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1. Assessing Global Engagement Interventions to Advance Global Engineering Competence for Engineering Formation

   Schneider, S. (June 2023, Review directory American Society for Engineering Education)

   An increasingly global environment expects graduating Engineering students to perform, live and work across cultures. Most intercultural competence research and associated global engineering education is focused on developing the global engineering skill set through long-term travel experiences such as study abroad programs. These programs can be expensive from both a time and money standpoint, limiting the participation to more privileged members of a community, and are not scalable to support broader participation. This work-in-progress addresses this research gap by focusing on the development of the students’ global learner mindset without requiring extensive travel. The project will investigate four different global engagement interventions, including the use of engineering case studies, the intentional formation of multi-national student teams, a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) research project, and a community engaged project within a short course. These interventions can be used to develop a holistic global learner mindset and global engineering education approach to foster global competence in undergraduate engineering students. The four global engagement interventions will be grounded in the global engineering competency (GEC) theoretical framework and assessed for their ability to foster a global learner mindset in engineering students. A mixed-methods approach will be used to assess students’ global learner mindset and skill set. This research will use the Global Engagement Survey (GES), the Global Engineering Competency Scale (GECS) and specific questions developed by the researchers to evaluate improvements in the participating students’ global engineering skill set and answer specific research questions including: 1) To what extent can global competence be developed in engineering students through the use of the proposed global engagement interventions; and 2) what are the relative strengths of each of the proposed global engagement interventions in developing global engineering competence? Combined, these research measures will provide both an accurate picture of how each global engagement intervention impacts the formation of a global learner mindset in engineering education, and also its associated ability to develop and/or improve global engineering skills. The outcomes of this study will generate valuable knowledge to understand how each global engagement intervention impacts the formation of global engineering competence. In this work-in-progress study, the authors discuss the four global engagement interventions with specific learning objectives that have been mapped to the overall student outcomes for the project. These objectives have also been mapped to the GES and GECS instruments. Finally the faculty members have developed qualitative tools to augment the GES and GECS to identify the global engineering skill sets each intervention is generating. This paper lays the foundation before implementing the interventions and performing their associated assessments over the several subsequent semesters. 

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2. Assessing Global Engagement Interventions to Advance Global Engineering Competence for Engineering Formation (Work in Progress)

   Schneider, Scott J.; Mowrey, Corinne; Janz, Eric; Vasquez, Eric S.; Murzi, Homero; Witenstein, Matthew A.; Holcomb, Jeanne (January 2023, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   An increasingly global environment expects graduating Engineering students to perform, live and work across cultures. Most intercultural competence research and associated global engineering education is focused on developing the global engineering skill set through long-term travel experiences such as study abroad programs. These programs can be expensive from both a time and money standpoint, limiting the participation to more privileged members of a community, and are not scalable to support broader participation. This work-in-progress addresses this research gap by focusing on the development of the students’ global learner mindset without requiring extensive travel. The project will investigate four different global engagement interventions, including the use of engineering case studies, the intentional formation of multi-national student teams, a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) research project, and a community engaged project within a short course. These interventions can be used to develop a holistic global learner mindset and global engineering education approach to foster global competence in undergraduate engineering students. The four global engagement interventions will be grounded in the global engineering competency (GEC) theoretical framework and assessed for their ability to foster a global learner mindset in engineering students. A mixed-methods approach will be used to assess students’ global learner mindset and skill set. This research will use the Global Engagement Survey (GES), the Global Engineering Competency Scale (GECS) and specific questions developed by the researchers to evaluate improvements in the participating students’ global engineering skill set and answer specific research questions including: 1) To what extent can global competence be developed in engineering students through the use of the proposed global engagement interventions; and 2) what are the relative strengths of each of the proposed global engagement interventions in developing global engineering competence? Combined, these research measures will provide both an accurate picture of how each global engagement intervention impacts the formation of a global learner mindset in engineering education, and also its associated ability to develop and/or improve global engineering skills. The outcomes of this study will generate valuable knowledge to understand how each global engagement intervention impacts the formation of global engineering competence. In this work-in-progress study, the authors discuss the four global engagement interventions with specific learning objectives that have been mapped to the overall student outcomes for the project. These objectives have also been mapped to the GES and GECS instruments. Finally the faculty members have developed qualitative tools to augment the GES and GECS to identify the global engineering skill sets each intervention is generating. This paper lays the foundation before implementing the interventions and performing their associated assessments over the several subsequent semesters. 

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3. A Semester-long Holistic Growth-Mindset Experience for First-Year Computing Students: Emerging Intersections

   Mason, S; Fluet, K (October 2024, IEEE Frontiers in Education)

   This innovative practice full paper examines mindset understandings of three cohorts of first-year student scholars in a College of Computing at a private technical Carnegie-classified Doctoral University in the northeastern United States. Grounded in theories of intelligence, a growth mindset posits that intelligence and skills can be developed through continued practice and learning, while a fixed mindset situates one with the skills they have at birth, never to evolve or grow. Thirty-two undergraduate students across three years (10 students in year one, cohort one; 10 students in year two, cohort two; and 12 students in year three, cohort three) participated in a holistic growth mindset program that included three pillars: (a) faculty-student mentoring infused with growth mindset, (b) growth-mindset augmentations to the introductory programming course and (c) a growth mindset-scholar seminar - a series of meetings where each cohort met as a group to discuss and practice activating a growth mindset. Previous work with students has focused on more limited growth mindset interventions rather than a holistic approach. Prior to the scholars arriving on campus, the faculty involved in each of the pillars were part of a Community of Practice to learn about and activate their own growth mindset. At the end of their first semester in the project, each of the student cohorts participated in a focus group to learn about their understanding and application of growth and fixed mindset. We report findings from the student scholar data after one semester of participating in the three programmatic pillars in the context of growth mindset: mentoring, programming instruction, and the scholar seminar. Summary findings from the student perspectives are described including the use of illustrative quotes, in the students' own words, serving as a powerful reminder of the importance of growth mindset and relationship building. This has implications for addressing mindset in the future by considering how the innovative practice of embedding a growth mindset holistically into mentoring, instruction and a student seminar can provide support for students that standalone interventions cannot. 

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4. Assessing the Effects of a Short-Term Global Engineering Ethics Course on the Development of Engineering Students' Moral Reasoning and Dispositions [Traditional paper – research/evidence-based, DEI/research methods]

   Clancy, Rockwell; Streiner, Scott; Zhu, Qin; Wu, Xianghong; Thorpe, Ryan (January 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   This paper describes a project to develop, deliver, and assess a short-term (one-week) course on global engineering ethics at Shandong University, Shandong, China in the summer of 2022. This project builds on previous work regarding the development and assessment of global engineering ethics, shortening the time required to deliver and assess a course. The goal was to explore whether a shorter version of the course resulted in gains similar to the longer version, and whether shorter versions of the assessment instruments could track these gains. Ethics is increasingly recognized as central to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning how it should be carried out and assessed. These disagreements are compounded by the global nature of engineering, where technologies span multiple countries, and peoples from different cultures work together as never before. Separation in time and space between those developing technologies and those affected by these technologies can increase difficulties associated with identifying and mitigating the negative effects of technology on human life. Additionally, regulatory and cultural differences can lead to disagreement regarding how technologies should or should not be developed and used. For these reasons, efforts have been made to develop global engineering ethics education. Over several years, members of the team have developed and delivered a semester-long, two-credit hour course in global engineering ethics, finding that participants scored significantly higher in measures of ethical reasoning post- than pre-course, and developed a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. Given the limited time and space in engineering curricula, and limited number of qualified faculty to teach global engineering ethics, this project sought to determine whether a course with reduced contents delivered over a shorter period of time would be similarly effective. Additionally, it sought to determine whether shorter versions of the instruments used to assess this education, the ESIT (Engineering and Science Issues Test) and MFQ (Moral Foundations Theory), would be as effective as their original, longer versions. This was motivated by the fact that, in ongoing research, the project team was having difficulty collecting adequate sample sizes, in part because it was taking so long to complete full versions of the ESIT and MFQ. To do so, in July of 2022, Chinese students enrolled in “Global Engineering Ethics” completed shortened versions of the ESIT and MFQ on the first and last days of the course. Our presentation will describe the nature of the course, as well as pre- and post-course results on shortened versions of the ESIT and MFQ. 

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5. Work in Progress: Formation of an engineering identity in first-year students through an intervention centered on senior design projects

   Richards, Abigail M; Anderson, Ryan; Myers, Carrie B (July 2020, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   Abstract This “work in progress” paper describes a multiyear project to study the development of engineering identity in a chemical and biological engineering program at Montana State University. The project focuses on how engineering identity may be impacted by a series of interventions utilizing subject material in a senior-level capstone design course and has the senior capstone design students serve as peer-mentors to first- and second-year students. A more rapid development of an engineering identity by first- and second-year students is suspected to increase retention and persistence in this engineering program. Through a series of timed interventions scheduled to take place in the first and second year, which includes cohorts that will serve as negative controls (no intervention), we hope to ascertain the following: (1) the extent to which, relative to a control group, exposure to a peer mentor increases a students’ engineering identity development over time compared to those who do not receive peer mentoring and (2) if the quantity and/or timing of the peer interactions impact engineering identity development. While the project includes interventions for both first- and second-year students, this work in progress paper focuses on the experiences of first year freshman as a result of the interventions and their development of an engineering identity over the course of the semester. Early in the fall semester, freshman chemical engineering students enrolled in an introductory chemical engineering course and senior students in a capstone design course were administered a survey which contained a validated instrument to assess engineering identity. The first-year course has 107 students and the senior-level course has 92 students and approximately 50% of the students in both cohorts completed the survey. Mid-semester, after the first-year students were introduced to the concepts of process flow diagrams and material balances in their course, senior design student teams gave presentations about their capstone design projects in the introductory course. The presentations focused on the project goals, design process and highlighted the process flow diagrams. After the presentations, freshman and senior students attended small group dinners as part of a homework assignment wherein the senior students were directed to communicate information about their design projects as well as share their experiences in the chemical engineering program. Dinners occurred overall several days, with up to ten freshman and five seniors attending each event. Freshman students were encouraged to use this time to discover more about the major, inquire about future course work, and learn about ways to enrich their educational experience through extracurricular and co-curricular activities. Several weeks after the dinner experience, senior students returned to give additional presentations to the freshman students to focus on the environmental and societal impacts of their design projects. We report baseline engineering identity in this paper. 

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