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1. Assessing the Impact of an REU Program on Students’ Intellectual Growth and Interest in Graduate School in Cybermanufacturing

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34183  

   Moturu, Pavan Kumar; Nepal, Bimal; Pagilla, Prabhakar; Bukkapatnam, Satish (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Advancements in information technology and computational intelligence have transformed the manufacturing landscape, allowing firms to produce highly complex and customized product in a relatively short amount of time. However, our research shows that the lack of a skilled workforce remains a challenge in the manufacturing industry. To that end, providing research experience to undergraduates has been widely reported as a very effective approach to attract students to industry or graduate education in engineering and other STEM-based majors. This paper presents assessment results of two cohorts of Cybermanufacturing REU at a major university. Students were recruited from across the United States majoring in multiple engineering fields, such as industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, mechatronics, manufacturing, and computer science. Several of the participants were rising sophomores or juniors who did not have any industry internship or prior research experience. In total 20 students (ten per year) participated in the program and worked on individual project topics under the guidance of faculty and graduate student mentors. Unlike a typical REU program, the Cybermanufacturing REU involved a few unique activities, such as a 48-hour intense design and prototype build experience (also known as Aggies Invent), industry seminars, and industry visits. Overall, the REU students demonstrated significant gains in all of the twelve research-related competencies that were assessed as a part of formative and summative evaluation process. While almost all of them wanted to pursue a career in advanced manufacturing, including Cybermanufacturing, the majority of the participants preferred industry over graduate school. The paper provides an in-depth discussion on the findings of the REU program evaluation and its impact on undergraduate students with respect to their future plans and career choice. The analysis is also done by gender, ethnicity, academic level (sophomore, junior, senior), and type of home institution (e.g., large research universities, rural and small schools) to explore if there was any significant difference in mean research competency scores based on these attributes. 

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2. Impacts Resulting from a Large-Scale First-Year Engineering and Computer Science Program on Students’ Successful Persistence Toward Degree Completion

   Ragusa, Gisele; Allen, Emily L.; Menezes, Gustavo B. (June 2020, ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings 2020)

   There is a critical need for more students with engineering and computer science majors to enter into, persist in, and graduate from four-year postsecondary institutions. Increasing the diversity of the workforce by inclusive practices in engineering and science is also a profound identified need. According to national statistics, the largest groups of underrepresented minority students in engineering and science attend U.S. public higher education institutions. Most often, a large proportion of these students come to colleges and universities with unique challenges and needs, and are more likely to be first in their family to attend college. In response to these needs, engineering education researchers and practitioners have developed, implemented and assessed interventions to provide support and help students succeed in college, particularly in their first year. These interventions typically target relatively small cohorts of students and can be managed by a small number of faculty and staff. In this paper, we report on “work in progress” research in a large-scale, first-year engineering and computer science intervention program at a public, comprehensive university using multivariate comparative statistical approaches. Large-scale intervention programs are especially relevant to minority serving institutions that prepare growing numbers of students who are first in their family to attend college and who are also under-resourced, financially. These students most often encounter academic difficulties and come to higher education with challenging experiences and backgrounds. Our studied first-year intervention program, first piloted in 2015, is now in its 5th year of implementation. Its intervention components include: (a) first-year block schedules, (b) project-based introductory engineering and computer science courses, (c) an introduction to mechanics course, which provides students with the foundation needed to succeed in a traditional physics sequence, and (d) peer-led supplemental instruction workshops for calculus, physics and chemistry courses. This intervention study responds to three research questions: (1) What role does the first-year intervention’s components play in students’ persistence in engineering and computer science majors across undergraduate program years? (2) What role do particular pedagogical and cocurricular support structures play in students’ successes? And (3) What role do various student socio-demographic and experiential factors play in the effectiveness of first-year interventions? To address these research questions and therefore determine the formative impact of the firstyear engineering and computer science program on which we are conducting research, we have collected diverse student data including grade point averages, concept inventory scores, and data from a multi-dimensional questionnaire that measures students’ use of support practices across their four to five years in their degree program, and diverse background information necessary to determine the impact of such factors on students’ persistence to degree. Background data includes students’ experiences prior to enrolling in college, their socio-demographic characteristics, and their college social capital throughout their higher education experience. For this research, we compared students who were enrolled in the first-year intervention program to those who were not enrolled in the first-year intervention. We have engaged in cross-sectional 2 data collection from students’ freshman through senior years and employed multivariate statistical analytical techniques on the collected student data. Results of these analyses were interesting and diverse. Generally, in terms of backgrounds, our research indicates that students’ parental education is positively related to their success in engineering and computer science across program years. Likewise, longitudinally (across program years), students’ college social capital predicted their academic success and persistence to degree. With regard to the study’s comparative research of the first-year intervention, our results indicate that students who were enrolled in the first-year intervention program as freshmen continued to use more support practices to assist them in academic success across their degree matriculation compared to students who were not in the first-year program. This suggests that the students continued to recognize the value of such supports as a consequence of having supports required as first-year students. In terms of students’ understanding of scientific or engineering-focused concepts, we found significant impact resulting from student support practices that were academically focused. We also found that enrolling in the first-year intervention was a significant predictor of the time that students spent preparing for classes and ultimately their grade point average, especially in STEM subjects across students’ years in college. In summary, we found that the studied first-year intervention program has longitudinal, positive impacts on students’ success as they navigate through their undergraduate experiences toward engineering and computer science degrees. 

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3. The impact of emergency remote learning on students in engineering and computer science in the United States: An analysis of four universities

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20473  

   Casper, A. M.; Rambo‐Hernandez, Karen E.; Park, Seoyeon; Atadero, Rebecca A. (June 2022, Journal of Engineering Education)

   Lisa Benson (Ed.)

   Abstract Background In Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic sent universities into emergency remote education. The pandemic has been disruptive but offers the opportunity to learn about ways to support students in other situations where abrupt changes to teaching and learning are necessary. Purpose/Hypothesis We described the responses of engineering and computer science students to a series of prompts about their experiences with remote learning. Design/Method Data about students' remote learning experiences were collected from undergraduate engineering and computer science students at four different universities through an end-of-semester survey. Descriptive statistics were calculated, and qualitative responses were analyzed using qualitative content analysis through the lenses of master narrative theory and sociocultural theory. Results Student responses revealed how their individual circumstances combined to reduce motivation, create home environments detrimental to completing schoolwork, and increase stress. Many students described the negative impacts of remote learning, but some students found positive aspects of the situation. The majority of students did not indicate a change in their desire or plans to pursue engineering or computer science majors. Conclusions There was wide variation in how students experienced the disruption to university learning during Spring 2020. Implications of this paper can help not only in cases where emergency remote learning is needed in the future but also as universities seek to return to “normal” operations in 2022 and beyond. 

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4. Postbaccalaureate terminal degree and career choices of students who performed undergraduate research

   https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00217.2020  

   Sens, Donald A.; Bobylev, Mikhail; Cisek, Karen L.; Garrett, Scott H.; Somji, Seema; Sens, Mary A.; Doze, Van A. (June 2021, Advances in Physiology Education)

   This study analyzed terminal degree and career choices of students who performed undergraduate research. In one analysis, the study compared terminal degree and career choices between a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) and traditional non-course-based undergraduate research experiences at one primarily undergraduate institution (PUI). Students who pursued postbaccalaureate programs chose terminal degrees at levels exceeding 75%, with no significant difference between a CURE experience and a traditional research experience. Analysis of terminal degree and career choices at four PUIs providing traditional research experiences showed a marked difference in the number of students pursuing terminal degrees. Two PUIs showed rates > 75%, whereas students at the other two PUIs pursued terminal degrees <50% of the time. The majority of students not pursuing terminal degrees chose M.S. degrees in education and healthcare. An analysis was also performed among students participating in traditional summer undergraduate research on a research-intensive university (RIU) campus with a medical school. Students were accepted from two programs, an NIH IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) program recruiting students from the RIU and an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program recruiting undergraduates from rural PUIs and minority-serving institutions, particularly tribal colleges. Analysis showed that >70% of the students who pursued postbaccalaureate programs chose terminal degrees. INBRE undergraduates displayed a marked preference for the M.D. degree (73.9% vs. 17.4%), whereas the REU students chose the Ph.D. degree (75.0% vs. 22.9%). American Indian students were also analyzed separately for career choice and showed an equal preference for the M.D. and Ph.D. degrees when pursuing postbaccalaureate education. Overall, the results provide evidence that undergraduate student research stimulates student careers in areas needed by the nation’s citizen stakeholders. 

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5. Addressing academic researcher priorities through science and technology entrepreneurship education

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-020-09787-5  

   Duval-Couetil, Nathalie; Ladisch, Michael; Yi, Soohyun (April 2020, The Journal of Technology Transfer)

   A key feature of the movement to create more entrepreneurial universities is incentivizing researchers to move discoveries beyond the laboratory and into society. This places additional expectations on Ph.D. students and faculty in science and engineering disciplines, who are encouraged to explore the commercialization of their research to promote the role of universities in innovation and job creation. A major barrier to this movement is that traditional Ph.D. training does not prepare researchers to participate in entrepreneurial activity, and as such its relevance to scientific work may not be evident. In this paper, we propose a course model for science and technology entrepreneurship education that has been designed to enable academic researchers to play a more active and informed role in the commercialization of their discovery. Its curricular foundation is a set of 14 factors that address the following four priorities: (1) technology readiness and timing, (2) intellectual property pathway decisions, (3) engagement with the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and (4) personal career choices. We describe the rationale for the course, its content and outcomes. 

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