This full research paper examines the effect of scaffolding on students” engagement with engineering judgment while solving an open-ended modeling problem (OEMP) during an introductory statics course. While traditional engineering coursework involves well-structured homework problems, research shows that open-ended design problems offer opportunities for students to develop fluency in problem solving and practice the use of engineering judgment. However, the transition from traditional, well-structured problems to OEMPs can be difficult for students, highlighting the critical role of scaffolding in introductory OEMP design [1]. In this paper, we interviewed the professor who created and assigned the OEMP to understand the goals of the scaffolding. Next, we analyzed the OEMP written assignment for scaffolding that elicits the use of engineering judgment and statics concepts. Using both data sources, the professors goals and assignment analysis, we coded a video transcript of collaborative work sessions from a group of students as they worked through the OEMP for engineering judgment and identified if students used the correct static concepts in their discussion. The implications of the paper revolve around identifying the level and type of scaffolding that initiates engagement in engineering judgment and statics course material, as well as strategies for improving scaffolding of open-ended problems. These insights aim to assist educators by highlighting effective scaffolding techniques that better align professors goals with the student takeaways.

This work in progress research paper explores the ways that team-based design-build-compete projects may build engineering identity and a sense of belonging during the first year of an undergraduate engineering program. We analyzed end of semester retrospective interviews of students to identify instances of the quantity and quality of interaction criteria for developing a sense of belonging and the performance and recognition factors for developing engineering identity. Early findings suggest that the design project provides opportunities to develop both identity and sense of belonging. Additionally, a sense of belonging may have helped students to buffer negative performance and recognition to reframe the project as a positive team experience.

This is an innovative practice Work in Progress paper regarding teacher development around engineering and language. It is known that sustained Professional Development (PD) programs result in better uptake and implementation of best practices with US public school teachers. Furthermore, there is an ever-increasing number of multilingual learners in US public school classrooms, necessitating new practices by teachers and support structures to better assist these students' learning. Engineering provides a powerful location for shared growth and learning in the curriculum. Further, this area provides an avenue for teachers to utilize more inclusive language ideologies, such as translanguaging. Language ideologies are the beliefs, values, and attitudes which surround and influence the structure and usage of language. Translanguaging is a specific form of an inclusive language ideology geared toward multilingual learners which empowers them to leverage their full language repertoires (in whatever language or dialect), rather than exclusively the language of instruction. We have initiated a sustained professional development project with elementary school teachers in US Public schools who have multilingual learners in their classrooms. We invited them to a summer Professional Learning Experience and several half-day workshops where we worked with the teachers to learn about engineering, translanguaging, and how to apply these topics within their classrooms. We then went into the classrooms and recorded their execution of engineering unit(s). This paper presents the case study of a third-grade teacher, Emma, who has been implementing engineering projects with her students. We examine her changing positions related to engineering and linguistic usage in these projects and her classroom.

In this workshop, we introduce participants to vocabulary and theory to understand their students' affective experiences of doing engineering work. As attention to emotions and other affective elements of engineering student experiences has grown in the literature, this workshop will aid instructors in considering the importance of attitudes, emotions, and values/beliefs for student learning and identity development. The workshop will provide ample opportunity for discussion and reflection, and will empower instructors both to consider scaffolding of assignments with affect in mind and to survey students about their affective experiences in order to iterate on assignment design.

Full Paper: Research. Students create their identities as engineers throughout their experiences in college, and these identities significantly impact engineering persistence. This paper uses Godwin’s identity formation framework to examine engineering identities in academically at-risk populations. We expand this framework by presenting an individual-institutional-social model to help understand how engineering identities are iterated as students confront academically at-risk labels. We also examine how belonginess interacts with identity construction using the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) belongingness indicators. We develop two measures – a non-belongingness score that applies NSSE characteristics to student demographic data, and an identity-vulnerability score derived from survey responses. We hypothesize that students with higher non-belonginess scores are less likely to be retained in the major, as they self-select out after being notified that they are on probation. Conversely, students who have stronger engineering identities and who have greater affinity in groups that traditionally ‘belong’ in engineering will not be as deterred by the academically at-risk status and will be more likely to persist. This research is significant as it contributes to increasing retention in engineering and computer science, as well as improving equity and inclusion in STEM fields.

Our research team has been working to understand how students develop and use mathematical models—the practice of engineering judgment—while completing open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs) during their undergraduate engineering science courses. We have used retrospective interviews, in which students review their work and discuss what they were thinking when they originally completed the problem, to develop a Productive Beginnings of Engineering Judgment (PBJ) Framework. This paper presents the transferability of our PBJ framework to a new data set—students’ discourse as they complete an OEMP in a small group. Examining this discourse data confirms that the PBJ Framework applies to students’ engineering judgment in-the-moment while working on an open-ended assignment. We also discuss three potential new codes for our PBJ Framework that need further exploring, and how students’ written assignments do not fully capture the engineering judgment they used when completing the OEMP with their peers.

This work-in-progress research paper discusses issues of academic integrity which have long been a concern of education researchers and academic institutions within all fields of study. Academic integrity (AI) violations can consist of a broad range of student behaviors that are considered dishonest, including but not limited to plagiarism, copying others’ assignments, and paying for others to complete their work. A plethora of researchers have attempted to identify what underlying factors lead students to commit AI violations, and have identified several potential factors, including a lack of self-control, students’ ethical views of AI, perceived opportunities to commit AI violations, involvement in extracurricular activities, and students’ social groups.Another topic that has in recent times become a focal point of education research is students’ sense of belonging within their field of study. Researchers have identified several factors that contribute to students feeling less welcome within higher education, particularly within Engineering and Computer Science. Students who feel a lower sense of belonging have been identified as being at higher risk of performing poorly with their studies and retention rates for these students are historically lower. Despite this, little research has been conducted to examine where issues with students’ sense of belonging and their incidences of AI violations overlap. In this study, we attempt to try and better understand this relationship between students’ sense of belonging and AI violations by attempting to answer the following question: Can students’ sense of belonging within their discipline influence their propensity to violate academic integrity? We take up a student centered, restorative position, and choose to understand the cognitive underpinnings behind students’ choices to violate AI, with the goal of identifying if student outreach and more inclusive practices within Engineering and Computer Science can be utilized to prevent instances of AI violations. To accomplish this, we are employing a qualitative interview-based study of first-year students studying Computer Science at a large public university in the northeastern United States. We plan to analyze transcript data collected during interviews using Grounded Theory and Narrative Analysis methodologies. Our goal with this study is to draw awareness to additional underlying causes behind students deciding to violate AI, with the hope that this research will encourage academic institutions to employ a more preventative approach to handling AI issues by ensuring all students feel welcome and included within their chosen field of study, thereby helping prevent AI violations before they happen.

This is a full paper examining Pre-Service Faculty (PSF) conceptions of learning and the influences of those upon their enacted or theorized teaching practices. PSF are our analogy to pre-service teachers, and denotes people on a pathway towards a faculty position, who have not yet landed their first faculty job. Specifically, we study engineering graduate students in this project. We thematically analyzed ten interviews with PSF at a large R1 US institution. We developed an analytical framework to describe the relationships between PSFs’ learning processes and teaching approaches. This framework is composed of four elements: PSFs’ personal learning processes, embraced teaching actions, rejected teaching actions, and the learning processes that the PSF considers viable. PSFs’ conceptions of effective engineering teaching can be deduced from this framework. This framework is in agreement with the literature on teaching processes of engineering faculty, who describe several of the same influences. We also found that these PSF describe more constructivist pedagogy than anticipated, especially considering that the majority of the PSF had minimal formal pedagogical training. We conclude that this inclination to implement constructivist pedagogies represents a productive beginning, that these PSF have considered what it means to effectively teach, and consequently represent a promising population for structured interventions to train them in educational theory, methods of enacting active learning, or these constructivist pedagogical methods which they describe thereby empowering them to introduce these methods within their future classrooms.

In this work-in-progress research-to-practice paper we present a newly integrated set of lenses for creating a senior capstone design course. Our future graduates face several concurrent challenges including both the increasing complexity of technology and rapid pace of innovations, and growing expectations of what engineers design will address in terms of technical and social considerations from users, stakeholders and other communities. Moreover, there are intensifying calls to address equity and inclusiveness across fields of engineering. This work proposes to begin addressing these challenges through a new pedagogical framework that synthesizes three lenses: liberative pedagogies, citizen engineering, and human-centered design and applies this synthesis to capstone design. We specifically focus this pedagogical framework on capstone design given its centrality to preparing students for engineering practice. We review literature on capstone design and summarize each lens. We then discuss our pedagogical design approach for integrating the lenses and present an integrated framework. Our results detail our learning and teaching objectives and assessments we developed from this integrated framework. Finally, we discuss critical reflections on our approach and future challenges we see before concluding.

This work-in-progress research paper describes the different ways in which undergraduate engineering students reasoned about the goals of an open-ended problem, and how this influenced the way they solved the problem. Typical homework assigned to students in engineering science courses is often well-defined textbook problems, which are very different from the ill-defined problems professional engineers solve in the workplace. Our research team has been assigning ill-defined problems in introductory engineering science courses in order to give students opportunities to engage in engineering judgement, thereby better preparing them for professional practice. This study examines how students decide to take up an open-ended problem, meaning their sense of the goals of the problem, and how this influences their actions when solving the problem. The results also include an analysis of the reasons students indicated they took up the open-ended problem in different ways.

This full research-to-practice paper examines the interaction between scaffolding and student thinking on an open-ended problem. The well-defined textbook problems typically assigned as engineering homework are very different from the ill-defined problems professional engineers solve in the workplace. These open-ended, ill-structured problems require professional engineers to employ engineering judgement. Our research team has been investigating how undergraduate engineering students make these judgements when given the opportunity through open-ended problems during their engineering science courses. This study examines how the problem scaffolding, or the design and structure of the homework problem, influences how students engage in engineering judgement while solving ill-defined and open-ended problems. Our results detail how scaffolding supported predictable behaviors, but also resulted in unpredictable engagement in engineering judgement. This unpredictable engagement can then be more explicitly scaffolded in the future to ensure that all students gain this experience.

This full research-to-practice paper is a collaboration between researchers and instructors to examine the scaffolding of open-ended problems. Most assigned homework problems are closed-ended with one correct answer and are unlike the ill-defined problems practicing engineers solve in the workplace. To begin bridging this gap, our research team of engineering education researchers and instructors have been designing and implementing ill-defined, open-ended homework problems for the past three years. This study presents instructor reflections on considerations for scaffolding open-ended problems, made after examining survey data from their own students. We present the results in six practices of scaffolding that better support students in their solving of the problems.

This full research paper examines students' epistemic affect, or their feelings about and within the doing of engineering, when encountering ill-defined problems in two of their first engineering science courses. Ill-defined problems are what students will encounter as professional engineers, but engineering students typically get little practice in their coursework at solving these types of problems. As students explained how they worked their way through the ill-defined and open-ended problems, we found evidence of both positive and negative feelings that arose, as well as descriptions of affective transitions, or shifts from one affect to another. Some of these transitions show evidence that students begin to regulate or anticipate these feelings as a result of repeated exposure to ill-defined problems. This work has implications for including the development of epistemic regulation as part of engineering students’ preparation for professional practice.

Engineering students have little practice solving the ill-defined problems they will encounter as professional engineers. Our research team has created an Open-ended Modeling Problem (OEMP) for students to begin practicing engineering judgment. This study investigates one aspect of engineering judgment, evaluating what is a good enough solution, or reasonableness. After solving an assigned OEMP, students were asked if their solutions were reasonable and to justify their answer. This paper examines the different justifications students provided and the assignment factors that may have led to those responses. This work has implications for designing future ill-structured problems and engaging students in engineering judgment.

This innovative practice full research paper offers insight into a course instructor's use of three varied projects within a first-year engineering course and the students' self-reported learning surrounding these projects. First-year courses are designed to both excite students about engineering and increase retention and thus have become a staple at many engineering institutions. However, there is space to gain a deeper understanding of how students perceive their own learning as gained from these first-year projects and how they could be impacted by different problem contexts.

Despite intensive education reform efforts and initiatives to improve undergraduate engineering education, many engineering students still graduate with gaps in their disciplinary knowledge and skills . Sense-making about scientific concepts is not always privileged in typical engineering courses, which instead often focus on textbook coverage. This focus on “covering the content” may contribute to the difficulty some students have in building deep conceptual knowledge. Discipline-based education research in science and engineering has demonstrated the effectiveness of student-centered instruction in “improving students' conceptual understanding, knowledge retention, and attitudes about learning in a discipline ” yet many instructors continue to rely on lecture-based pedagogies . More studies focusing on student-centered strategies and instruction practices within disciplines, especially at the undergraduate level, will strengthen reform efforts and initiatives.

The middle years of college-level engineering have been identified as an area that needs increased research attention. To date, little has been done to understand how students' learn conceptual knowledge in engineering science courses. This study examines how students use conceptual knowledge during the learning of control systems engineering. This work in progress will discuss the initial findings of a study examining junior-level mechanical engineering students solving controls homework and laboratory problems, exploring topics such as PID control, state feedback, and pole placement.