When preparing engineering students for professional practice, the importance of their engagement in global, social, and ethical dimensions of engineering cannot be overemphasized. The importance of ethics is well discussed in engineering education literature, but much less is known about how to effectively prepare graduates for the complex global, social, and ethical challenges of engineering practice. Studies have found that common challenges to engineering ethics education include lack of student interest, resistance from faculty, and a lack of consensus regarding topics and pedagogical methods to include in already saturated curricula.We believe a character-focused approach to engineering ethics education could address these challenges by providing language and tools that are easily accessible to students and faculty for engaging ethical challenges in engineering and addressing students' development as individuals and future professionals. This paper investigates recent pedagogical efforts to implement character education in undergraduate engineering education through a scoping literature review. The resulting synthesis of 30 publications reveals a variety of pedagogical approaches, the majority of which are student centered and already commonly used by engineering educators. Our findings indicate that character education is indeed a viable and accessible approach to engineering ethics education. Learning assessment was largely limited across observed interventions, so future studies are needed to examine student and faculty engagement as well as impact on students’ ethical decision-making processes.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper explores how implementing best practices from organizational science can strengthen strategic change initiatives in engineering education. Transforming organizational culture has been a priority in engineering education for nearly four decades, but systemic change has not come easily, and long-standing goals remain elusive. Stagnant graduation and industry participation rates for women and underrepresented minorities have implications for establishing cultures of inclusion. Further, continued difficulty closing the research-to-practice gap in the engineering classroom points to faculty cultures that are resistant to, or unprepared for, change. Are such cultures immutable, or could our current interventional methods be improved? How much do we really know about planning and managing change, and could best practices from organizational science help catalyze the transformations we seek? To investigate this possibility, the state of change in engineering education is briefly reviewed and compared to two influential sets of universal best practices for managing organizational change. These practices are incorporated into six principles of good practice intended for use in engineering education contexts.

The complexity of engineering practice requires engineers to make decisions for the betterment of society and public welfare. What role should character education play in engineering education? How might we better prepare engineers to tackle the complexity of real-world practice with virtues like integrity, humility, courage, purpose, empathy, practical wisdom, curiosity, creativity, justice, resilience, authenticity, etc.? In this special session, we invite engineers and engineering educators to rethink how we might educate the whole engineer holistically leveraging what we know about character education. The goals for the session will enable participants to: (1) Gain a common understanding of character education. (2) Reflect on the role that character education should play in engineering education. (3) Brainstorm ways upon which one might integrate character education in one's engineering course. (4) Develop some shared visioning for collective impact as engineering educators.

As we engage in an increasingly complex and quickly progressing world, the development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students will be increasingly important to the continuation of the United States' competitiveness. However, the overall number of STEM students earning a degree will not be able to meet the increasing demand for practicing professionals especially within historically underrepresented groups such as women and minorities. One way to tackle this problem is to increase the retention of STEM students by studying the processes that influence persistence to completion of a STEM degree. Retention is critically important to the field of engineering as over 10% of all engineering majors will switch to other STEM degrees and even more will not persist within STEM fields at all. The focus of this paper is to utilize Expectancy-Value Theory to determine how freshman engineering students (both those who persisted within the major and those who switched out of the major) perceive engineering. Research was conducted at a predominately undergraduate liberal arts institution with a medium sized engineering program. Interview data was examined for 11 entering freshman who stayed with the engineering program (persisters) and 10 entering freshman who switched to different majors (switchers).

The rigors of engineering education present each student with a unique set of academic and psychological challenges. Established interventional strategies are typically focused on enhancing academic - rather than psychological - preparedness, potentially leaving many students vulnerable to various demotivating factors. Participants in this special session will collaborate to develop a nucleus of ideas to inform the future development of psychological preparedness strategies - interventions specifically designed to facilitate productive processes such as self-efficacy, self-discipline, resilience, and motivation.