Student mental health issues have been on the rise in recent years. Many factors play a role in mental health issues, including culture and climate. Engineering culture is known to be very difficult and oftentimes toxic which can exacerbate mental health issues. This panel will discuss various mental health struggles and the ties between mental health and engineering culture. The goal of this panel is to get audience members thinking about how we can change engineering culture to be one that is more nurturing and places importance on mental well-being.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards millions annually to transform and continuously improve STEM education and engineering education in the United States. In order to position the engineering education community towards funding success, this session is designed to help investigators who are new to NSF and new to funded engineering education projects. Following common guidelines towards effective education research projects (from foundational research to design and development research to efficacy research to scale-up research), session attendees will learn about the critical elements that lead to successful engineering education projects and learn about a variety of NSF Programs that support engineering education transformation initiatives, from course-level innovations to curricular transformations to institutional transformations.

As part of a larger project to assess what marginalization looks like in engineering student teams in the classroom, an opportunity evolved to measure gender and race/ethnicity more authentically and more safely than is commonly done. This paper describes the design of these authentic questions and how students responded to them. In the case of the race/ethnicity question, the paper compares student responses to the new question to their responses to an earlier question that had no option to select multiple identities and no opportunity to write in a free-text response. This process makes visible the students who were likely harmed by the old question design, emphasizing the importance of an authentic measurement.

An ability to apply philosophical inquiry to both create and critique arguments about the current and future state of engineering education is a critical capability for future engineering educators to develop. However, there are few, if any, examples of how to do this. In this paper we describe a course that we have been offering for four years at Purdue University, History and Philosophy of Engineering Education, as an example of how to address this gap. We describe the learning objectives, conceptual frameworks used, learning and assessment activities, and examples of course assessments that illustrate learning outcomes.