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1. Learning Trajectories Through Learning Making and Engineering, and Implications

   Lande, Micah (July 2021, American Society for Engineering Education)

   This NSF EEC EAGER research project investigates how undergraduate STEM and engineering students’ learning trajectories evolve over time, from 1st year to senior year, along a novice to expert spectrum. We borrow the idea of “learning trajectories” from mathematics education that can paint the evolution of students’ knowledge and skills over time over a set of learning experiences. We use a theoretical framework based on adaptive expertise and design thinking adaptive expertise to further advance a design learning continuum. 

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2. Implementing Integrated Project-Based Learning Outcomes in a 21st-Century Environmental Engineering Curriculum

   Gallagher, S.; Phillips, A.; Lauchnor, E.; Hohner, A.; Stein, O. R.; Woolard, C. R.; Kirkland, C. M.; Plymesser, K (June 2022, 2023 ASEE annual conference exposition)

   Engineering education research and accreditation criteria have for some time emphasized that to adequately prepare engineers to meet 21st century challenges, programs need to move toward an approach that integrates professional knowledge, skills, and real-world experiences throughout the curriculum [1], [2], [3]. An integrated approach allows students to draw connections between different disciplinary content, develop professional skills through practice, and relate their emerging engineering competencies to the problems and communities they care about [4], [5]. Despite the known benefits, the challenges to implementing such major programmatic changes are myriad, including faculty’s limited expertise outside their own disciplinary area of specialization and lack of perspective of professional learning outcomes across the curriculum. In 2020, Montana State University initiated a five-year NSF-funded Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project to transform its environmental engineering program by replacing traditional topic-focused courses with a newly developed integrated and project-based curriculum (IPBC). The project engages all tenure-track faculty in the environmental engineering program as well as faculty from five external departments in a collaborative, iterative process to define what students should be expected to know and do at the completion of the undergraduate program. In the process, sustainability, professionalism, and systems thinking arose as foundational pillars of the successful environmental engineer and are proposed as three knowledge threads that can be woven throughout environmental engineering curricula. The paper explores the two-year programmatic redesign process and examines how lessons learned through the process can be applied to course development as the team transitions into the implementation phase of the project. Two new integrated project-based learning courses targeting the 1st- and 2nd-year levels will be taught in academic year 2023-2024. The approach described in this work can be utilized by similar programs as a model for bottom-up curriculum development and integration of non-technical content, which will be necessary for educating engineers of the future. 

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3. Design Educators’ Conceptions of Prototyping in Engineering Design Courses

   Ali, Hadi; Lande, Micah (June 2019, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This is a research study that investigates the range of conceptions of prototyping in engineering design courses through exploring the conceptions and implementations from the instructors’ perspective. Prototyping is certainly an activity central to engineering design. The context of prototyping to support engineering education and practice has a range of implementations in an undergraduate engineering curriculum, from first-year engineering to capstone engineering design experiences. Understanding faculty conceptions’ of the reason, purpose, and place of prototyping can help illustrate how teaching and learning of the engineering design process is realistically implemented across a curriculum and how students are prepared for work practice. We seek to understand, and consequently improve, engineering design teaching and learning, through transformations of practice that are based on engineering education research. In this exploratory study, we interviewed three faculty members who teach engineering design in project-based learning courses across the curriculum of an undergraduate engineering program. This builds on related work done by the authors that previously investigated undergraduate engineering students’ conceptions of prototyping activities and process. With our instructor participants, a similar interview protocol was followed through semi-structured qualitative interviews. Data analysis has been undertaken through an emerging thematic analysis of these interview transcripts. Early findings characterize the focus on teaching the design process; the kind of feedback that the educators provide on students’ prototypes; students’ behavior while working on design projects; and educators’ perspectives on the design course. Understanding faculty conceptions with students’ conceptions of prototyping can shed light on the efficacy of using prototyping as an authentic experience in design teaching and learning. In project-based learning courses, particular issues of authenticity and assessment are under consideration, especially across the curriculum. More specifically, “proportions of problems” inform “problem solving” as one of the key characteristics in design thinking, teaching and learning. More attention to prototyping as part of the study of problem-solving processes can be useful to enhance understanding of the impact of instructional design. Challenges for teaching engineering design exist, and may be due to difficulties in framing design problems, recognizing what expertise students possess, and assessing their expertise to help them reach their goals, all at an appropriate place and ambiguity with student learning goals. Initial findings show that prototyping activities can help students become more reflective on their design. Scaffolded activities in prototyping can support self-regulated learning by students. The range of support and facilities, such as campus makerspaces, may also help students and instructors alike develop industry-ready engineering students. 

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4. Assessing Awareness and Competency of Engineering Freshmen on Ethical and Responsible Research and Practices

   Johnson, M.D. (January 2023, American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   This paper presents the progress made in the first year of a five-year NSF ER2 (Ethical and Responsible Research)-funded project on ethical and responsible research and practices in science and engineering undertaken at a large public university in the southwestern United States. The objective of this research is to improve instructor training, interventions, and student outcomes in high schools and universities to improve awareness and commitment to ethical practices in STEM coursework. The paper will describe the progress made in several components of the grant: i) Preliminary analysis of measures of ethical knowledge, reasoning skills, attitudes, and practices of several hundred undergraduate freshmen and seniors, correlated with demographic data, based on data captured in the first year of the grant; ii) Progress made in the development of the concept of “ethical self-efficacy” and an instrument to measure it for freshmen and senior engineering students, and in assessing how it relates to ethical competency and student background; iii) Implications of these analyses in the construction of a three-week professional development program that guides high school STEM teachers through the development of learning modules on ethical issues related to their courses; iv) The assessment of the undergraduate engineering curriculum in two majors to determine appropriate courses for ethics interventions to help students understand how technical activities fit within broader social, economic, and environmental contexts; the construction of these interventions; and the development of measures to track their success; and, v) Initial steps toward measuring impact of other experiences (e.g., undergraduate research, internships, service learning) and courses (e.g., humanities, social science, and business courses) on development of ethical practices, on assessments taken in senior engineering capstone courses. 

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5. Engaging Civil Engineering Students by Exposing them to a “Capstone-like” Experience in their Sophomore Year: A Case Study

   Sarasua, Wayne; Kaye, Nigel B.; Ogle, Jennifer H.; Benaissa, Mehdi N.; Benson, Lisa; Putman, Bradley J.; and Pfirman, Aubrie L. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   As part of a National Science Foundation-funded initiative to completely transform the civil engineering undergraduate program at Clemson University, a capstone-like course sequence is being incorporated into the curriculum during the sophomore year. Clemson’s NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program is called the Arch Initiative. Just as springers serve as the foundation stones of an arch, the new courses are called “Springers” because they serve as the foundations of the transformed curriculum. Through a project-based learning approach, Springer courses mimic the senior capstone experience by immersing students in a semester-long practical application of civil engineering, exposing them to concepts and tools in a way that challenges students to develop new knowledge that they will build on and use during their junior and senior years. In the 2019 spring semester, a pilot of the first Springer course introduced students to three civil engineering sub-disciplines: construction management, water resources, and transportation. The remaining sub-disciplines are covered in a follow-on Springer 2 pilot. The purpose of this paper is to describe all aspects of the Springer 1 course, including course content, teaching methods, faculty resources, and the design and results of a Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) survey to assess students’ learning outcomes. The feedback from the SALG indicated positive attitudes towards course activities and content. Challenges for full-scale implementation of the Springer course sequence as a requirement in the transformed curriculum are also discussed. 

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