Integrating sociotechnical content into foundational engineering courses is a critical, but often overlooked, goal of engineering education. To accomplish this goal, we developed several one-hour modules for the Introduction to Circuits course that include learning objectives, pre-class activities, detailed class guides (with presentation slides, in-class activities, and instructor talking points), and post-class homework and exam questions. We have successfully implemented two initial modules in small and large classes, and in Summer 2024 we collaborated with a diverse cohort of graduate students from across the U.S. to create seven new modules. The modules address issues including sustainable development and energy efficiency, environmental and social impacts of lithium mining, global energy access, and$\text{CO}_{2}$emissions. In this paper, we describe the seven emerging modules.

This work-in-progress research paper describes the development and pilot administration of a survey to assess students' perceptions about sociotechnical issues in engineering. After refining the survey through iterative rounds of review, we piloted it in an “Introduction to Circuits” course at a large, public university in the Midwestern USA in which we deployed a short module addressing technical and social issues. In this paper we document our instrument development process and present descriptive statistics and results of paired t-tests used to analyze the pilot data. We also describe ways our instrument can be implemented by instructors and researchers in multiple contexts.

This innovative practice work-in-progress shares results from two workshops on promoting energy access education in electrical engineering and discusses next steps. There is a need for a significant increase in US workforce development in the electric energy sector as many people in this field are close to retirement age. The field of humanitarian engineering has been found to attract a diverse range of students and motivate students to engage in and persist through their engineering education. Yet, few students who are involved in humanitarian engineering major in electrical engineering. Electricity access refers to the provision of electricity to populations that do not have access to the electrical grid, usually in under-resourced settings. Around the world, over 700 million people do not have access to electricity. Yet, there is very little coverage of this topic in U.S. universities. Recognizing the importance of this topic, the USA National Science Foundation sponsored two workshops in 2022 and 2023 with the goal of identifying approaches to enhance and expand electricity access education at the undergraduate engineering level in the U.S., primarily within electrical engineering. In 2022, there were 25 participants and in 2023, there were 40. The participants at these successful workshops included engineering educators, students, field practitioners, and non-profit organization representatives. In this work-in-progress, we highlight the results from these workshops, discuss next steps, and focus on the importance of the educational challenges and potential for curricular development in this area.

This paper describes a panel session on electricity access education. Electricity access refers to the provision of electricity to populations that do not have access to the electrical grid, usually in under-resourced settings. Around the world, over 600 million people do not have access to electricity. Yet, there is little coverage of this topic in U.S. universities. There is also a need for a significant increase in U.S. workforce development in the electric energy sector as many people in this field are close to retirement age and the transition from fossil fuels may require a significant increase in energy engineers. Topics related to humanitarian engineering have been found to attract a diverse range of students and motivate students to engage in and persist through their engineering education. Yet, few students who are involved in humanitarian projects major in electrical engineering. Recognizing the importance of this topic, the U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored two workshops in 2022 and 2023 with the goal of identifying approaches to enhance and expand electricity access education at the undergraduate engineering level in the U.S., primarily within electrical engineering. In this panel session, we discuss electricity access, highlight the results from these workshops, discuss approaches to incorporating electricity access into the electrical engineering curriculum, survey the attendees on their interest in and expertise regarding electricity access, and brainstorm next steps for curricular development in this area. Thus, we aim to increase awareness of engineering educators about opportunities to incorporate electricity access learning in their courses and continue to build a community of engineering educators interested in electricity access education.

This Innovative Practice work-in-progress describes the use of collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a methodology to explore the centrality of Whiteness (as an ideology) in engineering and how it informs the culture, climate, and discourse of engineering education. We began the first year of our project by conducting a CAE on our own experiences in engineering spaces. CAE takes a collaborative approach to the process of critical self-reflection and can be conducted in many forms, such as collecting personal memory data (e.g., journaling), interviewing each other, facilitating intentional dialogue, or observing each other (e.g., in the classroom). Our team's diverse viewpoints facilitated rich conversations that let us interrogate the ways in which Whiteness reveals its form differently depending on one's positionality and ontology. In this paper, we describe our approach, experiences, and challenges with using CAE to explore our engineering journeys. Future steps include using our findings to create a faculty development program to help engineering faculty further their development of critical consciousness. For movement towards racial equity in engineering to be effective and sustainable, we believe change must begin with action in the classroom, where engineering faculty have direct interactions and influence over students' beliefs, attitudes, and value systems.

In this work-in-progress, we outline a new National Science Foundation-funded project to help engineering instructors integrate sociotechnical issues into their circuits' classrooms. Inspiring electrical engineering (EE) instructors to implement our sociotechnical modules has the potential to achieve far-reaching influence on the field. The modules address the need for sociotechnical curricula in the middle years, when students are forming their engineering identities, and can be used to help students achieve key ABET outcomes related to ethical, global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic considerations that are often challenging for faculty to address. Working with a team of EE graduate students and applying proven principles of backward course design, we aim to develop and test several sociotechnical modules for the Introduction to Circuits course. Each module will be linked to technical topics addressed in the course and emphasize a different sociotechnical issue such as conflict minerals used for electronics components or recycling electric vehicle batteries. We will assess the effectiveness of the modules at reinforcing the technical content of the course and at promoting students' sense of social responsibility and we will prepare detailed teaching guides that will allow instructors to easily use the modules in their own contexts.

Multiple stakeholders are interested in measuring undergraduate student success in college across academic fields. Different metrics might appeal to different stakeholders. Some metrics such as the fraction of first-time, full-time students who start in the fall who graduate within six years, the graduation rate, are federally mandated by the U.S. Department of Education, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). We argue that this calculation of graduation rate is inherently problematic because it excludes up to 60% of students who transfer into an institution, enroll part-time, or enroll in terms other than the fall. By expanding the starters definition, we propose a graduation rate definition that includes conventionally excluded students and provides information on progression in a specific program. Stickiness is an even more-inclusive alternative, measuring a program's success in graduating all undergraduates ever enrolled in the program. In this work, programs are grouped into six academic fields: Arts and Humanities, Business, Engineering, Other, Social Sciences, and STM (Science, Technology, and Mathematics. Stickiness is the percentage of students who ever enroll in an academic field that graduate in the same field. We use the Multiple Institution Dataset for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) 2023 which contains unit-record data for over 2 million individual students at 19 institutions. For the academic fields studied, Engineering has the highest graduation rate and third highest stickiness. Social Sciences and Business also have higher graduation rates and stickiness than the other fields. We also track the relative fraction of students migrating to and from each academic field. This paper continues our work to derive better metrics for understanding student success.

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress focuses on the development and deployment of an educational module about air quality for upper-division undergraduate engineering students. In a Photovoltaic Solar Energy course, one student developed and deployed a module to help other students consider the environmental impacts of engineering projects. This work capitalized on a unique opportunity for the student to bring her knowledge gained in an internship into the classroom to share with her peers. In this paper, the authors describe the motivation for this work, the design and implementation of the module, student responses on a homework and feedback survey, and their own reflections. Students were successful at completing the homework assignment where they applied knowledge gained from the module to a realistic, hypothetical engineering project on their University’s campus. Responses from the survey reveal that students felt peer-teaching was valuable and they particularly enjoyed hearing a peer’s perspective. Some students valued the specific content of the module, such as working with real environmental data. Others cited learning about diverse leaders who have contributed to the environmental movement around the world. This module could be useful for other classes where instructors are interested in integrating environmental, social, and technical concepts related to sustainability into their curriculum.

This research full paper explores the academic outcomes of undergraduate engineering students who leave their native countries and pursue their education in the USA. These “international students” are defined as students who were not citizens or permanent residents of the USA who enrolled in engineering programs in the USA. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze metrics for international and domestic students pursuing undergraduate degrees in one of the five most popular engineering disciplines in the USA: chemical, civil, electrical, industrial/systems, and mechanical using the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD includes institutional records from over 1.7 million undergraduate, degree-seeking students in 21 programs at nineteen universities in the USA with over 85,000 men and 21,000 women enrolled in one of the most popular five engineering disciplines in the USA. Metrics used include representation at the start of university studies, initial engineering major choice, six-year graduation rate, and stickiness (the number of students graduating in a major divided by the number of students who ever enrolled in that major). Results are disaggregated by origin (domestic or international), sex (female and male), and major (chemical, civil, electrical, industrial/systems, and mechanical). Results show that there are more men than women in these disciplines and this is more pronounced for international students. In these disciplines, international students graduate at higher rates and have higher stickiness than domestic students. International females have the highest graduation rates. Industrial/Systems Engineering has the highest graduation rates and stickiness for all populations. Insights from this work can inform student services personnel and others committed to international student success.

This research Work-In Progress begins the discussion of the experience of Native Hawaiian engineering students. Despite having early success in sustainable development and engineering, Kanaka Maoli or Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary engineering practices have not been able to persist alongside Western engineering due to cultural differences in knowledge acquisition. To understand these differences, the Holographic Epistemology of Dr. Manulani Aluli Meyer was used to code semi-structured interviews with three undergraduate Native Hawaiian engineering students focused on their intersectional identities. Common themes and experiences that all three students brought up were matched with native Hawaiian values of Kūpaʻa, Kuleana, and Hōʻihi to represent the Body, Mind, and Spiritual dimensions of knowing within the Holographic Epistemology, respectively. These values and dimensions of knowledge connect the importance of kumu (mentors) and lāhui (community) to the commitment to the ʻāina (land) that both stem from a profound respect for all people and things. Hopefully, all the dimensions can be put into balance and begin the conversation of bringing new mindsets, knowledges, and cultures into the engineering space. However, this is just the beginning of the moʻolelo (story) of Kānaka in engineering, and it is time to continue to build on the knowledge of these people and other understudied populations.

This paper presents findings on participants of a massive open online course named "Educational Robotics for all" developed under Open edX platform. The document describes the organization and structure of the MOOC and some of its preliminary results. As an example, Module 2 about Gender and STEAM is presented and discussed.

This study focuses on quantitative analyses of international and domestic students pursuing undergraduate degrees at institutions in the USA. Metrics used include representation at start of university studies, representation at graduation and six-year graduation rate. Results are disaggregated by origin (domestic or international), sex (female and male), and major (engineering or non-engineering). Results show that more international students choose engineering than other majors. There are more men than women in engineering and this is more pronounced for international students. International students graduate at higher rates in engineering than domestic students by about 5%. This may reflect a tension between their higher academic qualifications but challenges of adjusting to studying in another country. These insights can be used to support student success.

This special session aims to engage the audience in a conversation about integrated engineering, a transdisplinary approach to engineering. Participants will learn about the Integrated Engineering programs at Minnesota State University, Mankato (USA), the University of San Diego (USA), and University College London (UK). In an interactive session, participants will discuss the concept of integrated engineering and how it might apply to their programs and students. We hope this will establish a foundation for the community to continue discussion of integrated engineering as an emerging description of engineering learning and practice.

This work-in-progress is a critical reflection on our first offering of an energy course that reimagines what we teach and how we teach using a lens of culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs). As our interdisciplinary team developed and taught this class for second-year engineering students, we encountered challenges about how to best address systemic inequities in energy education in ways reflective of our own positionalities. In this WIP, we describe several missteps, illustrate how our differences in identities led to productive conflict, and reflect on our progression through deeper understanding of how to implement CSPs successfully. We conclude that critical self-reflection and acknowledging the pervasiveness of White, colonial, and masculine knowledge sources in engineering education is a necessary first step to taking an anti-racist position as an educator.

In this innovative practice paper, we describe a project related to fitness trackers designed to cultivate sociotechnical awareness and practice among second-year undergraduate engineering students in Spring 2020. We identified four topics related to fitness trackers that intersected with broader sociotechnical themes including data privacy, the workplace, health insurance companies, and sustainability. In teams, students researched the social and environmental impacts of fitness trackers for their topic and gave a presentation to the class including leading a discussion. This project was designed to scaffold learning, encourage class participation, and enhance the quality of presentation. Survey responses revealed that all student respondents found the practice presentation with the instructors held over Zoom as helpful in completing their assignments and presentations. Other aspects that students rated as helpful included providing a list of resources to start their research and an example presentation to clarify expectations about depth required. The global COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the project presentations being conducted remotely, which gave students the opportunity to practice facilitating using Zoom, a skill that is directly relevant to current industrial practice. Students were creative in how they encouraged their classmates to participate including using Zoom polls, Kahoot, and breakout rooms. Students' responses to survey questions demonstrate that they learned about the sociotechnical nature of engineering, believed the project topics mattered to them as engineers, and these topics were relevant to their majors. Students cited the environmental, social, and legal aspects of the project as most interesting to them as engineers. Thus this can serve as an example for other engineering educators for how to approach teaching sociotechnical content in engineering.

The Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is a unique research resource offering student record data at an unprecedented scale. This special session aims to introduce participants to MIDFIELD including the data that it contains and some key results from research using MIDFIELD, explore how to conduct research with such a resource, and explain how participants can access MIDFIELD. Understanding what data is available in MIDFIELD and how to access it will help researchers decide if this is a useful resource for their own research.

This Special Session paper introduces participants to constructivist listening strategies. As educators, we encounter institutional power and hierarchical systems as we work to affect educational change. Simultaneously, we navigate the effects of internalized conditioning and oppression from living within these systems particularly for those who are marginalized. These effects may be unseen and many of us feel there are not venues for discussing them and moving towards healing. We argue that different creative structures are needed to provide such venues and this session aims to begin to do so. Deepening authentic relationships both within a supportive community and across ideological divides are necessary to enact and sustain true change. We are proposing in this session an opportunity for educators to come together to build community and interrupt structures that result in isolation and inaction.

This innovative practice full paper shows how considerations of social, environmental, and economic context were integrated into a required introductory course on electrical engineering. We describe the content, implementation, and results of a "Design for the Future" module conducted in Spring 2019. This module is framed around a course-long student project where students choose a technology of interest (TOI) to them that relates to electrical engineering, (e.g. Tesla batteries, solar cells, and tidal-powered turbines). The module includes a student proposal; lectures and discussions interrogating how to determine and define sustainable technologies and how these can be improved; a memo homework asking students to consider the design of a solar farm; an in-class worksheet exercise designed to help students consider the design implications of who benefits, who pays, and who is excluded in relation to their TOI; and, finally, students present and submit a report on their TOI. Student feedback in surveys and a focus group showed that the module enabled students to think more deeply about the broader implications of technologies and their electrical components. We provide a reflection on the successes and areas for improvement of this module, along with module materials, with the hope that they might help others incorporate them into their courses towards developing the capacity among engineering students to address broad considerations that support values such as sustainability and social justice.

This workshop invites discussion about peer review of journal manuscripts in the field of engineering education. The aim is to generate advice for reviewers on how to make effective reviews, which can help editors make appropriate decisions and support authors in improving their manuscripts. The workshop is facilitated by editors of three leading engineering education journals.

This innovative practice full paper describes the design, implementation, lessons learned, and student feedback from the creation of a new module "The Final Straw" in a required Engineering Materials Science class for third-year engineering students. This module used the example of single-use plastic straws and material alternatives to make informed decisions that consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts. Students were introduced to the Social Impact Audit (SIA) tool, a macro-enabled Excel workbook, developed by Ansys/Granta, that uses data from the United Nations Environment Programme and Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry to evaluate and compare the social impact of a product's lifecycle. Based upon the social impacts revealed through SIA, students were required to make and justify recommendations on changing the material a straw was made from and/or the nations where the material originated, was manufactured, or disposed in. Student learning was assessed using homework and exam problems. Student feedback was obtained through voluntary surveys. Preliminary results indicate that students found the SIA tool easy to use, but would have liked a more sophisticated analysis of the intersection of social and economic considerations. Additionally, despite being required to focus on social impacts, students often attributed more importance to economic and environmental considerations when making material selection decisions.

This innovative practice work-in-progress explores the development of an Employment Strategies for Socially Conscious Engineers (ESSCE) resource for engineering students and students' initial responses when engaging with it. During a module that focused on incorporating social considerations into engineering decisions in a Materials Science engineering class, third-year students discussed the role that engineers play in making socially conscious decisions within their careers. Students considered whether they, as newly hired engineers, would have the ability, influence, or power to make these types of decisions when they perceived that employers did not prioritize social considerations over economic. Using student and faculty feedback, we created a list of strategies (e.g., seeking out socially conscious employers, networking with likeminded individuals, and leveraging a company's public image to advocate for socially responsible engineering decisions) to empower students to pragmatically include social considerations into their future engineering careers. Feedback from engineering students revealed that they appreciated strategies such as `wait and see'- which described students being non-selective in their first engineering job and purposively looking for socially responsible company alternatives while building up their engineering skills. One important finding was that students were divided on working for a company that was already socially conscious versus changing a company from within to be more socially conscious. Students also expressed that faculty could play a role in identifying and vetting socially conscious companies.

This work-in-progress presents an overview of current research with the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) and strategies for inviting and supporting other researchers to use this database in their own research. MIDFIELD is a resource for the study of students that includes longitudinal, de-identified, whole population data for multiple institutions. This enables researchers to examine student characteristics (such as race/ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic indicators) and curricular pathways (including coursework) by institution and over time. Because the dataset contains records of all students matriculating over a period of time, researchers can study students across all disciplines, not just engineering. The MIDFIELD team aims to educate the broader research community, expand the network of researchers capable of conducting this research, and share innovative research methods in addition to the actual data. We have offered workshops at several conferences as well as the MIDFIELD Institute. The inaugural MIDFIELD Institute brought together researchers from across the USA for two days in 2019. In an evaluation at the end of the Institute, participants were pleased with the Institute and rated it highly. There was high agreement about the value of the content and delivery. Most participants reported that the instituted lived up to their expectations and was a good way to learn about how to use MIDFIELD data. Areas of improvement suggested by participants included making it longer and more challenging. Several of the MIDFIELD Institute attendees are presenting works-in-progress together at FIE 2020 to provide attendees with a range of examples of research that is possible with MIDFIELD.

This work-in-progress paper builds on research that has found disciplinary differences in culture, demographics at initial enrollment ("starters"), demographics of students migrating later, and various student outcomes for both groups. An earlier longitudinal study using the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) showed no disciplinary stratification of grades in common early engineering courses based on the discipline in which a student matriculates (or first enrolls after a first-year engineering program). In contrast, this study finds that disciplinary differences in introductory courses emerge on the path to graduation. This can only be explained by a bias with respect to introductory course grades of students entering and leaving each major- students with lower grades in introductory courses are more likely to leave or be attracted by some majors than others. Citing prior research regarding cultural differences among the engineering disciplines, the authors propose that disciplines establish and enforce cultural norms regarding student performance in these introductory courses.

Under the National Science Foundation Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (IUSE/PFE: RED) program, we proposed to "Develop Changemaking Engineers" by infusing the socio with the technical into engineering education, and in the process to revitalize the conversation about what engineering is within the academy. In this project, we have developed curriculum that infuses the lenses of social justice, humanitarian practice, and peace into engineering content. We have also developed workshops aimed at broadening the capacity of engineering faculty to teach these topics. We have also created focused cluster hiring to bring new faculty to the school that have the desire and expertise to work in these areas. Finally, we have reached out to other schools and universities to find others who want to engage with us as we try to redefine the engineering canon.This work-in-progress paper includes reflections on this work from two perspectives: that of a department chair who created a new department as a place to prototype new curricular ideas and that of a dean of engineering that has been working with organizational change. From our two viewpoints, we reflect on:1.Challenges in understanding the goals of making engineering education more sociotechnical.2.Having the conversations about what engineering is and what it is not.3.Changing the culture within the school to value the sociotechnical nature of engineering.

Despite calls to increase diversity in engineering education and the professional workforce, there are persistent issues of underrepresentation for female and minority students. This challenge warrants consideration of underrepresented students' experiences both inside and outside the classroom and how they can contribute to persistence. Engagement in out-of-class activities has been linked to positive academic and interpersonal outcomes. However, access to, and impact of, these activities can vary for different groups of students. This session leverages an ongoing National Science Foundation CAREER project to explore out-of-class participation disaggregated by student demographics to provide a more nuanced profile of engagement and offer strategies for advising undergraduate engineering students.

This workshop, similar to our 2018 FIE workshop but revised to reflect participant feedback, introduces data and tools for investigating undergraduate persistence metrics using R. Student record data are from MIDFIELD, a database of registrars’ data from US institutions. The stratified data sample includes demographic, term, course, and degree information for 98,000 students from 1987 to 2016. The midfieldr package provides functions for determining persistence metrics such as graduation rates and for grouping findings by institution, program, sex, and race/ethnicity. The goal of the workshop is to share our data, methods, and metrics for intersectional research in student persistence. The workshop is designed for R beginners.

This workshop introduces data and tools for investigating undergraduate persistence metrics using R. Student record data are from MIDFIELD, a database of registrars' data from US institutions. The stratified data sample includes demographic, term, course, and degree information for 98,000 students from 1987 to 2016. The midfieldr package provides functions for determining persistence metrics such as graduation rates or program stickiness and for grouping findings by institution, program, sex, and race/ethnicity. The goal of the workshop is to share our data, methods, and metrics for intersectional research in student persistence. The workshop is designed for R beginners.

This special session will engage participants in how to apply multiple qualitative research methods to explore the experiences of students, particularly marginalized populations. Throughout the session, we will use our insights and experiences from our collaborative research on student veterans in engineering as an example. The session focuses on using multiple data collection methods (interviews and focus groups) across several institutions. We introduce and discuss the key event timeline and identity circle as qualitative research tools that can be used to answer important questions in engineering education for veterans and other understudied populations. We emphasize the importance of partnerships in such research. Benefits and challenges associated with data collection, synthesis, and analysis, across multiple research sites will be discussed.

How successful are undergraduate students who begin in another major and migrate into engineering disciplines after matriculation? In this work in progress, we present quantitative data on outcomes for engineering migrators disaggregated by discipline, race/ethnicity, and sex. The study includes over 73,000 engineering students from nine U.S. universities, including first-time-in-college and transfer students who ever majored in the most common engineering disciplines: Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Industrial, and Mechanical Engineering. Adopting an ecosystem mindset, we have developed metrics including the graduation rate of migrators and “migration yield” to uncover dynamic information, not afforded by the conventional pipeline model, about the successes of students who migrate among the top five engineering disciplines. Our data show that the graduation rates of migrators are typically higher than those of starters for all engineering majors studied. Migration yield varies by race/ethnicity-sex as well as discipline. Migration yield for Chemical, Electrical, Industrial and Mechanical Engineering shows a sex-based effect, whereas Civil shows a race/ethnicity-based effect.

This work describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a module on bioengineering design and material selection in a third-year Materials Science course for undergraduate engineering students in Fall 2017. This module was implemented as part of a larger National Science Foundation REvolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) project at the University of San Diego, the goal of which is to successfully blend technical content with social context in engineering curricula. This module required student teams to take on missions with specific users and sponsoring agents to design wrist bracing devices, with upfront consideration of social context unique to the mission. Students brainstormed design considerations in class, and then for homework, recommended a material for each of the three missions using technical calculations and engineering design tables that incorporated social context and human elements. Analysis of the weighted considerations showcased student understanding of the financial budgets of sponsoring agents as well as material requirements for specific users and environments. Through this work, students encountered and demonstrated understanding of the close relation between technical and social issues involved in Materials Science.

As women faculty in electrical and computer engineering (ECE), we have been involved in several efforts targeted at increasing the participation of women in ECE departments. For example, at Rutgers University, we have organized presentations and workshops for first year students that highlighted the societal aspects of ECE, such as bioelectrical engineering applications. Such focus did bear fruit; between 2010 and 2016, the sophomore female enrollment in ECE at Rutgers rose from 11% to 19%. At the University of San Diego, we have conducted research on the demographics and outcomes of undergraduate students in ECE, facilitated workshops to help faculty teach in more inclusive ways, and are currently working on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded effort to revolutionize engineering education [1]. Also, as chairs, we have been considering ways to diversify our faculty carefully considering the overall hiring process including innovative approaches such as cluster hires [2], paying close attention to the language used when advertising faculty positions, the discussions during the review of the candidates, the candidate selection criteria, and the interview process [3]. However, the number of diverse graduate students is small to begin with, and in an era in which companies have realized the value of diversity, academia has to compete with companies such as Google and Microsoft for the best Ph.D. graduates. Without a diverse faculty, we cannot sustain a diverse student body.

According to the National Science Foundation, increasing the proportion of veterans pursuing engineering degrees will help meet USA's need for more engineers. The USA offers benefits to military veterans to pay for higher education and they bring valuable assets from their service experience to their engineering education. More research is needed to improve institutional efforts to help veterans integrate these assets into their engineering education. In this paper, we draw on focus group data to explore transition issues faced by student veterans as they move from the military to higher education to pursue their undergraduate engineering degrees. We consider transition from the military and transition to the university, focusing on institutional policies and practices, co-curricular supports, and the relationship between service experiences and engineering study.

This session will engage participants in how to apply multiple qualitative research methods to examine emerging issues in engineering education. The focus will be on using qualitative methods — grounded theory, thematic analysis, and content analysis — across multiple data collection methods (individual interviews, focus groups, key informant interviews, and policy/programmatic artifacts) and across several institutions. Benefits and challenges associated with data collection, synthesis, analysis, and triangulation across multiple research sites will be discussed, as well as the important role of theoretical frameworks in designing engineering education inquiry. It is expected that participants will gain a greater appreciation of qualitative methods that can be used to answer important questions in engineering education.

At FIE 2002, 13 engineering educators assembled to address a variety of topics and predict the “Future of Engineering Education.” Larry Shuman organized and moderated the session [1]. Topics included the changing demographics and economics of the country, technological advances, the engineering pipeline, the state of the University and forces driving change, engineering as a liberal art, the accreditation process and faculty reward system, the role of technology in delivering engineering education, educating for higher levels of performance, research in engineering education, research applications, and outcomes assessment. This panel includes five of the original authors and some new contributors who are active in FIE. We will examine the predictions made in 2002, and ask where we were right, where we were wrong, what has come to pass, what is still in progress, and what concerns have faded from view. Many of the issues previously discussed are still hot topics 15 years later.

The Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is expanding from 14 to about 100 institutions across the USA. This special session aims to introduce participants to MIDFIELD, explore how to conduct research with such a resource, and explain how participants can access MIDFIELD.

Student veterans have become an increasing presence in higher education. We seek to understand the role of the military as a pathway into engineering for student veteran engineers as well as investigate the character and content of their educational experiences. The results of seven focus groups with 29 student veterans indicate that the decision to major in engineering is often, but not always, related to their service. Veteran students are often open with faculty about their veteran status, however they are less likely to reveal it to other students. Veterans believe that their status as a veteran is a significant asset in engineering studies but that their age is less so.

The Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is expanding to include 113 institutions and is being redesigned and archived to be more accessible to researchers. This special session will describe how researchers can better use or gain access to MIDFIELD. At the conclusion of the session participants should be able to: describe MIDFIELD including common data elements, discuss how new variables can be derived from MIDFIELD, understand what is necessary to access the data on the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, and define quantitative and qualitative data types and structures and outline research questions and methods of personal interest to them.

Engineering and Computer Science (E&CS) Education is an emerging discipline and is a subset of the larger field of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. E&CS Education has a relatively brief history, and many individuals who are not directly involved in the discipline are often confused about its purpose. In this special session, we will use up to two background stories to frame the larger questions around E&CS Education goals and help draw the conversation from practice to philosophy while creating a safe space for open conversation addressing issues of change in our discipline.

Active military and student veterans navigate engineering education in ways both similar to and different from their civilian counterparts. This Work in Progress describes variation in institutional environments through interviews with campus administrators and inspection of university websites at four institutions. Three emerging themes are identified: 1) the presence/absence of key student policies, 2) variation in student support services, and 3) gaps in provision of such services. Interviews provide data on the challenges faced and assets brought by veterans, from the point of view of administrators. We find that serving veterans is an area of recent and increasing importance to these institutions and that the level of services offered is evolving to include veterans resource centers, training for students and faculty on veterans' issues, and web portals to access veteran-specific information.

The University of San Diego (USD)'s NSF ADVANCE grant, AFFIRM (Advancement of Female Faculty: Institutional climate, Recruitment and Mentoring), focuses on addressing issues related to race and gender for faculty in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Although a majority of undergraduate students majoring in most STEM disciplines at USD are female, there are not nearly that many women faculty. As part of the grant proposal, the AFFIRM team was promised two new faculty positions by the Provost. In Fall 2013, the team met with the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of the School of Engineering and the idea of hiring a faculty cohort to facilitate mentoring, diversity, and interdisciplinarity emerged and was approved. Over 200 candidates from diverse backgrounds applied. The candidates that came for on-campus interviews were so impressive that the Provost and Deans agreed to additional hiring opportunities, leading to a cohort of eight female faculty in the STEM fields including four women of color. In this work-in-progress, we discuss our innovative cohort hiring process, and share feedback from members of the cohort, and lessons learned. This innovative process could serve as a model for other campuses.

What are the experiences of Chinese students taking engineering courses taught in English by American professors using active learning techniques? Case studies of three such courses are explored in this work. Specifically, two American professors taught courses in English to about 100 students whose native language was Chinese. These courses included a required Electronics course for electrical engineering sophomores, a seminar on Medical Device New Product Development within a required Biomedical Instrumentation course for juniors in biomedical engineering, and a lecture series on New Product Development for first year honors students. All courses included homework teams and active learning techniques in the classroom. Focus groups were conducted near the end of the courses to examine students' experiences. Results and analyses of this qualitative data are presented here. Themes which emerged include the importance of teamwork, challenges with and comfort gained using English, conflicting attitudes toward teaching style, and exposure to practical applications.

Engineering and Computer Science (E&CS) Education is an emerging discipline with a brief history and the unfortunate particularity that many folks outside our discipline are confused as to our purpose. In this special session, we will use two case studies to frame the larger questions around E&CS Education goals and help draw the conversation from practice to philosophy while creating a safe space for open conversation.

Science and Engineering have struggled to diversify the faculty and students in terms of race/ethnicity and gender. Typical approaches to addressing this problem have not been successful, suggesting more innovative approaches are needed. The University of San Diego (USD) received a National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE grant entitled AFFIRM (Advancement of Female Faculty: Institutional climate, Recruitment and Mentoring) which aims to improve the experiences and career development of all women faculty through climate initiatives, mentoring and professional development. As part of AFFIRM, our multidisciplinary team is exploring an innovative methodology known as "Interactive Theatre" to engage faculty in difficult dialogues and sensitive subjects. In this work in progress, we discuss the first Interactive Theatre presentation at USD including the interactive theatre method, results from the climate study we conducted to provide data for developing the skits, details of the interactive theatre experience, responses from the attendees, and key lessons learned.

"Stereotype threat" is a term used by social scientists to describe the anxiety one feels when one fears that he or she will confirm a negative stereotype about his or her own group. This anxiety impairs performance and reduces motivation by introducing a self-evaluative threat. More than 300 studies have verified that people underperform when put in situations that cause stereotype threat. Documented consequences of stereotype threat include decreased performance; blaming failure on internal, rather than external, causes; and distancing oneself from a setting that generates stereotype threat (e.g. changing one's major from engineering or computer science). Given the plethora of research available on practices that increase or reduce stereotype threat, a set of recommended practices can now be used in engineering education to reduce stereotype threat and thereby increase the performance of potentially threatened groups. In this paper, we provide an easy to use and research supported list of best practices to reduce stereotype threat in engineering education.

Stereotype threat occurs when one is at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about a social group that one belongs to. In the academic setting, research has shown that stereotype threat contributes to the achievement gap noted in underrepresented students in engineering classrooms. Participants in this FIE special session define and discuss stereotype threat, explore interventions that research has found to successfully reduce stereotype threat, and identify one strategy to try in the classroom. Key resources are identified including research literature, websites and videos, and recommendations for intervention strategies. In addition to the literature, participants will have access to strategies developed by other participants that can be used by instructors to mitigate stereotype threats.

Various technological, economic, and social developments may radically reshape engineering and computer science education in the next 20 to 30 years. Leaders in engineering education, such as IEEE, that play key roles must decide how they will innovate and support initiatives to improve engineering education. Decisions must be guided by both historical trends and potential future evolutions of engineering education. Since the future cannot be predicted, the organizations may be interested in methodologies to help make decisions. IEEE's Curriculum and Pedagogical Committee (CPC), which is charged with helping IEEE make solid decisions, engaged in a scenario planning exercise to help understand how various influences and trajectories could influence engineering education. Scenario planning methodology has been used by many organizations making long-term investments, to understand how future developments could be taken into account when making key decisions. The purpose of the workshop is to allow participants to experience some aspects of the scenario planning methodology and to compare their results with the results generated by the CPC.

Various technological, economic, and social developments may radically reshape engineering and computer science education in the next 20 to 30 years. Leaders in engineering education, such as IEEE, that play key roles must decide how they will innovate and support initiatives to improve engineering education. The IEEE's Curriculum and Pedagogical Committee (CPC), which is charged with helping IEEE forecast the future of engineering education and make decisions about IEEE's roles in preparing for and crafting that future, engaged in a scenario planning exercise to help understand how various influences and trajectories could influence engineering education. Scenario planning methodology has been used by many organizations making long-term investments. After considering influencers in the engineering education environment; important stakeholders and their roles; goals, constraints, and outcomes for key stakeholders; and potential uncertainties, the CPC identified two critical uncertainties over the next five years: (i) How will engineering programs innovate and adapt? (ii) What will be the values and competencies of engineering faculty? By considering two extremes for each of these uncertainties, the CPC crafted four scenarios, which are described in this paper, to characterize potential future trends and how different scenarios will influence the evolution of engineering education.

We are conducting a longitudinal, multi-institutional, and multivariate study of the trajectories of students in specific engineering disciplines in the U.S.A. to an extent never before possible. Focusing on the eleven partner institutions of the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD), we examine trajectories of engineering students in five engineering disciplines by race/ethnicity and gender. This work-in-progress focuses on the largest fields: chemical (ChE), civil (CVE), electrical (EE), industrial (IE), and mechanical (ME) engineering. Our results show that all disciplines lose about half of their starters. However, when transfer students and others who switch into the majors are included, the results vary by race/ethnicity, gender, and engineering discipline. The metrics used are trajectories and stickiness in the major and in engineering. This work can inform educators, administrators, and policy makers about how engineering disciplines are racialized and gendered in different ways. Sharing this information can help engineering disciplines learn from each other.

Lifelong learning is a critical skill for all citizens of the modern world, especially engineers. All engineering educators throughout the world must focus on this outcome. It is difficult, however, to measure students' ability to engage in lifelong learning. In this work, the use of two short surveys designed to measure students' propensity for lifelong learning is investigated with engineering students at universities in China and the United States. Overall, engineering students in China and the U.S. self-reported a propensity for lifelong learning on both surveys. Several comparisons were done including 1) sophomores, 2) electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering sophomores and juniors, and 3) Asian American students compared to Chinese. Interestingly, contrary to popular stereotypes of Chinese students as rigid rote learners, the Chinese students reported higher use of adaptable learning strategies including comfort with open-ended problems and uncertainty compared with the American students.

What are the experiences of Chinese students taking engineering courses taught in English by American professors using active learning techniques? Case studies of three such courses are explored in this work. Specifically, two American professors taught courses in English to about 90 students whose native language was Chinese. These courses included a required Electronics course for electrical engineering sophomores, a seminar on Medical Device Product Development within a required Biomedical Instrumentation course for juniors in biomedical engineering, and a lecture series on New Product Development for first year honors students. All courses included homework teams and active learning techniques in the classroom. Surveys were given to students throughout the courses. Statistical analyses of these surveys show that the Chinese students valued the homework team experience and believed that it helped them learn although some variation is seen among the courses. Peer evaluations of teamwork also showed that students responded well to homework teams. Despite considerable variation in their comfort with speaking English, the students did well in these courses taught in English with active learning techniques.

A substantial percentage of the manuscripts submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Education as well as a substantial percentage of the papers that have been published fall within the scholarship of application as described by Boyer. The scholarship of application in electrical and computer engineering education might be briefly described as the scholarship of teaching practice in these disciplines. While this is a critical arena for electrical and computer engineering education, standards and criteria across the scholarly community for this area of scholarship have not been well established. Thus, this workshop at FIE 2013 offers opportunities for dialog about these issues. A starting point for the conversation will be the new review criteria that the Transactions has established for the scholarship of application. The intent of the workshop is to explore how authors interpret the new criteria, how authors might address the new criteria, and how support for authors can be fostered. Small groups will explore in greater depth the meaning of review criteria for the scholarship of application for education in electrical and computer engineering. Then, small groups with share their results with the large group for broader conversations.

We use the “borderlands of education” as a metaphor for studying processes of educational exclusion in engineering and the social forces that create them. Latinas in engineering education occupy intersecting borderlands. On the path to higher education, they face numerous societal obstacles. As women, they are on the margins of the masculine space of engineering. Though Latinas in engineering comprise a very small group, through their voices and experiences, we illuminate broader structural problems within engineering education.

Using longitudinal data from eleven institutions in the U.S., this study explores the persistence of students in the two largest engineering disciplines: Electrical (EE) and Mechanical (ME). These programs have large enrollments of students but small percentages of women. Despite these similarities, enrollment and persistence in these majors is qualitatively different. In this research, we adopt an intersectional framework and consider both race/ethnicity and gender. Our results show that ME attracts more White students while EE attracts more Black and Asian students. Hispanic men and women are attracted in similar numbers to EE and ME. Overall, ME has higher graduation rates than EE and women have higher rates than men in both disciplines. Transfer students of nearly all race/gender groups are more likely to persist to graduation than starters in the same disciplines. Black and Hispanic female transfer students are particularly successful in EE and ME, which suggests enhancing the transfer pathway as a strategy to improve diversity. The success of ME starters causes a shift in the demographic profile between starters and graduates. ME could learn from EE how to diversify its enrollment and EE could learn from ME strategies to retain its diverse students. These findings suggest that program factors affect each race-gender group differently. Therefore, the success of recruitment and retention strategies may depend on considering both the target population and the discipline.

In Fall 2012, 53 honors students and 53 engineering students (including seven students in both honors and engineering) completed a survey designed to examine their attitudes towards engineering and their ability to succeed in engineering. Preliminary analysis of five factors shows that the attitudes of engineers and honors students were similar in many respects. The main areas of difference were that honors liberal arts students had lower confidence in their ability to succeed in science and math and all non-engineers showed lower aptitude for engineering. Non-engineering women showed slightly less affinity for solving open-ended problems. All students expressed similar attitudes about the creativity of engineers and their contributions to solving society's problems.

Lifelong Learning (LLL) is critical for engaged citizens of the modern knowledge economy. Development of such generic or key competencies should be integrated throughout curricula along with specific competencies in the disciplines such as engineering. This is a common educational goal in higher education in the USA and in Europe inside the Bologna Process. To enhance the capability of students to articulate their lifelong learning competencies, we developed a “Lifelong Learning Competencies for Engineers” program. This was presented as a workshop in a senior design course at the University of San Diego. The workshop includes presentations on lifelong learning competencies and specific recommendations for engineers as well as an active learning exercise that helps students recognize their lifelong learning competence developed throughout their undergraduate career. After the workshop, the students improved their awareness of the importance of LLL for their future careers. Since lifelong learning spans disciplinary and national boundaries, this program could be adopted by other engineer educators and adapted by educators from a variety of fields.

White privilege is an important concept when considering issues such as social justice, the internal “culture” of engineering education and systematic change in engineering education. However, it is not well understood by most engineering educators. This Special Session will help participants explore the idea of White Privilege within the context of engineering education. Through an interactive format, participants will learn some theory and develop some ideas for addressing White Privilege in engineering learning environments. The related idea of stereotype threat will also be discussed.

A new metric, “stickiness,” is proposed, tracking longitudinally all students who have contact with a discipline to determine the likelihood those students will “stick” to that discipline and graduate in it. This metric has the versatility to be relevant for students making contact with engineering through a variety of pathways. Stickiness exhibits significant disciplinary differentiation. Whereas earlier work has shown that Industrial Engineering is the most successful at attracting and retaining students, the disciplinary distribution of stickiness shows that Industrial Engineering is exceptional. Disaggregating by race/ethnicity and gender, much larger variations in stickiness are observed (as much as 48 percent), and positive and negative outcomes are identified where students in particular subpopulations are more or less likely to stick than expected. Aggregated by race/ethnicity and gender, the stickiness of transfer students ranks the disciplines in the same order as the stickiness of first-time-in-college students, but transfer stickiness exhibits less disciplinary variation and transfer students in all disciplines exhibit higher stickiness than first-time-in-college students.

Longitudinal data from ten U.S. institutions are used to characterize outcomes of three matriculation models: Direct Matriculation to a specific major (DM), First-Year Engineering programs (FYE), and Post-General Education Programs (PGE). Both DM and FYE programs show high persistence rates, but FYE programs are less likely to attract transfer students and switchers. FYE graduates are the most likely to stick with their first choice of major (after completing FYE requirements), followed by DM graduates who begin in undesignated engineering (taking extra time to decide), then DM graduates who choose their major as part of the matriculation process, and then PGE graduates. FYE students also have the shortest time to graduation. We conclude that encouraging students to associate with engineering or an engineering discipline from the start, yet maintaining the curricular flexibility to allow alternate entry points onto the engineering path improves persistence, accessibility, effectiveness of major choice, and time to graduation.

How do women experience the climate of engineering undergraduate education? How is this shaped by race/ethnicity? Using a focus group methodology, we interviewed women who self-identify as Asian, Latina and White at a large public institution in the southeastern United States. Their narratives are analyzed using the interdisciplinary theoretical framework of “microaggressions” from the social sciences. Microaggressions arise from subtle and covert racist and sexist acts which occur frequently in the lives of marginalized groups. Women of all races, who remain severely underrepresented in engineering, may be considered a marginalized group. For women of color, stereotypes of the “model minority” or “affirmative action baby” also overlay their experiences. Microaggressions occur at multiple levels: at the institutional level, at the interpersonal level, and as jokes or humor that subtly deride women's place in engineering. In this paper, we provide examples of each of these types of microaggressions in the experiences of women majoring in engineering and how these are processed differently depending on race/ethnicity. Our findings provide a nuanced perspective on how these microaggressions help shape the academic and social aspects of the climate of undergraduate engineering education.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill overhauled the educational benefits available to military veterans. Additionally, the Yellow Ribbon Program makes private institutions more affordable to veterans. Consequently, more veterans are seeking undergraduate degrees, and many schools are seeing significant numbers of veterans for the first time. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recognized that veteran engineers may address shortages in the engineering workforce and has funded projects to develop models for helping veterans make the transition from active duty to successful student. This special session provides a forum for several awardees to describe their work and to engage a larger audience in discussions about engineering education for veterans. The goals for this session are to raise awareness in the engineering education community about the issues facing veteran engineering students, identify issues commonly encountered as veterans transition from service to the classroom, promote the dissemination of results from NSF-supported efforts to support veterans in engineering programs, provide a forum for sharing best practices related to the successful transition of a veteran from the military to engineering programs, and establish relationships between schools with the shared interest of serving military veteran students.

Engineering senior design courses fill a critically important role in the curriculum forming a bridge between school and the workplace. Although sustainability is one of ABET's considerations for design, it is often overlooked in student projects. In 2010-2011, the instructors for the senior design sequence in electrical engineering (EE) at the University of San Diego (USD) chose sustainability as a theme. The USD Director of Sustainability worked with the instructors to suggest some projects, students suggested others, and industry input was obtained. Mechanical engineering (ME) students were invited to participate on projects where their skills were beneficial. Projects included Carpool Companion (EE only), Smart Shower (EE only), Engineering a Brighter Sudan (EE/ME), Cycle to Sustain (EE/ME), and TOCOM: An Energy Management Laboratory (EE/ME). Sustainability also became a theme for the instructors as they considered logistics of peer review, evaluation of reports, and distribution of class materials. As students better understood the concept of sustainability, they suggested that more should be done electronically. This work-in-progress discusses the logistics and experiences of incorporating sustainability into a senior design course. This information should be helpful to other engineering instructors aiming to incorporate sustainability into their senior design courses.