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1. Development and Assessment of a Vignette Survey Instrument to Identify Responses due to Hidden Curriculum among Engineering Students and Faculty

   Villanueva, I.; Di Stefano, M.; Gelles, L.; Youmans, K.; Hunt, A. (January 2020, IJEE International Journal of Engineering Education)

   null (Ed.)

   One of the pivotal goals in engineering education is to broaden participation of different minorities. An overlooked barrier yet to be explored is how hidden curriculum and its connected constructs may impede this goal. Hidden curriculum (HC) refers to the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended assumptions, lessons, values, beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives in engineering. This paper will present the development and assessment of a mixed-method vignette survey instrument to evaluate the responses of current engineering students and faculty when exposed to several examples of hidden curriculum. Results from 153 engineering students and faculty across the United States and Puerto Rico were used to assess the survey sub-subscales (HC awareness, emotions, self-efficacy, and self-advocacy). Findings revealed Cronbach alpha coefficients of 0.70 (HC awareness), 0.73 (emotions), 0.91 (self-efficacy), and 0.91 (self-advocacy). The overall instrument had a reliability of 0.74. Alongside HC awareness, we found that among different axes of inequity, gender, role, and institution type are important elements that shaped the responses of these engineering populations. 

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2. Perceptions of ethical behavior in ethical mentoring relationships between women graduate students and faculty in science and Engineering.

   Gelles, L. (June 2018, Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, Engineering Ethics Division)

   The purpose of this Work In Progress (WIP) qualitative study was to explore how underrepresented women graduate students and faculty in Science and Engineering understand and perceive what constitutes ethical behavior in a mentoring research relationship centered around the six ethical principles of Beneficence, Nonmaleficence, Autonomy, Fidelity, Fairness, and Privacy. This WIP paper focuses on the responses of eight graduate students and four faculty to six case studies that targeted a specific ethical mentoring principle, and it represents an expansion of a larger study currently under review. The goals of this WIP paper are to: (a) explore participant understanding of each ethical mentoring principle; (b) elucidate participant perceptions of ethical issues in six case studies; and (c) reveal what ethical behaviors participants expect from their respective mentor/mentee if they placed themselves in the situation of the case studies. 

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3. Work in Progress: Self-Advocacy as a Framework for Supporting Academic Success of Minoritized Graduate Students

   Lilley, Carmen Larnell (June 2022, ASEE 2022 Annual Conference)

   This work in progress paper outlines the initial evaluation results for a professional development program that is focused on strengthening self-advocacy among historically minoritized graduate students in science, engineering, technology and math (STEM). The program’s framework for self-advocacy is adapted from existing frameworks developed by the American Counseling Association and the Learning Disabilities communities to educate students on skills that support academic success. The American Counseling Association (ACA) published the Advocacy Competencies between the three areas of client/student, school/community, and public arena advocacy as part of their guidelines for effective counseling of minoritized students (Lewis, Arnold et al. 2002, Toporek and Daniels 2018) and is based on a social justice framework (Ratts and Hutchins 2009). The three skills with self-advocacy are: empowerment or a sense of agency (having control over decisions and life events), strong self-awareness (knowing what is right for oneself and setting goals based on this criteria), and social justice (knowing how to identify and challenge negative social climates and systems of oppression) (Test, Fowler et al. 2010). Within the different forms of practicing and teaching advocacy, working with students by teaching them the skills within a counselor and student or mentor and student group structure was found to help minoritized students reach academic success (Dowden 2009, Ratts and Hutchins 2009, Roberts, Ju et al. 2016). 

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4. Concept Maps Lead to Better Problem Statements: An Empirical Study Measuring the Effects of Priming Students to Think in Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483985.024  

   Ignacio, Paulo; Milovanovic, Julie; Shealy, Tripp; Gero, John (March 2022, Construction Research Congress 2022)

   Jazizadeh, F.; Shealy, T.; Garvin, M. (Ed.)

   Challenges associated with the design and construction of the built environment are complex. Students need training to help them deal with this complexity and to help them explore and reframe problems early during project planning and design. Concept maps provide a visual representation of complex information and the relationships between this information. The research presented in this paper tested whether priming students to think in systems by asking them to draw concept maps changes how they construct problem statements. In total, 40 engineering students participated in the study. Half were asked to draw a concept map before constructing a problem statement about how to improve mobility systems around campus. The cognitive effort (i.e., time and words) students spent on the task and the number of unique system elements included in their problem statement were measured. Students that received the concept mapping intervention spent significantly more time thinking about the problem, developed longer problem statements, and included more unique elements of systems. These findings suggest using concept mapping can aid students’ conceptualization of complex problems. 

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5. What does hidden curriculum in engineering look like and how can it be explored?

   Villanueva, I. (June 2018, Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, Minorities in Engineering Division)

   This work in progress paper describes the initial stages of a project which aims to characterize the mechanisms of hidden curriculum (HC) in engineering and identify methods for exploring this phenomenon. To effectively study the complex nature of HC, this work brings together researchers with a range of expertise (sociology, engineering education, engineering, statistics, policy analysis, curriculum and instruction) to develop a holistic approach to explore HC in engineering. This work describes the process of gathering input from this multidisciplinary team as well as the literature to develop a mixed-method instrument and model to explore the mechanisms behind HC in engineering, a new realm in engineering education. Early findings suggest that HC may require considerations of an individual’s motivation, self-efficacy, and self-advocacy. The paper also discusses the initial stages of a vignette design used to elicit participants’ responses and reactions to the presented scenes. The vignette scenes focus on HC elements present during classroom preparation and instruction in engineering. Preliminary work on these HC elements per scene are also discussed here. 

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