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Engineering programs have long struggled with balancing curricula that are rigorous enough to prepare graduates to be capable practitioners and educational experiences that are engaging enough to retain undergraduate students. Data show a little more than half of students who start in a program leave after the first or second year, and that many of those students came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession. These findings suggest a mismatch between what incoming students think engineering practice is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. This work will aim to understand how contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can improve the intentions of students, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women, to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students. In addition, this work will contribute new knowledge about students’ understanding of what it means to practice engineering and how that understanding changes with exposure to different types of contextualization (e.g., historical or technical). It will also contribute new knowledge about how undergraduate students associate engineering science and judgement with engineering practice, particularly with respect to how these facets of engineering practice are directly in service to design. Engineering science courses that occupy the middle two years of a program most often utilize traditional lecture-based pedagogy and simplified close-ended textbook problems, which do not typically allow students to engage in the kind of decision-making that is essential to developing engineering judgement. This work proposes a teaching pedagogy intended to provide students with context for how engineering science concepts are implemented in authentic engineering practice and how engineering judgement is essential in that implementation. Moreover, this work will aim to employ another teaching pedagogy to provide a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. This pedagogy was implemented during the Fall 2023 semester in a required seminar course for mechanical engineering sophomores at [name of university]. This work will advance the field of engineering education research by studying how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program, and how these educational activities can shape that progress and/or reframe their beliefs about their education and training. Semi-structured interviews will reveal how students’ perceptions of engineering practice change longitudinally and whether the aforementioned educational activities influence that trajectory. In addition, a larger group of students will be invited to participate in surveys, which will enable drawing inferences from a broader sample about intention to persist as well as baseline levels of familiarity with engineering in general.
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Board 231: Contextualizing Engineering Science Courses by Teaching History and Judgement
Engineering programs have long struggled with balancing curricula that are rigorous enough to prepare graduates to be capable practitioners and educational experiences that are engaging enough to retain undergraduate students. Over the past 60 years, data collected from a variety of institutions across the United States capture an alarming trend – only about half of students who start in an engineering program will actually graduate with an engineering degree. Several studies found that the first-year engineering curricula, which traditionally consist of physics, chemistry, and mathematics courses, are ineffective in motivating students to persist in a program. Many students who leave after their first or second year explain that they came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession altogether. Together, these findings suggest a mismatch between what incoming students think engineering is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. To address retention issues in the first year of an engineering program, many institutions now employ a first-year design experience intended to expose students early on to the true nature of engineering [4]. However, the engineering science courses that occupy a significant proportion of the middle two years of a program still most often utilize traditional lecture-based pedagogy and simplified close-ended textbook problems, which do not typically allow students to make the connection between these classes and the engineering design process or the engineering profession. These types of closed-ended problems also do not provide students with the opportunity to engage in the kind of decision-making that leads to developing sound engineering judgement. Recent work developing and studying the effects of open- ended modeling problems define an opportunity to provide students with challenging problems that simultaneously reinforce their understanding of course material and expose them to the realities of engineering practice. This NSF-funded work proposes introducing two different pedagogies into a Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Iowa. The first pedagogy is designed to provide a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. The second instructional technique is intended to provide students with context for how engineering science concepts are implemented in authentic engineering practice and how engineering judgement is essential in that implementation. This work will aim to understand how historical and/or technical contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can influence the intentions of students, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women, to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2306053
- PAR ID:
- 10528311
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Society for Engineering Education
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: 1.9MB
- Size(s):
- 1.9MB
- Location:
- Portland, OR
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Recent data suggests that a little more than half of students who start in an engineering program leave after the first or second year and that many of those students came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession. These findings indicate a potential mismatch between what incoming students think engineering practice is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. Unlike the other major professions with which engineering shares a common set of principles (e.g., medicine and law), there are very few examples of engineering in popular American culture, and fewer still that are realistic. Thus, a limited number of studies have considered the impacts of exposing students to the history of the profession on students’ perceptions of engineering practice. The overall aim of this project is to understand how historical contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can improve students’ intentions to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students. A secondary aim is to contribute new knowledge about students’ understanding of what it means to practice engineering and how that understanding changes with additional context for the careers for which they are preparing. This work provides second year mechanical engineering students with a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing them to the history of the profession. This work aims to advance the field of engineering education research by studying how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program, and how this activity can shape that progress and/or reframe their beliefs about their education and training. For example, students are educated about how the Morrill Land Grant Acts were essential to the growth of engineering at higher education institutions, but at the considerable cost of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from the lands provided to those institutions. Additionally, students are educated about the differences between professions and occupations, and how their technical competence is intimately connected with their ability to make ethical engineering decisions. Planned semi-structured will reveal how students’ perceptions of engineering practice change longitudinally and whether the aforementioned educational activity influences that trajectory.more » « less
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Design projects are an important part of many first-year engineering programs. The desire to employ holistic assessment strategies to student work with open-ended and divergent responses has been widely noted in the literature. Holistic strategies can provide insight into the role of qualities (e.g., professional constructs) that are not typically conducive to standard assessment rubrics. Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) is an assessment approach that is used to assess design projects holistically. The assessment of projects using ACJ can be carried out by experts or students to scaffold their learning experience. This Work-in-Progress paper explores the use and benefits of ACJ for assessing design projects specifically focusing on first-year engineering students and educators. Further, conference attendees will be provided the opportunity throughout the conference to engage with the ACJ software to experience how this system can work in practice for assessing student design projects.more » « less
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null (Ed.)In this work-in-progress study, the engineering identities of students enrolled in a first-year engineering (FYE) program were surveyed to investigate whether students identify with engineering (in general or with a specific engineering major) during their first year and how differences in identities impact intent to persist in engineering. Literature suggests a strong engineering identity is linked to student retention and can positively impact a student’s trajectory within an engineering program. To investigate these interactions, a survey was distributed at a large public institution in the southeast at the beginning and end of the Fall semester. Most students reported they had decided on a specific engineering major even in the beginning of their first engineering course. While students are relatively confident in that major choice at the beginning of the year, their confidence increased by the end of the semester. Future work will invite students for interviews to elucidate understanding in how a student’s views of the engineering profession affect their FYE experience and the role the FYE curriculum has in their anticipated engineering major and themselves as engineers.more » « less
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null (Ed.)In this paper, we argue that the exploration of engineering judgment in undergraduate education should be grounded at the intersection of decision making, situated cognition, and engineering identity production. In our view, engineering judgment is an embodied cognitive process that is situated in written and oral communication, involved with immediate praxis, and takes place within the contexts of standards and traditions of the engineering communities of practice. Moreover, engineering judgment is constituted as authoritative communication tasks that draw on the subject’s and audience’s common experiences and knowledge base for its clarity and persuasive power (e.g., Weedon (2019), "The role of rhetoric in engineering judgment," IEEE Trans. Prof. Commun. 62(2):165-177). The objective of this work short essay is to review the engineering education literature with the aim of synthesizing the concept of engineering judgment from theories of decision-making, identity, communities of practice, and discourse communities. Although the rationale for developing engineering judgment in undergraduate students is the complexity they will face in professional practice, engineering educators often considerably reduce the complexity of the problems students face (with learning engineering judgement or with engineering judgment in their undergraduate education?). Student work intended to train engineering judgment often prescribes goals and objectives, and demands a one-time decision, product, or solution that faculty or instructors evaluate. The evaluation process might not contain formal methods for foregrounding feedback from experience or reflecting on how the problem or decision emerges; thus, the loop from decision to upstream cognitive processes might not be closed. Consequently, in this paper, our exploration of engineering judgment is guided by the following questions: How have investigators researchers? defined engineering judgment? What are the potential limitations of existing definitions? How can existing definitions be expanded upon? What cognitive processes do students engage to make engineering judgments? How do communication tasks shape students’ engineering judgments? In what ways does engineer identity production shape students’ engineering judgments? How might a definition of engineering judgement suggest areas for improving undergraduate education?more » « less
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