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1. Early Career Engineers’ Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Study Overview

   Claussen, S.; Jesiek, B. K.; Zoltowski, C. B.; Howland, S. (July 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 American Society of Engineering Education Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Amidst growing concerns about a lack of attention to ethics in engineering education and professional practice, a variety of formal course-based interventions and informal or extracurricular programs have been created to improve the social and ethical commitments of engineering graduates. To supplement the formal and informal ethics education received as undergraduate students, engineering professionals often also participate in workplace training and professional development activities on ethics, compliance, and related topics. Despite this preparation, there is growing evidence to suggest that technical professionals are often challenged to navigate ethical situations and dilemmas. Some prior research has focused on assessing the impacts of a variety of learning experiences on students’ understandings of ethics and social responsibility, including the PIs’ prior NSF-funded CCE STEM study which followed engineering students through the four years of their undergraduate studies using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. This prior project explored how the students’ views on these topics changed across demographic groups, over time, between institutions, and due to specific interventions. Yet, there has been little longitudinal research on how these views and perceptions change (or do not change) among engineers during the school-to-work transition. Furthermore, there has been little exploration of how these views are influenced by the professional contexts in which these engineers work, including cultures and norms prevalent in different technical fields, organizations, and industry sectors. This NSF-supported Ethical and Responsible Research (ER2) study responds to these gaps in the literature by asking: RQ1) How do perceptions of ethics and social responsibility change in the transition from undergraduate engineering degree programs to the workplace (or graduate studies), and how are these perceptions shaped or influenced?, and RQ2) How do perceptions of ethics and social responsibility vary depending on a given individual’s engineering discipline/background and current professional setting? This paper gives an overview of the research project, describing in particular the longitudinal, mixed-methods study design which will involve collecting and analyzing data from a large sample of early career engineers. More specifically, we will present the proposed study contexts, timeline, target subject populations, and procedures for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. We will also describe how this study leverages our prior project, thereby allowing unique longitudinal comparisons that span participants’ years as an engineering undergraduate student to their time as an early-career professional. Through this project, we aim to better understand how early career engineers’ perceptions of social and ethical responsibility are shaped by their prior experiences and current professional contexts. This paper will likely be of particular interest to scholars who teach or research engineering ethics, social responsibility, and professional practice. 

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2. Understanding the Situated Workplace Practices and Habits of Engineers Using Agile Ethnography

   Green, Theresa; Minichiello, Angela; Wilson-Lopez, Amy (August 2022, 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   This methods paper describes the application of and insights gained from using aspects of an emerging methodology, agile ethnography, to study engineers working in practice. Research has suggested that there is a misalignment between what is taught in engineering school and the types of work that engineers do in practice [1]. Little is known about the types of engineering work that are conducted in practice [2], [3]. In order to best prepare engineering graduates to meet the demands of the engineering workforce, students should be taught the types of knowledge and problem-solving strategies that are commonly used by practicing engineers. By teaching students the problem-solving strategies that are used by their professional counterparts, the gap between what students are taught in school and what is expected of them in the workplace may be lessened. The purpose of this paper is to describe how agile ethnography [4], [5] was successfully used in our research project to examine workplace literacy practices and habits of mind employed by eight engineers in their workplaces over a period of three years. The overarching purpose of the project was to develop models of disciplinary literacy instruction [6] and habits of mind [7] in engineering, both of which are potential methods for teaching students the knowledge, skills, and strategies that may prepare them for an engineering career. Disciplinary literacy instruction teaches students the ways that practitioners use literacy practices when reading, writing, interpreting, and evaluating discipline-specific information [8]. Habits of mind are the intelligent behaviors that guide how professionals respond when faced with situations of uncertainty [9]. By understanding how engineers use disciplinary literacy practices and habits of mind in the workplace, models for student instruction can be developed. These instructional practices can be used to support students’ use of authentic engineering practices and ways of thinking that will support them in the classroom and in their future workplaces. Findings about the disciplinary practices and habits of mind of the eight engineers are presented in previous publications by the authors (e.g., [10]–[12]). 

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3. Examining the Literacy Practices of Electrical Engineers: A Comparative Case Study

   Green, T.; Wilson-Lopez, A.; Minichiello, A. (April 2019, American Education Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting)

   This study, part of a larger research project focused on disciplinary literacy within engineering (Authors, 2018), is a comparative case study of the literacy practices of two electrical engineers. The goal of this comparative case study was to understand how electrical engineers read, write, and evaluate multi-representational texts in the context of their professional lives. We used the findings from this study to construct a model of disciplinary literacy in electrical engineering, whose purpose is to prepare students for the electrical engineering workforce by teaching them to interpret and produce texts using authentic disciplinary frameworks. This paper examines the literacy practices of two electrical engineers to answer the following research questions: (1) What texts do the electrical engineers read and write? (2) What disciplinary frameworks do they use to read and write different texts? (3) How do engineers use internet searches to locate and evaluate information? (4) What role does argumentation have with respect to their literacy practices? 

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4. Using Vignettes to Elicit Students' Understanding of Dispositions in Computing Education

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342915  

   McCauley, Renée; Sabin, Mihaela; Kumar, Amruth N; Kiesler, Natalie; MacKellar, Bonnie; Raj, Rajendra K; Impagliazzo, John (October 2023, IEEE)

   Vignettes are short stories along with a set of questions that engage the reader to comment on the story. Vignettes have been used in professional academic programs (e.g., teacher preparation and medical education), for professional development in various fields (e.g., teaching ethics in psychology and medicine), and in various research fields for data collection. In this work, vignettes are used to elicit students' understanding of dispositions in computing education. Professional dispositions enable behaviors that are valued in the workplace, such as adaptability or self-directedness. They are often explicitly stated in computing job postings. While the relevance of dispositions is widely recognized in the workplace, only recently have curricular guidelines for computing programs recognized professional dispositions as an integral part of competencies and as complementary to knowledge and skills. There is scarce literature on the use of vignettes in teaching undergraduate computing, or on how best to foster dispositions in students. In this project, four faculty from four diverse institutions in the U.S., along with three consulting experts, have collaborated to design and evaluate the use of vignettes in the classroom. This paper documents researchers' efforts to gain insights into students' perceptions of dispositions through the use of vignettes. Such insights may guide educators to identify pedagogical strategies for fostering dispositions among students. This paper presents an iterative process for vignette design with continuous review by researchers and focus group members. The vignettes in this study use stories of situations which demonstrate the application of a disposition, drawn from various fields and walks of life to represent diverse groups and experiences. Students are presented with the vignette story and asked to identify the disposition illustrated. To elicit students' understanding of dispositions in terms of their personal behaviors, students are asked to describe a situation in which they have experienced the disposition. Lessons learned in the design and use of vignettes are discussed. 

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5. Examining the Literacy Practices of Engineers to Develop a Model of Disciplinary Literacy Instruction for K-12 Engineering (Work in Progress)

   Green, Theresa; Minichiello, Angela; Wilson-Lopez, Amy (June 2018, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Despite efforts to diversify the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, engineering remains a White, male-dominated profession. Often, women and underrepresented students do not identify with STEM careers and many opt out of STEM pathways prior to entering high school or college. In order to broaden participation in engineering, new methods of engaging and retaining those who are traditionally underrepresented in engineering are needed. This work is based on a promising approach for encouraging and supporting diverse participation in engineering: disciplinary literacy instruction (DLI). Generally, teachers use DLI to provide K-12 students with a framework for interpreting, evaluating, and generating discipline-specific texts. This instruction provides students with an understanding of how experts in the discipline read, engage, and generate texts used to solve problems or communicate information. While models of disciplinary literacy have been developed and disseminated in several humanities and science fields, there is a lack of empirical and theoretical research that examines the use of DLI within the engineering domain. It is thought that DLI can be used to foster diverse student interest in engineering from a young age by removing literacy-based barriers that often discourage underrepresented students from entering and pursuing careers in STEM fields. This work-in-progress paper describes a new study underway to develop and disseminate a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. During this project, researchers will observe, interview, and collect written artifacts from engineers working across four sub-disciplines of engineering: aerospace/mechanical, biological, civil/environmental, and electrical/computer. Data that will be collected include interview transcripts, observation field notes, engineer logs of literacy practices, and photographs of texts that the engineers read and write. Data will be analyzed using constant comparative analytic (CCA) methods. CCA will be used to generate theoretical codes from the data that will form the basis for a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. As a primary outcome of this research, the engineering DLI model will promote the use of DLI practices within K-12 engineering instruction in order to assist and encourage diverse, underrepresented students to engage in engineering courses of study and pursue STEM careers. Thus far, the research team has begun collecting and analyzing data from two electrical engineers. This work in progress paper will report on preliminary findings, as well as implications for K-12 classroom instruction. For instance, this study has shed insights on how engineers use texts as part of the process of conducting failure analysis, and the research team has begun to conceptualize how these types of texts might be used with K-12 students to help them conduct failure analyses during design testing. Ultimately, this project will result in a list of grade-appropriate texts, evaluative frameworks, and activities (e.g., failure analysis in testing) that K-12 engineering teachers can use to prepare their diverse students to think, act, read, and write like engineers. 

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