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1. Through their eyes: Understanding institutional factors that impact the transfer processes of Black engineering students

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20609  

   Berhane, Bruk ; Buenaflor, Shannon ; Lee, Eunsil ; Liu, Jingjing ; Najera, Gabriel ( July 2024 , Journal of Engineering Education)

   The potential for broadening participation in engineering among Black undergraduates via transfer pathways is considerable, given their large share of the community college population. By understanding the opportunities and challenges presented within the context of transfer, this potential can be realized.

   The goal of this study is to explore ways in which Black students who transitioned from a community college to a 4‐year engineering program describe the institutional factors affecting their transfer processes.

   Drawing from a 3‐year qualitative research study involving approximately 27 Black engineering transfer students at a large, predominantly White, institution, we present data derived through interviews and focus groups with these undergraduates.

   Participants expressed that they benefited from supportive institutional agents who offered engineering transfer‐related resources. These included both faculty and advisors in their mostly Minority Serving Community Colleges (MSCCs) as well as advisors from the engineering college at the 4‐year institution. In addition, respondents described being part of a number of community college programs, including some for Black collegians, that offered resources for transfer. Nonetheless, some participants shared problems that emerged during the transfer process, including having to self‐navigate confusing transfer websites or self‐advocate to resolve erroneous admissions decisions.

   We suggest a need to elevate MSCCs as learning environments that can produce future Black engineers. We also recommend a systems‐level approach that brings together community colleges and 4‐year institutions while also accounting for issues related to resources as well as power dynamics that students may encounter.

    

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2. Board 372: Research Initiation: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer within Engineering Curricula

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--46956  

   De_Rosa, Alexander ; Reed, Teri ; Van_Horne, Samuel ; Arndt, Angela ( June 2024 , ASEE Conferences)

   It is well-established that students have difficulty transferring theory and skills between courses in their undergraduate curriculum. At the same time, many college-level courses only concern material relating to the course itself and do not cover how this material might be used elsewhere. It is unsurprising, then, that students are unable to transfer and integrate knowledge from multiple areas into new problems as part of capstone design courses, for example, or in their careers. More work is required to better enable students to transfer knowledge between their courses, learn skills and theory more deeply, and to form engineers who are better able to adapt to new situations and solve “systems-level” problems. Various authors in both the cognitive and disciplinary sciences have discussed these difficulties with the transfer of knowledge, and noted the need to develop tools and techniques for promoting knowledge transfer, as well as to help students develop cross-course connections. This work will address these barriers to knowledge transfer, and crucially develop the needed activities and practices for promoting transfer by answering the following research questions: (1) What are the primary challenges experienced by students when tasked with transferring theory and skills from prior courses, specifically mathematics and physics? (2) What methods of prior knowledge activation are most effective in enabling students to apply this prior knowledge in new areas of study? Here, we present a summary, to date, of the findings of this investigation. These findings are based on an analysis of the problem solving techniques employed by students in various years of their undergraduate program as well as faculty experts. A series of n=23 think aloud interviews have been conducted in which participants were asked to solve a typical engineering statics problem that also requires mathematical skills to solve. Based on participant performance and verbalizations in these interviews, various barriers to the knowledge transfer process were identified (lack of prior knowledge, accuracy of prior knowledge, conceptual understanding, lack of teaching of applications, language of problem, curricular mapping). At the same time, several interventions designed to promote the transfer of knowledge were incorporated into the interviews and tested. Initial results demonstrated the potential effectiveness of these interventions (detailed in the poster/paper) but questions were raised as to whether participants truly understood the underlying concepts they were being asked to transfer. This poster presentation will cover a holistic representation of this study as well as the findings to date. 

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3. Case study on engineering design intervention in physics laboratories

   Kaufman-Ortiz, K. ; Morphew, J. W. ; Rebello, N. S. ; & Rebello, C. M. ( January 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings)

   Problem-solving is a critical skill in the workplace, but recent college graduates are often deficient in problem-solving skills. Introductory STEM courses present engineering students with well-structured problems with single-path solutions that do not prepare students with the problem-solving skills they will need to solve complex problems within authentic engineering contexts. When presented with complex problems in authentic contexts, engineering students find it difficult to transfer the scientific knowledge learned in their STEM courses to solve these integrated and ill structured problems. By integrating physics laboratories with engineering design problems, students are taught to apply physics principles to solve ill-structured and complex engineering problems. The integration of engineering design processes to physics labs is meant to help students transfer physics learning to engineering problems, as well as to transfer the design skills learned in their engineering courses to the physics lab. We hypothesize this integration will help students become better problem solvers when they go out to industry after graduation. The purpose of this study is to examine how students transfer their understanding of physics concepts to solve ill-structured engineering problems by means of an engineering design project in a physics laboratory. We use a case-study methodology to examine two cases and analyze the cases using a lens of co-regulated learning and transfer between physics and engineering contexts. Observations were conducted using transfer lenses. That is, we observed groups during the physics labs for evidence of transfer. The research question for this study was, to what extent do students relate physics concepts with concepts from other materials (classes) through an engineering design project incorporated in a physics laboratory? Teams were observed over the course of 6 weeks as they completed the second design challenge. The cases presented in this study were selected using observations from the lab instructors of the team’s work in the first design project. Two teams, one who performed well, and one that performed poorly, were selected to be observed to provide insight on how students use physics concepts to engage in the design process. The second design challenge asked students to design an eco-friendly way of delivering packages of food to an island located in the middle of the river, which is home to critically endangered species. They are given constraints that the solution cannot disrupt the habitat in any way, nor can the animals come into contact directly with humans or loud noises. Preliminary results indicate that both teams successfully demonstrated transfer between physics and engineering contexts, and integrated physics concepts from multiple labs to complete the design project. Teams that struggle seem to be less connected with the design process at the beginning of the project and are less organized. In contrast, teams that are successful demonstrate greater co-regulated learning (communication, reflection, etc.) and focus on making connections between the physics concepts and principles of engineering design from their engineering course work. 

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4. Putting Affect in Context: Meta-Affect, Beliefs, & Engineering Identity

   Plagge, Alyndra ; Treadway, Emma ; Swenson, Jessica ; Usinski, Danielle ( June 2024 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   In this research paper, we sought to understand how meta-affect influences the strength of engineering identity in first-year students, since strong engineering identity is correlated with retention. Meta-affect refers to affect about affect, cognition about affect, and monitoring of affect. Goldin’s research on meta-affect has suggested that there is a cycle wherein students’ beliefs establish meta-affective contexts that in turn shape the experience of affective pathways. We analyzed transcripts of interviews conducted with students during their first year in an engineering program. The primary goal of the interviews was to gain insight into engineering students’ affect towards math, science, and engineering and their engineering identity. For this comparative case study, we focus on three students with different engineering identities. Our goal was to investigate and provide evidence for the trends and relationships between beliefs, meta-affective-context, and affect and their influence on engineering identity. We found relationships between meta-affect and engineering identity related to specific beliefs: beliefs concerning getting help, the challenges of engineering, and performance ability. These relationships had different implications for the students’ identities depending on the students’ meta-affective contexts and affect. Understanding the relationship between these factors can help instructors promote more productive beliefs and meta-affect. This could potentially help strengthen engineering identity and increase retention of students within engineering. 

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5. Engineering culture under stress: A comparative case study of undergraduate mechanical engineering student experiences

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20594  

   Deters, Jessica R. ; Leydens, Jon A. ; Case, Jennifer ; Cowell, Margaret ( April 2024 , Journal of Engineering Education)

   Engineering culture research to date has described the culture as rigid, chilly, and posing many barriers to entry. However, the COVID‐19 pandemic provided an important opportunity to explore how engineering culture responds to a major disruption.

   The purposes of this study are to understand how elements of engineering culture emerged in mechanical engineering students' perceptions of their classroom experiences during the pandemic and how their experiences varied across two national contexts.

   This qualitative comparative case study examines undergraduate mechanical engineering students' perceptions of their experiences taking courses during the pandemic at two universities—one in the United States and one in South Africa. Semistructured interviews were conducted across both sites with 21 students and contextualized with 3 faculty member interviews. Student interviews were analyzed using an iterative process of deductive coding, inductive coding, and pattern coding.

   We identified two key themes that characterized participants' experiences during the pandemic: hardness and access to resources. We found that students at both sites experienced two types of hardness—intrinsic and constructed—and were more critical of constructed forms of hardness. We found that the South African university's response to facilitating student access to resources was viewed by students as more effective when compared with the US university.

   We found that hardness remained a central feature of engineering culture, based on student perceptions, and found that students expressed awareness of resource‐related differences. A key distinction emerged between intrinsic and constructed hardness.

    

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