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1. Design Process Geometries: Shapes and Learning Trajectories of Engineering Students’ Design Process Concept Maps

   Lande, Micah ; Liu, Yue ( June 2019 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The research objective of this NSF-funded study is to explore and understand how open-ended, hands-on making work and activities can reflect student learning trajectories and learning gains in the product-based learning, undergraduate engineering classroom. The aim is to expand understanding of what making learning in the context of engineering design education might be and to illustrate educational pathways within the engineering education curriculum. Making is rooted in constructionism – learning by doing and constructing knowledge through that doing. Aspects of making work and activities that are unique to making that could appear in the engineering classroom or curriculum include: sharing, practical ingenuity, personal investment, playful invention, risk taking, community building and self-directed learning. The main research questions of this work is: How do engineering students learn and apply making? What are the attributes of making in the engineering classroom? Empirical evidence of what making in the engineering classroom looks like, and how it changes over time, and how students conceptualize making through making, designerly, and engineering ways of knowing-doing-acting will come from revisiting and additional qualitative analysis of student project data collected during a product-based learning course engineering design course. To best address the research question, this proposed study proposes multiple qualitative methods to collect and analyze data on engineering students learning making. We aim to triangulate what students think they are learning, what they are being taught, and what students are demonstrating. This work is exploratory in nature. In our approach to understanding making outside of formal engineering education, at events like Maker Faires in the Maker Community, it does seem evident that there is a lot of overlap between a making mindset and a designerly way of knowing or engineering way of knowing. In the sphere of formal engineering education however, making is regularly viewed as lesser than engineering, engineering design without the engineering science or analysis. Making is not yet valued as part of formal engineering education efforts. If making is something that can be connected to beneficial student learning and is additive to the required technical content and provides a means for students to figure out what area of problems they want to tackle in the studies and beyond, it would make for a student-centered making revolution. This study advances the knowledge of the learning pathways of making by capturing empirical evidence of such learning trajectories. This study will advance the currently limited knowledge of learning in the making community and making in the engineering classroom. Initial findings generated during this study describe the learning trajectories of engineers learning making. By examining the engineering student making learning experience through the lens of cognitive science and illustrating empirical making learning trajectories, this work may impact the quality of engineering design teaching. By sharing learning trajectories across multiple communities, we seek to change the conversation by illuminating pathways for a wider array of student makers to become the makers and engineers of the future. 

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2. Design Process Geometries: Shapes and Learning Trajectories of Engineering Students’ Design Process Concept Maps

   Lande, Micah ; Liu, Yue ( June 2019 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The research objective of this NSF-funded study is to explore and understand how open-ended, hands-on making work and activities can reflect student learning trajectories and learning gains in the product-based learning, undergraduate engineering classroom. The aim is to expand understanding of what making learning in the context of engineering design education might be and to illustrate educational pathways within the engineering education curriculum. Making is rooted in constructionism – learning by doing and constructing knowledge through that doing. Aspects of making work and activities that are unique to making that could appear in the engineering classroom or curriculum include: sharing, practical ingenuity, personal investment, playful invention, risk taking, community building and self-directed learning. The main research questions of this work is: How do engineering students learn and apply making? What are the attributes of making in the engineering classroom? Empirical evidence of what making in the engineering classroom looks like, and how it changes over time, and how students conceptualize making through making, designerly, and engineering ways of knowing-doing-acting will come from revisiting and additional qualitative analysis of student project data collected during a product-based learning course engineering design course. To best address the research question, this proposed study proposes multiple qualitative methods to collect and analyze data on engineering students learning making. We aim to triangulate what students think they are learning, what they are being taught, and what students are demonstrating. This work is exploratory in nature. In our approach to understanding making outside of formal engineering education, at events like Maker Faires in the Maker Community, it does seem evident that there is a lot of overlap between a making mindset and a designerly way of knowing or engineering way of knowing. In the sphere of formal engineering education however, making is regularly viewed as lesser than engineering, engineering design without the engineering science or analysis. Making is not yet valued as part of formal engineering education efforts. If making is something that can be connected to beneficial student learning and is additive to the required technical content and provides a means for students to figure out what area of problems they want to tackle in the studies and beyond, it would make for a student-centered making revolution. This study advances the knowledge of the learning pathways of making by capturing empirical evidence of such learning trajectories. This study will advance the currently limited knowledge of learning in the making community and making in the engineering classroom. Initial findings generated during this study describe the learning trajectories of engineers learning making. By examining the engineering student making learning experience through the lens of cognitive science and illustrating empirical making learning trajectories, this work may impact the quality of engineering design teaching. By sharing learning trajectories across multiple communities, we seek to change the conversation by illuminating pathways for a wider array of student makers to become the makers and engineers of the future. 

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3. Student Learning Trajectories from Making and Engineering Activities

   Lande, Micah ( January 2018 , Review & directory - American Society for Engineering Education)

   The research objective of this NSF-funded study is to explore and understand how open-ended, hands-on making work and activities can reflect student learning trajectories and learning gains in the product-based learning, undergraduate engineering classroom. The aim is to expand understanding of what making learning in the context of engineering design education might be and to illustrate educational pathways within the engineering education curriculum. Making is rooted in constructionism – learning by doing and constructing knowledge through that doing. Aspects of making work and activities that are unique to making that could appear in the engineering classroom or curriculum include: sharing, practical ingenuity, personal investment, playful invention, risk taking, community building and self-directed learning. The main research questions of this work is: How do engineering students learn and apply making? What are the attributes of making in the engineering classroom? Empirical evidence of what making in the engineering classroom looks like, and how it changes over time, and how students conceptualize making through making, designerly, and engineering ways of knowing-doing-acting will come from revisiting and additional qualitative analysis of student project data collected during a product-based learning course engineering design course. To best address the research question, this proposed study proposes multiple qualitative methods to collect and analyze data on engineering students learning making. We aim to triangulate what students think they are learning, what they are being taught, and what students are demonstrating. This work is exploratory in nature. In our approach to understanding making outside of formal engineering education, at events like Maker Faires in the Maker Community, it does seem evident that there is a lot of overlap between a making mindset and a designerly way of knowing or engineering way of knowing. In the sphere of formal engineering education however, making is regularly viewed as lesser than engineering, engineering design without the engineering science or analysis. Making is not yet valued as part of formal engineering education efforts. If making is something that can be connected to beneficial student learning and is additive to the required technical content and provides a means for students to figure out what area of problems they want to tackle in the studies and beyond, it would make for a student-centered making revolution. This study advances the knowledge of the learning pathways of making by capturing empirical evidence of such learning trajectories. This study will advance the currently limited knowledge of learning in the making community and making in the engineering classroom. Initial findings generated during this study describe the learning trajectories of engineers learning making. By examining the engineering student making learning experience through the lens of cognitive science and illustrating empirical making learning trajectories, this work may impact the quality of engineering design teaching. By sharing learning trajectories across multiple communities, we seek to change the conversation by illuminating pathways for a wider array of student makers to become the makers and engineers of the future. 

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4. Social responsibility views in science and engineering: An exploratory study among engineering undergraduate researchers

   Fernandez, K. ; Rivera-Jimenez, SM. ( July 2023 , American Society for Engineering Education, 2023)

   In 2017, the report Undergraduate Research Experiences for STEM Students from the National Academy of Science and Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) invited research programs to develop experiences that extend from disciplinary knowledge and skills education. This call to action asks to include social responsibility learning goals in ethical development, cultural issues in research, and the promotion of inclusive learning environments. Moreover, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) all agree that social responsibility is a significant component of an engineer’s professional formation and must be a guiding force in their education. Social Responsibility involves the ethical obligation engineers have to society and the environment, including responsible conduct research (RCR), ethical decision-making, human safety, sustainability, pro bono work, social justice, and diversity. For this work, we explored the views of Social Responsibility in engineering students that could provide insight into developing formal and informal educational activities for future summer programs. In this exploratory multi-methods study, we investigated the following research question: What views of social responsibility are important for engineering students conducting scientific in an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)? The REU Site selected for this study was a college of engineering located at a major, public, comprehensive, land-grant research university. The Views of Social Responsibility of Scientists and Engineers (VSRoSE) was used to guide our research design. This validated instrument considers the following major social responsibility elements: 1) Consideration of societal consequences, 2) Protection of human welfare and safety, 3) Promotion of environmental sustainability, 4) Efforts to minimize risks, 5) Communication with the public, and 6) Service and Community engagement. Data collection was conducted at the end of their 10-week-long experience in Summer 2022 using Qualtrics. REU students were invited to complete an IRB-approved questionnaire, including collecting demographic data, the VSRoSE-validated survey, and open-ended questions. Open-ended questions were used to explore what experiences have influenced positive student views of social responsibility and provide rich information beyond the six elements of the VSRoSE instrument. The quantitative data from the VSRoSE is analyzed using SPSS. The qualitative data is analyzed by the research team using an inductive coding approach. In this coding process, the researchers derive codes from the data allowing the narrative or theory to emerge from the raw data itself, which is great for exploratory research. The results from this exploratory study will help to strategically initiate a formal and informal research education curriculum at the selected university. In addition, the results may serve as a way for REU administrators and faculty to create metrics of impact on their research activities regarding social responsibility. Finally, this work intends to provoke the ethics and research community to have a deeper conversation about the needs and strategies to educate this unique population of students. 

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5. Emergent Bilingual Middle Schoolers’ Syncretic Reasoning in Statistical Modeling

   https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681221104141  

   Radke, Sarah C. ; Vogel, Sara E. ; Ma, Jasmine Y. ; Hoadley, Christopher ; Ascenzi-Moreno, Laura ( May 2022 , Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education)

   Background/Context: Bi/multilingual students’ STEM learning is better supported when educators leverage their language and cultural practices as resources, but STEM subject divisions have been historically constructed based on oppressive, dominant values and exclude the ways of knowing of nondominant groups. Truly promoting equity requires expanding and transforming STEM disciplines. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article contributes to efforts to illuminate emergent bi/multilingual students’ ways of knowing, languaging, and doing in STEM. We follow the development of syncretic literacies in relation to translanguaging practices, asking, How do knowledges and practices from different communities get combined and reorganized by students and teachers in service of new modeling practices? Setting and Participants: We focus on a seventh-grade science classroom, deliberately designed to support syncretic literacies and translanguaging practices, where computer science concepts were infused into the curriculum through modeling activities. The majority of the students in the bilingual program had arrived in the United States at most three years before enrolling, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Research Design: We analyze one lesson that was part of a larger research–practice partnership focused on teaching computer science through leveraging translanguaging practices and syncretic literacies. The lesson was a modeling and computing activity codesigned by the teacher and two researchers about post–Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Analysis used microethnographic methods to trace how students assembled translanguaging, social, and schooled practices to make sense of and construct models. Findings/Results: Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing and negotiating both designed and emergent goals. These included sensemaking, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting both the physical and computational models of migration. Conclusions/Recommendations: Implications support the development of theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students to engage in meaning-making through translanguaging and syncretic practices in order to provide new possibilities for lifting up STEM learning that may include, but is not constrained by, disciplinary learning. Additional implications for teacher education and student assessment practices call for reconceptualizing schooling beyond day-to-day curriculum as part of making an ontological shift away from prioritizing math, science, and CS disciplinary and language objectives as defined by and for schooling, and toward celebrating, supporting, and centering students’ diverse, syncretic knowledges and knowledge use. 

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