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1. ABET & Engineering Accreditation - History, Theory, Practice: Initial Findings from a National Study on the Governance of Engineering Education

   Akera, A. ( January 2019 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Who and by what means do we ensure that engineering education evolves to meet the ever changing needs of our society? This and other papers presented by our research team at this conference offer our initial set of findings from an NSF sponsored collaborative study on engineering education reform. Organized around the notion of higher education governance and the practice of educational reform, our open-ended study is based on conducting semi-structured interviews at over three dozen universities and engineering professional societies and organizations, along with a handful of scholars engaged in engineering education research. Organized as a multi-site, multi-scale study, our goal is to document differences in perspectives and interest the exist across organizational levels and institutions, and to describe the coordination that occurs (or fails to occur) in engineering education given the distributed structure of the engineering profession. This paper offers for all engineering educators and administrators a qualitative and retrospective analysis of ABET EC 2000 and its implementation. The paper opens with a historical background on the Engineers Council for Professional Development (ECPD) and engineering accreditation; the rise of quantitative standards during the 1950s as a result of the push to implement an engineering science curriculum appropriate to the Cold War era; EC 2000 and its call for greater emphasis on professional skill sets amidst concerns about US manufacturing productivity and national competitiveness; the development of outcomes assessment and its implementation; and the successive negotiations about assessment practice and the training of both of program evaluators and assessment coordinators for the degree programs undergoing evaluation. It was these negotiations and the evolving practice of assessment that resulted in the latest set of changes in ABET engineering accreditation criteria (“1-7” versus “a-k”). To provide an insight into the origins of EC 2000, the “Gang of Six,” consisting of a group of individuals loyal to ABET who used the pressure exerted by external organizations, along with a shared rhetoric of national competitiveness to forge a common vision organized around the expanded emphasis on professional skill sets. It was also significant that the Gang of Six was aware of the fact that the regional accreditation agencies were already contemplating a shift towards outcomes assessment; several also had a background in industrial engineering. However, this resulted in an assessment protocol for EC 2000 that remained ambiguous about whether the stated learning outcomes (Criterion 3) was something faculty had to demonstrate for all of their students, or whether EC 2000’s main emphasis was continuous improvement. When it proved difficult to demonstrate learning outcomes on the part of all students, ABET itself began to place greater emphasis on total quality management and continuous process improvement (TQM/CPI). This gave institutions an opening to begin using increasingly limited and proximate measures for the “a-k” student outcomes as evidence of effort and improvement. In what social scientific terms would be described as “tactical” resistance to perceived oppressive structures, this enabled ABET coordinators and the faculty in charge of degree programs, many of whom had their own internal improvement processes, to begin referring to the a-k criteria as “difficult to achieve” and “ambiguous,” which they sometimes were. Inconsistencies in evaluation outcomes enabled those most discontented with the a-k student outcomes to use ABET’s own organizational processes to drive the latest revisions to EAC accreditation criteria, although the organization’s own process for member and stakeholder input ultimately restored much of the professional skill sets found in the original EC 2000 criteria. Other refinements were also made to the standard, including a new emphasis on diversity. This said, many within our interview population believe that EC 2000 had already achieved much of the changes it set out to achieve, especially with regards to broader professional skills such as communication, teamwork, and design. Regular faculty review of curricula is now also a more routine part of the engineering education landscape. While programs vary in their engagement with ABET, there are many who are skeptical about whether the new criteria will produce further improvements to their programs, with many arguing that their own internal processes are now the primary drivers for change. 

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2. Documenting professional learning focused on implementing high-quality instructional materials in mathematics: the AIM–TRU learning cycle

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-022-00362-y  

   Russell, John Lawson ; DiNapoli, Joseph ; Murray, Eileen ( July 2022 , International Journal of STEM Education)

   To increase teachers’ capacity to implement high-quality instructional materials with fidelity in their classrooms through a video-based professional learning cycle, the Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics Using the Teaching for Robust Understanding framework (AIM–TRU) research–practice partnership was formed. Drawing upon the design-based research paradigm, AIM–TRU created the initial design for the professional learning cycle and wanted to engage in continued iterative redesign as the year progressed. This necessitated a method, common among those who adjust their designs when applying them in context, by which to document and justify changes made over time to our model. The research contained in this article used qualitative methods to articulate and test the design underlying our professional learning cycle by advancing conjecture mapping, a device by which the embodiments of the design are made transparent to be analyzed in practice.

   The initial design conjectures and activity structures teachers engaged in through our model of professional learning were refined to address three themes that emerged. Firstly, it was found that the ways participants engaged with the mathematics of the lesson were underwhelming, in large part, because our own definition of what rich talk around mathematics should entail was lacking in details such as the mathematical objects in the lesson, the presence of multiple solution pathways, or the various representations that students could use. Second, talk structures did not always allow for equitable exchanges among all teachers. Finally, activity structures did not encourage teachers to delve deeply into the mathematics so they could perceive the lesson as a coherent piece of their own classroom curriculum. Our design conjectures and activity structures were revised over the course of the year.

   Our use of conjecture mapping allowed us to address the concern with research–practice partnerships that they should develop and utilize tools that make the systemic inquiry they engage in transparent, allowing for other researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to see the complete design process and make use of the findings for their local context. Implications for this process as a tool for those who pilot and scale professional development are raised and addressed.

    

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3. Studying the Formation of Engineers: A Case Study of a Higher-education Learning Ecology

   Korte, Russell ; LeBlanc, Saniya ( July 2021 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   The development of professional engineers for the workforce is one of the aims of engineering education, which benefits from the complementary efforts of engineering students, faculty, and employers. Typically, current research on engineering competencies needed for practice in the workplace is focused on the experiences and perspectives of practicing engineers. This study aimed to build on this work by including the perspectives and beliefs of engineering faculty about preparing engineering students, as well as the perspectives and beliefs of engineering students about preparing for the workplace. The overall question of the research was, “What and how do engineering students learn about working in the energy sector?” Additional questions asked practicing engineers, “What is important to learn about your work and how did you learn what was important when you started in this industry? For engineering faculty, we asked, “What is important for students to learn as they prepare for work as professionals in the energy industry?” We anticipated that the findings of triangulating these three samples would help us better understand the nature of the preparation of engineering students for work by exploring the connections and disconnections between engineering education in school and engineering practice in the workplace. The aim was to map out the complex ecosystem of professional learning in the context of engineering education and practice. The core concept framing this study is the development of competence for engineering practice—including the education of students in the context of higher education and the practical learning of newly hired engineers on the job. Initial findings of the work-in-progress describe the nature of instruction and learning in higher education, learning in the workplace, along with comparisons and contrasts between the two. As of this point, we have initially mapped the learning ecosystem in the workplace based on in-depth, qualitative interviews with 12 newly hired engineers in the target energy company. In addition, we are analyzing interviews with two managers in the company and three other experienced leaders in the energy industry (this sample is currently in process and will include interviews with more participants). Currently, we are analyzing and mapping the learning and experiences of students in their studies of energy engineering and the instructional goals of engineering faculty teaching and mentoring these students. The map of the higher education ecosystem will connect with the workplace ecosystem to portray a more longitudinal map of the learning and development of professional competence of engineering students preparing for their career in the energy sector. The findings of the analysis of the workplace emphasized the importance of the social and relational systems in the workplace, while very preliminary indications from the educational context (students and faculty) indicate initial awareness of the social context of energy practice and policy. There are also indications of the nature of important cultural differences between higher education and industry. We continue to collect data and work on the analysis of data with the aim of mapping out the larger learning and experience ecosystem that leading to professional competence. 

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4. Rethinking the classroom science investigation

   https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21625  

   Manz, Eve ; Lehrer, Richard ; Schauble, Leona ( February 2020 , Journal of Research in Science Teaching)

   There is now a significant research literature devoted to reconceptualizing scientific activities, such as modeling, explanation, and argumentation, to realize a vision of science‐as‐practice in classrooms. As yet, however, not all scientific practices have received equal attention.Planning and Carrying out Investigationsis one of the eight scientific practices identified in the Next Generation Science Standards, and there is a long line of research from both psychological and science education traditions that addresses topics about investigation, such as the generation and interpretation of evidence. However, investigation has not been subject to concerted reconceptualization within recent research and instructional design efforts focused on science‐as‐practice. In this article, we propose a framework that centers the investigation as a key locus for constructing alignments among phenomena, data, and explanatory models and makes visible the work that scientists engage in as they develop and stabilize alignments. We argue that these alignments are currently under‐theorized and under‐utilized in instructional environments. We explore four opportunities that we argue are both accessible to students from a young age and can support conceptual innovation. These are (a) developing empirical systems, (b) getting a grip on empirical systems, (c) determining, defining and operationalizing data as “evidence,” and (d) making sense of what the results of empirical systems do and do not help us understand.

    

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5. Supporting Elementary Teacher's Reflections on Equity in CS Education: A Case Study Approach

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3291279.3341208  

   Sullivan, Florence ; Tulungen, Catherine ; Veeragoudar, Sneha ; Pektas, Emrah ( August 2019 , Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research)

   The dearth of women and people of color in the field of computer science is a well-documented phenomenon. Following Obama's 2016 declaration of the need for a nationwide CS for All movement in the US, educators, school districts, states and the US-based National Science Foundation have responded with an explosion of activity directed at developing computer science learning opportunities in K-12 settings. A major component of this effort is the creation of equitable CS learning opportunities for underrepresented populations. As a result, there exists a strong need for educational research on the development of equity-based theory and practice in CS education. This poster session reports on a work-in-progress study that uses a case study approach to engage twenty in-service elementary school teachers in reflecting on issues of equity in CS education as part of a three-day CS professional development workshop. Our work is unfolding in the context of a four-year university/district research practice partnership in a mid-sized city in the Northeastern United States. Teachers in our project are working to co-design integrated CS curriculum units for K-5 classrooms. We developed four case studies, drawn from the first year of our project, that highlight equity challenges teachers faced in the classroom when implementing the CS lessons. The case studies follow the "Teacher Moments" template created by the Teaching Systems Lab in Open Learning at MIT. The case study activity is meant to deepen reflection and discussion on how to create equitable learning opportunities for elementary school students. We present preliminary findings. 

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