Engineering education research often uses interview-based studies to develop critical theoretical findings for transforming engineering education and practice. However, researchers are often left with few practical tools to hone the craft of interviewing, especially for unscripted interactions or moments that go beyond predefined protocols. Here, we introduce a process-oriented tool designed to refine researchers' interviewing capabilities. By focusing on adaptability and reflexivity, this tool aims to elevate the quality of evaluative discussions between novice researchers and their mentors.

Students in the U.S. experience common barriers to studying abroad, including finances, institutional support, cultural capital, racism abroad, and lack of information [1]. Engineering students go abroad at significantly lower rates than their peers, with only 8.9% of the over 2% U.S. student population studying abroad from the engineering field in the 2020–2021 academic year [2]. Although these barriers demonstrate significant challenges for students, an anti-deficit approach to studying abroad empowers students in their pursuit of a global engagement experience and informs administrators on how to develop empowering programs that deliver numerous benefits to these student participants [3]. Over the past three years at a large, urban, Minority-Serving University, efforts have been made by engineering faculty and the learning abroad office to decrease common barriers and empower students by highlighting the learning outcomes that students acquire during short-term faculty-led learning abroad experiences. However, there is limited research on the intersection of underrepresented and STEM students in study abroad. Therefore, the purpose of this preliminary study was two-fold: (1) to investigate the student learning outcomes that students express having been enhanced or acquired during a short-term learning abroad experience, and (2) to use those findings to encourage additional engineering faculty to develop programs. This study used photo-elicitation, a visual method that taps into participants' tacit knowledge and helps lessen the power dynamics between researchers and study participants. We asked participants to capture and submit photographs and a written response describing how the learning abroad experience impacted them as global citizens. We used thematic analysis [4] of participants' written descriptions triangulated with photographs that they submitted as our data analysis procedure. Through the analysis of nine student responses, we inductively developed two themes: the process of experiencing and connecting to culture and people and teamwork. We observed distinctions in the process of experiencing and connecting based on where students placed their value. Some students found value in the immersive experience, while others valued the comparison and connection to their previous cultural experience and knowledge. Students presenting teamwork focused on the engagement with other participants or people in Ghana to solve problems (small activities) and larger challenges. This preliminary study suggests that short-term faculty-led learning abroad experiences are viable for supporting students' development as global engineers and citizens. The results suggest that short-term experiences can significantly impact student perspectives, identity as engineers, and connection to people and the world. The work will be foundational for future qualitative studies that could include interviews and focus groups that render deeper inquiry into the themes identified in the preliminary study.

Engineering education research heavily relies on qualitative studies that utilize interview-based approaches. The quality and depth of knowledge derived from these studies depend heavily on the craft of conducting interviews, a facet often overlooked in prior work on qualitative methods. This special session aims to address this gap by guiding engineering education researchers in honing their interviewing skills for qualitative research. Participants will learn best practices for developing interview protocols, creating an accessible environment, and capturing high-quality data. Through case studies and hands-on activities, attendees will gain confidence in moderating conversations, improving data collection, and enhancing their overall skillset. This session provides an opportunity for researchers interested in qualitative research and scholarly educators to deepen their understanding of conducting meaningful interviews. By bridging the gap between the importance of qualitative studies and the need for skilled interviewers, we aim to contribute to the advancement of engineering education research.

Background: A dissertation literature review can require up to six months of effort for a chapter's worth of either chronological or thematic history of the ideas and arguments for a given topic. With the fast propagation of engineering education (EnEd) research, there is a correlated need to quickly evaluate relevant research, especially during the initial stages of project design. A way to speed up the process of reviewing relevant literature is to use computational tools. One such example is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC, pronounced “Luke”) and its Meaning Extraction Method (MEM) topic modeling option as a pathway to a speedier literature review over traditional methods (e.g., by hand or spreadsheet). Purpose: We used LIWC to conduct an enhanced literature review as a part of an ongoing study on middle school outreach, engineering identity (eID), and persistence for women in engineering. Here, we highlight the findings gleaned from MEM, the “bottom-up” topic modeling procedure to find common themes within diverse types of EnEd text, also weighing the importance of each search term within the paper set while creating an author reliance metric. Scope/Method: LIWC quickly gathered data on a set of twenty-seven papers found via systematic search methods, using both “top-down” methods with user-defined and built-in dictionaries as well as the “bottom-up” MEM analysis. MEM first uses a find-and-replace lemmatizer, then it scans for the number of times those simple forms appear (also counting the number of documents) and produces a document-term matrix. We analyzed the matrix for the top-50 most frequently used vocabulary within all papers and top-10 terms within a majority of the papers and compared the results to a priori eID and persistence facets. Results: In this early-stage work, we learned that computational text analysis could indeed speed up the process of a literature review. LIWC MEM analysis confirmed the most important topics to the body of texts analyzed and was able to determine that the recurring verbiage in these texts indeed applied to the topic under study while swiftly highlighting the recurrence of the original search terms. Conclusions: LIWC allowed our team to focus quickly on the most salient themes in the literature. Still, we reaffirm that we had to read the papers found to capture the essential insights. The power of the MEM portion of LIWC might be the future for understanding the language of EnEd research in a quantitative manner and could allow faster inter-rater consistency if also used to analyze transcripts.

This addresses the question, "To what degree can design projects integrated into the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) curriculum affect student confidence in their design skills and perceptions of ChBE as a whole?" To answer this question, students were evaluated on their confidence with engineering design and their satisfaction with ChBE as a discipline before and after the design projects, as well as their perceived learning outcomes after completing the design projects.