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1. Building High-Level Environmental Behavior into HBCU Engineering

   J. T. Solomon, S. Poozesh (June 2023, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This work-in-progress paper explores links between engineering students' environmental awareness and their intended environmental behavior at different levels in a prominent HBCU. Through extensive surveys developed as part of this project, students' higher-level behavior, manifested by their willingness and preparedness to pursue careers in the industries developing sustainable resources, has been explored. To maximize the high-level behavior and sustainability competencies, a pedagogical system with a comprehensive pool of interventions has also been developed and implemented in a senior-level mechanical engineering course. In this paper, we report the initial survey response data and details of the intervention strategies, which are intended to develop scalable educational approaches and guidelines for building high-level environmental behavior in the next-generation diverse renewable energy workforce. 

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2. Imparting High-Level Environmental Behavior Through Tailored Interventions

   J. T Solomon, H Song (June 2024, ASEE)

   This work-in-progress paper presents data from ongoing research that studies engineering students' environmental awareness and pro-environmental behavior at different levels in a prominent HBCU. Through extensive surveys developed as part of this project, students' environmental knowledge and higher-level environmental behavior, manifested by their willingness and preparedness to pursue careers in the industries developing sustainable resources, have been explored. With a focus on imparting these qualities, a pedagogical system with a comprehensive pool of interventions has been designed and implemented in a senior-level mechanical engineering course in the HBCU. The paper summarizes the survey development process and explores the impact of the intervention on students' ecological knowledge, behavior, attitudes, and job decisions, which will help develop strategies for preparing the next-generation, diverse renewable energy workforce. 

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3. Shaping Environmental Attitude and Behavior Through Academic Interventions

   Solomon, J; Song, H; McNeal, K; Beckingham, L; Lazar, K (June 2025, ASEE)

   ASEE (Ed.)

   This paper presents four years (2021-2024) of data from a study that aims to understand engineering students' environmental awareness and pro-environmental behavior at different levels in a prominent HBCU. Through extensive surveys developed as part of this project, students' ecological knowledge and higher-level environmental behavior were explored. In this context, the study also investigated their willingness and preparedness to pursue careers in the industries developing sustainable resources. With a focus on imparting these qualities, a pedagogical system with a comprehensive pool of interventions has been designed and implemented in a senior-level mechanical engineering course. The paper summarizes the survey development process and the data that explores the impact of the intervention on students' ecological knowledge, behavior, attitudes, and job decisions. The study indicates that early academic interventions can shape students' environmental attitudes and behavior and help prepare a diverse renewable energy workforce for the future. 

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4. Developing an Instrument to Measure Online Engineering Undergraduate Students’ Learning Experiences and Intentions to Persist

   Lee, E.; Brunhaver, S.; Bekki, J. (January 2020, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument to measure student perceptions about the learning experiences in their online undergraduate engineering courses. Online education continues to grow broadly in higher education, but the movement toward acceptance and comprehensive utilization of online learning has generally been slower in engineering. Recently, however, there have been indicators that this could be changing. For example, ABET has accredited online undergraduate engineering degrees at Stony Brook University and Arizona State University (ASU), and an increasing number of other undergraduate engineering programs also offer online courses. During this period of transition in engineering education, further investigation about the online modality in the context of engineering education is needed, and survey instrumentation can support such investigations. The instrument presented in this paper is grounded in a Model for Online Course-level Persistence in Engineering (MOCPE), which was developed by our research team by combining two motivational frameworks used to study student persistence: the Expectancy x Value Theory of Achievement Motivation (EVT), and the ARCS model of motivational design. The initial MOCPE instrument contained 79 items related to students’ perceptions about the characteristics of their courses (i.e., the online learning management system, instructor practices, and peer support), expectancies of course success, course task values, perceived course difficulties, and intention to persist in the course. Evidence of validity and reliability was collected using a three-step process. First, we tested face and content validity of the instrument with experts in online engineering education and online undergraduate engineering students. Next, the survey was administered to the online undergraduate engineering student population at a large, Southwestern public university, and an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on the responses. Lastly, evidence of reliability was obtained by computing the internal consistency of each resulting scale. The final instrument has seven scales with 67 items across 10 factors. The Cronbach alpha values for these scales range from 0.85 to 0.97. The full paper will provide complete details about the development and psychometric evaluation of the instrument, including evidence of and reliability. The instrument described in this paper will ultimately be used as part of a larger, National Science Foundation-funded project investigating the factors influencing online undergraduate engineering student persistence. It is currently being used in the context of this project to conduct a longitudinal study intended to understand the relationships between the experiences of online undergraduate engineering students in their courses and their intentions to persist in the course. We anticipate that the instrument will be of interest and use to other engineering education researchers who are also interested in studying the population of online students. 

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5. Learning Communities: Impact on Retention of first-year students

   Darbeheshti, Maryam; Schupbach, William; Lafuente, Ariel; Altman, Tom; Goodman, Katherine; Jacobson, Michael; O'Brien, Shani (July 2020, Zone 1 Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   This completely evidence-based paper focuses on the impact of the Engineering Learning Communities” on the retention rate of the first-year students. The University of Colorado at Denver has recognized the need to increase retention rates at the Engineering College and has created a Learning Community to aid in this effort. The Engineering Learning Community (ELC) was launched in 2016 and works to increase student collaboration from day one, and to increase interest in engineering through an introductory design course for first year freshman students. ELC students not only take this design course but are matriculated into common first year Math and English courses. These attributes are thought to enhance the student’s ability to overcome the hurdles of their first year and improve their interest in completing a four-year degree at the Engineering College. Since then, three cohorts of ELC students have been observed through the lens of retention, and this study is intended to show how the ELC is affiliated with retention. The results from this study indicate that first year GPA is strongly related to first year retention at the Engineering College, and that students participating in the ELC are observed to have a higher GPA at the end of their first year when compared to the rest of the students in the Engineering College. 

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