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1. Fostering Structural Earthquake Engineering on Early Years College Students through Field Damage Observations and Fiber-Based Simulations

   Montejo, L. ( June 2022 , 12th National Conference in Earthquake Engineering)

   Because of the already crowded civil engineering curriculum and the amount of previous knowledge required, earthquake engineering topics are barely taught at the undergraduate level and is mostly reserved as an advance course in graduate school. In this article we show how we engaged fiber-based simulations along with field damage observations from the 2020 southwest Puerto Rico earthquake sequence to introduce early year college students from different academic backgrounds into structural earthquake engineering. It was found that fiber-based modeling provides a natural way of modeling civil structures and offer results that can be easily related with the expected/observed damages, making it an efficient tool to introduce key aspects of the structural seismic response and motivate early year college students to pursue further studies in this field. 

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2. A Pilot Study of the Development of Empathy within a Service-learning Trip from a Qualitative Perspective

   Wang, Linjue ; Carroll, Turhan Kendall ; Delaine, David A. ( January 2018 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Qualitative outcomes of a pilot study which seeks to investigate the ways and extent to which service-learning impacts the development of empathy in undergraduate engineering students are presented. Service-learning is an experiential education pedagogy in which students engage in activities designed to tackle community needs within structured opportunities to promote learning and development. Community service, teamwork, problem-solving, and reflection are common elements within service-learning activities. This educational approach can provide students with real-world scenarios that connect classroom theory and knowledge to community needs. A brief literature review on service-learning within engineering education, is presented alongside brief background on the meaning of empathy. This is followed by initial qualitative findings around a service-learning trip within an undergraduate engineering course involving 13 student participants. The findings indicate service-learning in a foreign community can serve as a platform for the development of empathy in engineering undergraduates. The development of empathy can be fostered within three main findings: group dynamics, interactions with the community, and individual interpretation of the service-learning experience through self-reflection. This paper concludes with a discussion on how these three findings collectively influence the development of empathy in students. This paper provides a qualitative approach to contextualizing the development of empathy as a learning outcome for engineering educators interested in service-learning. 

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3. Broadening Participation of First-Generation College Students in Engineering – Backgrounds, Experiences and Strategies for Success

   Smith, Jessica M. ; Verdin, Dina ; Lucena, Juan ( January 2019 , Review & directory - American Society for Engineering Education)

   First-generation college students have entered the spotlight of educational research and reform. This shift in perspective has been covered in popular media, for example, in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s series entitled “Engine of Inequality,” which analyzes the challenges facing first-generation college students. However, engineering programs have been slower in responding to this new emphasis on first-generation college students, perhaps assuming that the lack of success of underrepresented groups is a result of deficiencies in the students’ background and preparation. Our research challenges this assumption by explicitly investigating the connections between first-generation engineering students’ success and their experiences within higher education, using a large-scale quantitative survey. Whereas the deficiency perspective focuses on what these students lack and how they need to change themselves in order to adapt to engineering undergraduate curricula, this study seeks to understand how first-generation college student’s funds of knowledge (i.e., family and cultural knowledge developed by growing up in poor and/or working households) can be leveraged in their engineering work and the factors that contribute to their success in engineering. Using ethnographic data of first-generation college students in engineering, from prior work, seven themes were created to capture aspects of students’ funds of knowledge. The themes were classified as follows: community networks, lived experiences, tinkering knowledge from home, tinkering knowledge from work, perspective taking, reading people, and translation among people. To date, the funds of knowledge themes have been validated, at the first level, using exploratory factor analysis with a broad range of engineering students from first-years to fourth-year of higher at two institutions, one in the Midwest and one in the mountain region. Convenience sampling was used to test and validate the funds of knowledge survey constructs. We are currently in our second data collection process. The large-scale survey will be administered to upperclassman and alumni at five participating institutions across the United States, i.e., in a large public polytechnic, small selective private polytechnic, large land grant, large sub-urban public, and large public universities. 

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4. Students’ implicit epistemologies when working at the intersection of engineering and the arts

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-021-00289-w  

   Cruz, Joshua ; Bruhis, Noa ; Kellam, Nadia ; Jayasuriya, Suren ( December 2021 , International Journal of STEM Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Background This paper explores the epistemologies and discourse of undergraduate students at the transdisciplinary intersection of engineering and the arts. Our research questions focus on the kinds of knowledge that students value, use, and identify within an interdisciplinary digital media program, as well as how they talk about using these epistemologies while navigating this transdisciplinary intersection. Six interviews were conducted with students pursuing a semester-long senior capstone project in the digital culture undergraduate degree program in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University that emphasizes the intersection between arts, media, and engineering. Results Using deductive coding followed by discourse analysis, a variety of student epistemologies including positivism, constructionism, and pragmatism were observed. “Border epistemologies” are introduced as a way to think and/or construct knowledge with differing value across disciplines. Further, discourse analysis highlighted students’ identifications with being either an artist or an engineer and revealed linguistic choice in how students use knowledge and problem-solve in these situations. Conclusions Students in a digital media program use fluid, changing epistemological viewpoints when working on their projects, partly driven by orientations with arts and/or engineering. The findings from this study can lead to implications for the design and teaching of transdisciplinary capstones in the future. 

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5. The Cumulative Effects of an NSF-Funded Additive Manufacturing Course at Three Large State Universities and Their Surrounding Communities

   Maloney, Patricia. ; Cong, Weilong. ; Zhang, Meng. ; Li, Bingbing. ( August 2022 , Proceedings ASEE annual conference)

   This paper is the culmination of four years of an NSF-funded project implementing and assessing an undergraduate additive manufacturing course at three large state universities: Texas Tech University, Kansas State University, and California State University – Northridge. The research questions addressed are: (1) What are the changes in skill and knowledge concerning additive manufacturing experienced by undergraduate students? (2) What is the effect of this course on attitudes towards engineering and self-efficacy in engineering for enrolled undergraduate students? The sample consists of four years of data from the undergraduate students enrolled in the course at all three universities (combined N = 196). Our method for data collection was matched-pair surveys that contained both (i) an assessment for content knowledge and (ii) an attitudinal assessment previously validated in published research for data collection about attitudes towards engineering. Matched-pair surveys means that we collected data from Student X at Time 1 (before being taught) and then again from at Time 2 (after being taught) and are able to directly compare any change in content knowledge or attitude within the same person. We also collected demographic information to be able to see whether changes in, for example, women differed from those in men. All undergraduates experienced statistically significant increases in content knowledge and additive manufacturing skills. In an intriguing finding, female students outperformed male students, which fits with the research that indicates that engineering courses which emphasize pragmatic and real-world applications, as well as those that use group work, will disproportionately help underserved engineering populations like women and people of color succeed. Fitting with the above finding, undergraduates noted that they perceived that they had increased in teamwork, communication, and computer programming skills. These gains were particularly high in female students and students of color. 

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