The lack of diversity within engineering degree programs and occupations has been an ongoing concern for decades. National engineering programs have placed a high priority on broadening participation in engineering and making the engineering culture more inclusive. Specifically, the cultivation of engineering students' inclusive professional engineering identities (IPEIs)—or the value these individuals place on diversity and their willingness to act inclusively within engineering contexts—might be one way to address this long-standing lack of representation.
Rooted in theoretical contexts regarding professional identity development, the purpose of this study is to uncover developmental patterns of first-year engineering students' IPEIs and factors that influence IPEI cultivation.
This study built upon the previous variable-centered research findings regarding IPEI development. Specifically, the person-centered approach of random intercept latent transition analysis (RI-LTA) was utilized. RI-LTA allows for the detection of different meaningful groups of individuals demonstrating similarities on the construct and investigating these groups for probabilistic changes over time.
Four IPEI groups of students emerged with IPEI developmental patterns that were not always stable. Student IPEI classifications differed significantly across gender and students' levels of engineering identity. Furthermore, a series of intervention experiences instigated an even more malleable nature to student IPEIs.
Engineering students' IPEIs demonstrate some likelihood to change over time, with intervention experiences enhancing the likelihoods for changes to occur. Continuing to investigate factors influencing the positive cultivation of students' IPEIs is fundamental to broadening participation in engineering and making the engineering culture more inclusive.
Undergraduate students consistently struggle with mastering concepts related to thermodynamics. Prior work has shown that haptic technology and intensive hands-on workshops help improve learning outcomes relative to traditional lecture-based thermodynamics instruction. The current study takes a more feasible approach to improving thermal understanding by incorporating simple mechanical objects into individual problem-solving exercises.
This study tests the impact of simple mechanical objects on learning outcomes (specifically, problem-solving performance and conceptual understanding) for third-year undergraduate engineering students in a thermodynamics course across a semester.
During the semester, 119 engineering students in two sections of an undergraduate thermodynamics course completed three 15-min, self-guided problem-solving tasks, one section without and the other with a simple and relevant physical object. Performance on the tasks and improvements in thermodynamics comprehension (measured via Thermal and Transport Concept Inventory scores) were compared between the two sections.
Students who had a simple, relevant object available to solve three thermodynamics problems consistently outperformed their counterparts without objects, although only to statistical significance when examining the simple effects for the third problem. At the end of the semester, students who had completed the tasks with the objects displayed significantly greater improvements in thermodynamics comprehension than their peers without the relevant object. Higher mechanical aptitude facilitated the beneficial effect of object availability on comprehension improvements.
Findings suggest that the incorporation of simple mechanical objects into active learning exercises in thermodynamics curricula could facilitate student learning in thermodynamics and potentially other abstract domains.
Engineering education seeks to prepare students for engineering practice, but the concept of preparedness is often ill-defined. Moreover, findings from studies of different populations or in different contexts vary regarding how well new graduates are prepared. These variations, coupled with the lack of clarity, suggest the need to better understand what it means to be prepared for engineering work.
This study contributes to research on workplace preparation by exploring how new graduates describe being prepared for engineering work.
Applying secondary analysis to data from the multi-institution Capstone To Work (C2W) project, we used thematic analysis to explore new engineers' descriptions of preparedness. We analyzed written responses to structured questions about the school-to-work transition collected weekly during participants' first 12 weeks of work; 105 graduates drawn from four universities provided 956 responses, with a mean of 9 (out of 12 possible) responses per participant.
Participants' descriptions of preparedness included applying concrete skills, recognizing familiar situations, and having strategies for approaching challenging tasks even when they lacked relevant knowledge or skill.
Our findings suggest that although many discussions about workplace preparation implicitly focus narrowly on mastery of skills and knowledge, that focus may not fully capture new graduates' experiences, and may limit discussions about the ways in which school can (and cannot) prepare students for work. A more expansive understanding may better support both student learning and workplace onboarding, though more research is needed across stakeholders to establish shared understanding.
This paper begins with the premise that ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) overlap in engineering. Yet, the topics of ethics and DEI often inhabit different scholarly spaces in engineering education, thus creating a divide between these topics in engineering education research, teaching, and practice.
We investigate the research question, “How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer-reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?”
We used systematic review procedures to synthesize intersections between ethics and DEI in engineering education scholarly literature. We extracted literature from engineering and engineering education databases and used thematic analysis to identify ethics/DEI connections.
We identified three primary themes (each with three sub-themes): (1) lenses that serve to connect ethics and DEI (social, justice-oriented, professional), (2) roots that inform how ethics and DEI connect in engineering (individual demographics, disciplinary cultures, institutional cultures); and (3) engagement strategies for promoting ethics and DEI connections in engineering (affinity toward ethics/DEI content, understanding diverse stakeholders, working in diverse teams).
There is a critical mass of engineering education scholars explicitly exploring connections between ethics and DEI in engineering. Based on this review, potential benefits of integrating ethics and DEI in engineering include cultivating a socially just world and shifting engineering culture to be more inclusive and equitable, thus accounting for the needs and values of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.
Engineering's introduction into K–12 classrooms has been purported to support meaningful and inclusive learning environments. However, teachers must contend with dominant discourses embedded in US schooling that justify inequitable distributions of resources.
Drawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers incorporate language legitimizing socially and culturally constructed values and beliefs. In particular, we focus on the discourse of ability hierarchy—reflecting dominant values of sorting and ranking students based on perceived academic abilities—and the discourse of individual blame—reflecting dominant framings of educational problems as solely the responsibility of individual students or families. We aim to understand how these discourses surface in teachers' reasoning about teaching engineering.
We interviewed 15 teachers enrolled in an online graduate program in engineering education. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, we analyzed how teachers drew on discourses of blame and ability hierarchy when reasoning about problems of practice in engineering.
Teachers drew on engineering education concepts to reinforce dominant discourses (echoing specific language and preserving given roles) as well as to disrupt (utilizing different language or roles that [implicitly] challenge) dominant discourses. Importantly, teachers could also retool discourses of ability hierarchy (arguing for a more equitable distribution of resources but problematically preserving the values of ranking and sorting students).
K–12 schooling's sociohistorical context can shape how teachers make sense of engineering in ways that implicate race, gender, disability, and language, suggesting a need to grapple with how discourses from schooling—and engineering culture—maintain marginalizing environments for students.
In the United States, the current 6-year completion rate in engineering is a mere 54% among full-time students who enter a 4-year course. Researchers have identified many reasons why students leave engineering, including academic difficulties and poor teaching. However, the problems experienced by the departing students are also experienced by students who persist in engineering. Why do some students persist in engineering while others depart?
We sought to better understand persisters by investigating their responses to failure experiences. We left the definition of failure up to the students, who described experiences such as failing exams, failing courses, and temporarily abandoning their degree programs.
We interviewed 26 undergraduate engineering students who had persisted in engineering after failing a required technical course. Using thematic analysis, we analyzed the students' responses to their failure experiences and developed themes to describe their responses.
We constructed four themes to describe students' responses to failure experiences: unresponsive, avoidant, floundering, and rebounding.
Since failure events are common among engineering students—even those who persist—we recommend that the engineering education community work toward removing the stigma traditionally associated with failure by normalizing failure as an opportunity for growth. We also recommend that faculty and administrators revise academic policies to promote student resilience and to enable learning from failure.
To prepare engineers who can address complex sociotechnical problems, a deep understanding of engineers' complex problem-solving approaches is needed.
This study operationalizes comprehensive systems thinking as an analysis framework that attends to aspects of engineering work and relationships among those aspects. Leveraging this framework to analyze engineers' complex problem-solving approaches enables attention to social and technical dimensions.
We interviewed 46 engineers about their specific complex problem-solving experiences. To explore a range of perspectives, we purposely sampled participants with varying academic, professional, and personal backgrounds and experiences. Data analysis focused on operationalizing comprehensive systems thinking; we first developed a set of aspects that captured the variety of considerations that participants discussed in their descriptions of solving a complex problem. We then inductively developed a scoring guide to differentiate response quality.
The scoring approach differentiated the quality of consideration based on a combination of the number of details provided, the degree of specificity, and analytical depth. While most participants discussed the consideration of a wide range of aspects of engineering work, they discussed far fewer possible relationships between these aspects. Contextual aspects of engineering work were consistently the least commonly identified and least likely to be considered in relation to other aspects of a given problem.
Our differentiation of various complex problem-solving approaches can guide the development of educational interventions and tools, ultimately facilitating more comprehensive consideration of aspects—and in particular relationships among aspects—and setting up engineers to be more successful at developing appropriate solutions.
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