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1. Board 272: Engineering Pathways for Appalachian Youth: Design Principles and Long-term Impacts of School-Industry Partnerships

   Schilling, M.R.; Grohs, J.R. (June 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   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. 

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2. Assessing Educational Pathways for Manufacturing in Rural Communities: An Investigation of New and Existing Programs in Northwest Florida

   Mardis, Marcia A.; Jones, Faye R. (June 2019, ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   To build the nation's skilled technical workforce, the demand for entry and middle-skill professionals in technical fields in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is increasing. The alignment between educational programming and job requirements for STEM-oriented technicians is essential for establishing career pathways that produce high-quality middle skills professionals for technology-rich fields. Building on prior research on rural Florida’s information technologies career pathways, in this National Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced Technician Education (ATE) targeted research project, FSU researchers are investigating alignment among educational opportunities, employer needs, student readiness and new employee experiences in Advanced Manufacturing (AM) and test the usefulness of tools and processes developed to assess such alignment, focusing on the opportunities and challenges in Florida’s rural areas. Researchers constructed and are iteratively refining an AM Body of Knowledge (BOK) for analysis and community engagement. The quantitative and qualitative mixed methods research design combines content analysis and text mining using the BOK with surveys, and interviews/focus groups. The research team is applying text mining approaches to identify the match between syllabi learning outcomes, industry certification requirements, state curriculum frameworks, and job postings. In interviews and focus groups, researchers are qualitatively assessing the employers’ competency expectations and new professionals’ job experiences. These analyses will build capacity among rural stakeholders to strengthen and expand their technical workforce. 

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3. Integrating Professional Mentorship with a 3D-Printing Curriculum to Help Rural Youth Forge STEM Career Connections.

   Bhaduri, S. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference.)

   Economically disadvantaged youth residing in mountain tourist communities represent an important and understudied rural population. These communities typically include a large percentage of children that are English language learners. Our NSF STEM Career Connections project, A Model for Preparing Economically-Disadvantaged Rural Youth for the Future STEM Workplace, investigates strategies that help middle school youth in these communities to envision a broader range of workforce opportunities, especially in STEM and computing careers. This poster highlights the initial findings of an innovative model that involves working with local schools and community partners to support the integration of local career contexts, engineering phenomena, 3D printing technologies, career connections, and mentorship into formal educational experiences to motivate and prepare rural youth for future STEM careers. We focus on select classrooms at two middle schools and describe the implementation of a novel 3D printing curriculum during the 2020-2021 school-year. Two STEM teachers implemented the five-week curriculum with approximately 300 students per quarter. To create a rich inquiry-driven learning environment, the curriculum uses an instructional design approach called storylining. This approach is intended to promote coherence, relevance, and meaning from the students’ perspectives by using students’ questions to drive investigations and lessons. Students worked towards answering the question: “How can we support animals with physical disabilities so they can perform daily activities independently?” Students engaged in the engineering design process by defining, developing, and optimizing solutions to develop and print prosthetic limbs for animals with disabilities using 3D modeling, a unique augmented reality application, and 3D printing. In order to embed connections to STEM careers and career pathways, some students received mentorship and guidance from local STEM professionals who work in related fields. This poster will describe the curriculum and its implementation across two quarters at two middle schools in the US rural mountain west, as well as the impact on students’ interest in STEM and computing careers. During the first quarter students engaged in the 3D printing curriculum, but did not have access to the STEM career and career pathway connections mentorship piece. During the second quarter, the project established a partnership with a local STEM business -- a medical research institute that utilizes 3D printing and scanning for creating human surgical devices and procedures -- to provide mentorship to the students. Volunteers from this institute served as ongoing mentors for the students in each classroom during the second quarter. The STEM mentors guided students through the process of designing, testing, and optimizing their 3D models and 3D printed prosthetics, providing insights into how students’ learning directly applies to the medical industry. Different forms of student data such as cognitive interviews and pre/post STEM interest and spatial thinking surveys were collected and analyzed to understand the benefits of the career connections mentorship component. Preliminary findings suggest the relationship between local STEM businesses and students is important to motivate youth from rural areas to see themselves being successful in STEM careers and helping them to realize the benefits of engaging with emerging engineering technologies. 

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4. Resiliency through partnerships: Prioritizing STEM workforce pathways amid macro challenges

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ssm.12575  

   Mathieson, Danny; Cotrupi, Catherine; Schilling, Malle; Grohs, Jake (April 2023, School Science and Mathematics)

   Abstract Multi‐institutional educational partnerships are a promising approach to developing the skilled technical workforce. Inexorably, the ability to maintain such partnership networks that support skilled technical workforce education was disrupted by COVID‐19. The purpose of this study is to explore Southwest Virginia's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)‐focused multi‐institutional partnership networks, to inventory the disruptive impacts of COVID‐19, and to identify how partnership stakeholders navigated these challenges to prepare students for the skilled technical workforce. This work presents a single‐case study design, highlighting the evolving landscape of STEM workforce education partnership networks in Southwest Virginia throughout the pandemic. The team conducted interviews with 19 regional stakeholders focused on the participants' role throughout the pandemic, barriers to STEM workforce education presented by public health and economic factors, and innovative strategies to sustain and expand partnership networks through COVID‐19. Two key themes emerged from this study: successful partners maintained network connections through adaptive interactions and actors within the network served as brokers to leverage their connections and expand partnerships in the face of adversity. By taking a contextual view of the role of partnership networks in creating equitable STEM workforce pathways during COVID‐19, we develop rich insights into partnership formation, collaboration, resource allocation, and programming amidst challenges to their success. 

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5. The Synergy of Intertwining Grant Activities: Cyber Up! and GenCyber Girls

   West, Tobi (August 2022, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The ongoing workforce shortage of skilled and diverse cybersecurity professionals coupled with the continued upward trend of cybercrime has led to an increased number of funding opportunities from the federal government to support projects focused on technical skills development. Significant emphasis is placed on academic transfer pathways and education-to-career pathways for students from K-12 to community college and beyond. Utilizing funding from multiple sources, faculty have intertwined grant project activities to increase awareness of cybersecurity careers and academic pathways, emphasizing digital forensics and incident response. The two grant projects, Cyber Up! and GenCyber Girls, aimed to develop college-level curriculum and cybersecurity workshops for female high school students. Project activities were synthesized to create a summer camp for high school students based on the curriculum developed for the college programs in digital forensics and incident response. The synergy between the projects has shown an increase in female participation in the digital forensics course and helped build interest in cybersecurity careers among K-12 students. 

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