There is an urgent need to recruit, train, and sustain a diverse engineering workforce able to meet the socio-technical challenges of 21st century society. Together, student veterans and service members (SVSM) are a unique yet understudied student group that comprises substantial numbers of those historically underrepresented in engineering (i.e., due to race, ethnicity, gender, ability, orientation, etc.). That, in combination with technical interests and skills, maturity, life experience, and self-discipline, makes SVSM ideal candidates for helping engineering education meet these demands [1,2]. This NSF CAREER project aims to advance full participation of SVSMs within higher engineering education and the engineering workforce by 1) Research Plan: developing deeper understandings about how SVSM participate, persist, and produce professional identities in engineering and 2) Education Plan: putting new assets based understandings of SVSM experiences into practice through collaborative development, implementation and broad dissemination of evidence-based military ally and mentorship programs in engineering and awareness/support trainings for engineering faculty, staff, and administrators.
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CAREER: ‘Support our Troops’: Re-storying Student Veteran and Service Member Deficit in Engineering through Professional Formation and Community Advocacy: YEAR 1
There is an urgent need to recruit, train, and sustain a diverse engineering workforce able to meet the socio-technical challenges of 21st century society. Together, student veterans and service members (SVSM) are a unique yet understudied student group that comprises substantial numbers of those historically underrepresented in engineering (i.e., due to race, ethnicity, gender, ability, orientation, etc.). That, in combination with technical interests and skills, maturity, life experience, and self-discipline, makes SVSM ideal candidates for helping engineering education meet these demands [1,2]. This NSF CAREER project aims to advance full participation of SVSMs within higher engineering education and the engineering workforce by 1) Research Plan: developing
deeper understandings about how SVSM participate, persist, and produce professional identities in engineering and 2) Education Plan: putting new assets based understandings of SVSM experiences into practice through collaborative development, implementation and broad dissemination of evidence-based military ally and mentorship programs in engineering and awareness/support trainings for engineering faculty, staff, and administrators.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1950330
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10356790
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Continuing education after years of technician experience can pose multiple challenges to the adult student population, such as incumbent workforce technicians and veterans. Veterans, through their active service, frequently receive training in highly skilled technical areas but may lack a theoretical background in underlying engineering principles. While STEM education is important for the maintenance of national competitiveness, it is especially critical that the nation’s veterans, who possess technical STEM training gained in the military, are enabled to pursue higher education in order to increase the quantity and quality of talent available in the STEM workforce. A program that will be presented in this paper emphasizes the importance of recruiting students to engineering and engineering technology disciplines, mentoring and supporting students through degree completion, and partnering with employers to facilitate student academic success and career placement in the STEM workforce. Enabling multiple mechanisms which support and provide guidance are especially important at universities with large veteran populations such as Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. Advancing the field’s understanding of interventions that affect these outcomes for adult students and student veterans is important for the improvement of future support programs as well as to guide implementation across different institutions. The program presented in this paper is funded by the National Science Foundation.more » « less
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Broadening participation in the skilled technical workforce is a national priority given strong evidence of growing critical vacancies in engineering coupled with the urgent need for this workforce to better reflect the rich diversity of the nation. Scholars and activists often call for increased focus on education access, quality, and workforce development among rural Appalachian communities, noting that students from these communities are under-represented in higher education generally, and engineering careers specifically. Investing in preK-12 education, engaging youth as valued members of their communities, and cultivating workforce opportunities such as in advanced manufacturing have all been highlighted by the Appalachian Regional Commission as vital to strengthening economic resilience. However, scaffolding engineering and technical career pathways for Appalachian youth at scale in the context of broader systemic issues is challenging. Past research on the career choices of Appalachian youth show that sparked interest alone was not sufficient to consider engineering careers. Research on the sustained development of interest in engineering highlights rich networks of formal and informal experiences as catalysts or supportive infrastructure. Yet, access to such opportunities varies greatly. School systems often lack the necessary personnel, money, or space to offer these experiences, and, even if opportunities are available, often only a small subset of students may be able to participate. Further, common views of what engineering work is and who can do it are narrow, biased, and exclusive. This CAREER project has focused on three areas of research. The first area, focused on school-industry partnerships through COVID-19 in the region, highlighted the importance of rich partnerships, resilient stakeholders, and innovative contexts to persist throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This is particularly pertinent to partnerships and collaboration, sustainability of these collaborations, and programming in the context of STEM skilled technical workforce development programs in rural places. The second area of research, focused on developing a conceptual framework for engineering education research and engagement in rural places, highlighted the importance of place, individual student and community assets, and leveraging these things to provide context and meaning in a decontextualized K-12 curriculum. Finally, the third research area, focused on systematically reviewing literature related to the assessment of systems thinking in K-12 education, highlighted the lack of comprehensive assessment tools that can apply across many educational disciplines but particularly in areas as it relates to socio-technical problems. Together, these three research areas ultimately seek to inform broader aspects of K-12 education, such as career and technical education, issues related to rural education, and ultimately focusing on students’ ability to handle complex problems in their communities or other contexts with systems thinking.more » « less
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Broadening participation in the skilled technical workforce is a national priority given strong evidence of growing critical vacancies in engineering coupled with the urgent need for this workforce to better reflect the rich diversity of the nation. Scholars and activists often call for increased focus on education access, quality, and workforce development among rural Appalachian communities, noting that students from these communities are under-represented in higher education generally, and engineering careers specifically. Investing in preK-12 education, engaging youth as valued members of their communities, and cultivating workforce opportunities such as in advanced manufacturing have all been highlighted by the Appalachian Regional Commission as vital to strengthening economic resilience. However, scaffolding engineering and technical career pathways for Appalachian youth at scale in the context of broader systemic issues is challenging. Past research on the career choices of Appalachian youth show that sparked interest alone was not sufficient to consider engineering careers. Research on the sustained development of interest in engineering highlights rich networks of formal and informal experiences as catalysts or supportive infrastructure. Yet, access to such opportunities varies greatly. School systems often lack the necessary personnel, money, or space to offer these experiences, and, even if opportunities are available, often only a small subset of students may be able to participate. Further, common views of what engineering work is and who can do it are narrow, biased, and exclusive. This CAREER project has focused on three areas of research. The first area, focused on school-industry partnerships through COVID-19 in the region, highlighted the importance of rich partnerships, resilient stakeholders, and innovative contexts to persist throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This is particularly pertinent to partnerships and collaboration, sustainability of these collaborations, and programming in the context of STEM skilled technical workforce development programs in rural places. The second area of research, focused on developing a conceptual framework for engineering education research and engagement in rural places, highlighted the importance of place, individual student and community assets, and leveraging these things to provide context and meaning in a decontextualized K-12 curriculum. Finally, the third research area, focused on systematically reviewing literature related to the assessment of systems thinking in K-12 education, highlighted the lack of comprehensive assessment tools that can apply across many educational disciplines but particularly in areas as it relates to socio-technical problems. Together, these three research areas ultimately seek to inform broader aspects of K-12 education, such as career and technical education, issues related to rural education, and ultimately focusing on students’ ability to handle complex problems in their communities or other contexts with systems thinking.more » « less
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Abstract Background Engineering education traditionally emphasizes technical skills, sometimes at the cost of under‐preparing graduates for the real‐world engineering context. In recent decades, attempts to address this issue include increasing project‐based assignments and engineering design courses in curricula; however, a skills gap between education and industry remains.
Purpose/Hypothesis This study aims to understand how undergraduate engineering students perceive product design before and after an upper‐level project‐based design course, as measured through concept maps. The purpose is to measure whether and how students account for the technical and nontechnical elements of design, as well as how a third‐year design course influences these design perceptions.
Design/Method Concept maps about product design were collected from 105 third‐year engineering students at the beginning and end of a design course. Each concept map's content and structure were quantitatively analyzed to evaluate the students' conceptual understandings and compare them across disciplines in the before and after conditions.
Results The analyses report on how student conceptions differ by discipline at the outset and how they changed after taking the course. Mechanical Engineering students showed a decrease in business‐related content and an increased focus on societal content, while students in the Engineering Management and Industrial and Systems Engineering programs showed an increase in business topics, specifically market‐related content.
Conclusion This study reveals how undergraduate students conceptualize product design, and specifically to what extent they consider engineering, business, and societal factors. The design courses were shown to significantly shape student conceptualizations of product design, and they did so in a way that mirrored the topics in the course syllabi. The findings offer insights into the education‐practice skills gap and may help future educators to better prepare engineering students to meet industry needs.
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