two sets of qualitative data from 16 participants: timeline and interview. These two pieces of data will be coded together to validate and expand the framework by using a directed content analysis. By understanding the ways in which identity and motivation interact and influence the doctoral experience we can target aspects of doctoral training that may serve to undercut or suppress development of these affective characteristics.

This work-in-progress research paper describes the initial findings of research on students' attitudes about diversity in first-year engineering teams. We used quantitative pre- and post-survey data and qualitative interviews with student teams to understand students' initial attitudes about diversity and teaming and how those were affected by engineering teaming experiences over a semester. The qualitative and quantitative data analyses interact throughout the project's iterations, with each informing the other. Here, we review the progress made through in-depth qualitative analysis when compared to survey data about changes in variance of students' attitudes towards teaming. By using an iterative mixed methods approach, we are able to explore the subtle distinctions in students' attitudes and experiences affecting diverse teaming experiences. In this paper, we will detail this iterative process and how it has produced more nuanced findings than a particular research paradigm alone.

Engineering culture has traditionally limited rather than fostered diversity in engineering. This culture serves to limit representation of diverse individuals within engineering and create environments that are detrimental to creativity, problem solving, and productivity. One way to address this issue is to understand how students align themselves with the cultural values of engineering and navigate their pathways through earning their engineering degrees. We present an analysis of ten participants previously identified through attitudinal survey data as belonging to a “normative” attitudinal group of engineering majors. These individuals provide a way to understand students who are attitudinally similar to the accepted norms and practices of what it means to be an engineer. Results indicate the importance of social resource experiences in engineering and on the widely held belief that success in engineering is born out of hard work, consistent with other studies. These findings outline ways in which engineering culture can shape student attitudes and actions towards learning engineering. Understanding this group may provide ways to change engineering culture to be more inclusive for all students. Our research begins to describe particular cultural practices and values to improve the recruitment, training, and retention of a broader population of engineering students.

Successful group work requires that students transfer relevant prior knowledge to solve problems. This paper establishes a method to assess dynamic knowledge transfer in a group setting through analysis of a group project in a biomechanics class. Transcripts of student-student and student-instructor interactions were coded for evidence of target tools (students identifying relevant problem features), source tools (students activating prior knowledge), answers (stopping points), external inputs (resources and prompts from individuals or the instructor), and workbench explanations (student explanations of connections between source tools and target tools). Knowledge transfer was identified when a source tool and a target tool were coded within a phrase. The frequencies of codes were quantified to provide an overall picture of knowledge transfer for each group member throughout the project. Analysis for one group (a sophomore and junior bioengineering student, and a freshman engineering student) revealed that the junior was the largest contributor in the group, followed by the sophomore and freshman. The group mentioned source tools most frequently, followed by external inputs and target tools. The analysis provided evidence of knowledge transfer within the group through their identification of target tools and use of prior knowledge to explain their observations.

Student motivation is often undervalued in comparison to academic performance measures for evaluating changes in higher education. There is a need to consider the affective domain in reform, in addition to academic performance. The effect of student motivation toward short- and long-term goals on student actions is not well understood. To assess this need, two research questions are addressed: 1) What elements of a motivation instrument designed for first-year engineering students are valid for upper-level engineering students? 2) How do motivations differ for upper level students in different engineering majors? Students in their major-specific engineering courses were surveyed with the Motivation and Attitudes in Engineering (MAE) instrument, which assesses long-term goal related expectancy, and perceptions of present and future tasks/goals. Short-term task self-efficacy was assessed using items adapted from the Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey. Results based on comparisons between major, class, and grade point average (GPA) showed: 1) Higher GPA indicates significantly higher expectancies and self-efficacy; 2) Bioengineers have significantly higher expectancies than mechanical engineers; and 3) Juniors have significantly higher GPAs, expectancies, and more positive perceptions of the present than sophomores. Results indicate that students' motivations toward short- and long-term goals may influence actions toward learning.

The limited impact of many engineering education reforms may be due in part to treating engineering as a single monolithic discipline. We are using student motivation to characterize differences in engineering majors in order to inform educational practices and differences in student learning. Here we report on differences in student attitudes towards their engineering majors, elucidated through the use of survey data collected from first year students and longitudinal data on their majors 2 years later. We provide a detailed picture of the complexity of the engineering population, which will help direct more in-depth qualitative research to examine possible correlations between student motivation and learning in different engineering majors.