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1. Board 122: Work in Progress: Identity and Positioning of International Students in Sociotechnical Discussions

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42426  

   Meng, Jingshu; Norton, Hannah; Andrews, Chelsea (June 2023, Annual ASEE Conference and Exhibition)

   Concerns about technocentric undergraduate engineering courses have now become widely disseminated. As a result, universities are diligently working to include more sociotechnical content in formerly purely-technical courses, with the goal of engaging students in recognizing and analyzing the economic, political, and social impacts of technology. In the U.S., many of the focus topics for this sociotechnical content are grounded in a U.S. context, requiring an understanding of the history and current state of racial and economic power structures. While U.S. residents are likely familiar with these structures, it is important to consider how these topics are encountered by international students. This case study on international student experience is part of a larger NSF-funded research project exploring integrating sociotechnical topics in a first-year engineering computing course. The revised course included weekly readings followed by small-group discussions on curriculum-aligned real-world justice topics. This work in progress study analyzes post-course student interviews of six international students of color to understand their experiences in this course. We use a qualitative case study approach to analyze these interviews, drawing heavily from work in identity (e.g., Berhane, Secules, & Onuma, 2020), being careful to take an intersectional lens (e.g., Ross, Capobianco, & Godwin, 2017). We draw heavily from the emergent framework of Learning Race in the U.S. Context (Fries-Britt, Mwangi, & Peralta, 2014). We focus on the unique challenges for international students as they navigate justice discourse in the U.S. context. Our examination of international student interviews illuminated conflicts between international students’ self-identity and what they felt they were expected to know and have experienced. Most first-year international students of color reported strong identities as international students and did not identify as strongly with their racial/ethnic groups. They felt they were lacking U.S. racial context, including both knowledge of the history of U.S. racial relations and lived experiences within these systems. At the same time, there is evidence that other students in the classes positioned the international students of color as experts in racial relations in the U.S., looking to them to share personal experiences or for approval of what other students were sharing. Without essentializing these particular international students’ experiences, we hope to draw attention to the social dynamics encountered during sociotechnical lessons and the potential for marginalization of the international student population. 

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2. How do undergraduate engineering students conceptualize product design? An analysis of two third‐year design courses

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20468  

   Miska, Jacob W.; Mathews, Laura; Driscoll, Jessica; Hoffenson, Steven; Crimmins, Sarah; Espera, Jr., Alejandro; Pitterson, Nicole (May 2022, Journal of Engineering Education)

   Abstract BackgroundEngineering education traditionally emphasizes technical skills, sometimes at the cost of under‐preparing graduates for the real‐world engineering context. In recent decades, attempts to address this issue include increasing project‐based assignments and engineering design courses in curricula; however, a skills gap between education and industry remains. Purpose/HypothesisThis study aims to understand how undergraduate engineering students perceive product design before and after an upper‐level project‐based design course, as measured through concept maps. The purpose is to measure whether and how students account for the technical and nontechnical elements of design, as well as how a third‐year design course influences these design perceptions. Design/MethodConcept maps about product design were collected from 105 third‐year engineering students at the beginning and end of a design course. Each concept map's content and structure were quantitatively analyzed to evaluate the students' conceptual understandings and compare them across disciplines in the before and after conditions. ResultsThe analyses report on how student conceptions differ by discipline at the outset and how they changed after taking the course. Mechanical Engineering students showed a decrease in business‐related content and an increased focus on societal content, while students in the Engineering Management and Industrial and Systems Engineering programs showed an increase in business topics, specifically market‐related content. ConclusionThis study reveals how undergraduate students conceptualize product design, and specifically to what extent they consider engineering, business, and societal factors. The design courses were shown to significantly shape student conceptualizations of product design, and they did so in a way that mirrored the topics in the course syllabi. The findings offer insights into the education‐practice skills gap and may help future educators to better prepare engineering students to meet industry needs. 

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3. Development and Assessment of a Combined REU/RET Program in Materials Science

   Salzman, N.; Ubic, R. (April 2017, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   In this paper we present an evaluation and lessons learned from a joint Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program focused on energy and sustainability topics within a Materials Science and Engineering program at a public university. This program brought eleven undergraduate science and engineering students with diverse educational and institutional backgrounds and four local middle and high school teachers on campus for an 8-week research experience working in established lab groups at the university. Using the Qualtrics online survey software, we conducted pre-experience and post-experience surveys of the participants to assess the effects of participating in this summer research program. At the beginning of the summer, all participants provided their definition of technical research and described what they hoped to get out of their research experience, and the undergraduate students described their future career and educational plans. At the conclusion of the summer, a post-experience survey presented participants’ with their answers from the beginning of the summer and asked them to reflect on how their understanding of research and future plans involving research changed over the course of the summer experience. Many participants evolved a new understanding of research as a result of participating in the summer experience. In particular, they better recognized the collaborative nature of research and the challenges that can arise as part of the process of doing research. Participants acquired both technical and professional skills that they found useful, such as learning new programming languages, becoming proficient at using new pieces of equipment, reviewing technical literature, and improving presentation and communication skills. Undergraduates benefited from developing new relationships with their peers, while the teacher participants benefited from developing relationships with faculty and staff at the university. While most of the participants felt that they were better prepared for future studies or employment, they did not feel like the summer research experience had a significant impact on their future career or degree plans. Finally, while almost all of the participants described their summer research experience as positive, areas for improvement included better planning and access to mentors, as well as more structured activities for the teachers to adapt their research activities for the classroom. 

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4. What do Undergraduate Engineering Students and Pre-service Teachers Learn by Collaborating and Teaching Engineering and Coding Through Robotics?

   Kidd, J.; Kaipa, K.; Sacks, S.; Ringleb, S.; Pazos, P.; Gutierrez, K.; Ayala, O. M.; de Souza Almeida, L. M. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Online)

   This research paper presents preliminary results of an NSF-supported interdisciplinary collaboration between undergraduate engineering students and preservice teachers. The fields of engineering and elementary education share similar challenges when it comes to preparing undergraduate students for the new demands they will encounter in their profession. Engineering students need interprofessional skills that will help them value and negotiate the contributions of various disciplines while working on problems that require a multidisciplinary approach. Increasingly, the solutions to today's complex problems must integrate knowledge and practices from multiple disciplines and engineers must be able to recognize when expertise from outside their field can enhance their perspective and ability to develop innovative solutions. However, research suggests that it is challenging even for professional engineers to understand the roles, responsibilities, and integration of various disciplines, and engineering curricula have traditionally left little room for development of non-technical skills such as effective communication with a range of audiences and an ability to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams. Meanwhile, preservice teachers need new technical knowledge and skills that go beyond traditional core content knowledge, as they are now expected to embed engineering into science and coding concepts into traditional subject areas. There are nationwide calls to integrate engineering and coding into PreK-6 education as part of a larger campaign to attract more students to STEM disciplines and to increase exposure for girls and minority students who remain significantly underrepresented in engineering and computer science. Accordingly, schools need teachers who have not only the knowledge and skills to integrate these topics into mainstream subjects, but also the intention to do so. However, research suggests that preservice teachers do not feel academically prepared and confident enough to teach engineering-related topics. This interdisciplinary project provided engineering students with an opportunity to develop interprofessional skills as well as to reinforce their technical knowledge, while preservice teachers had the opportunity to be exposed to engineering content, more specifically coding, and develop competence for their future teaching careers. Undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a computational methods course and preservice teachers enrolled in an educational technology course partnered to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth and sixth graders. This paper reports on the effects of this collaboration on twenty engineering students and eight preservice teachers. T-tests were used to compare participants’ pre-/post- scores on a coding quiz. A post-lesson written reflection asked the undergraduate students to describe their robotics lessons and what they learned from interacting with their cross disciplinary peers and the fifth/sixth graders. Content analysis was used to identify emergent themes. Engineering students’ perceptions were generally positive, recounting enjoyment interacting with elementary students and gaining communication skills from collaborating with non-technical partners. Preservice teachers demonstrated gains in their technical knowledge as measured by the coding quiz, but reported lacking the confidence to teach coding and robotics independently of their partner engineering students. Both groups reported gaining new perspectives from working in interdisciplinary teams and seeing benefits for the fifth and sixth grade participants, including exposing girls and students of color to engineering and computing. 

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5. Literature Searching/Compiling/Understanding for Support of Student Research/Projects: A Dedicated Course Approach

   Gaylord, Thomas K.; Finn, Bette M. (February 2022, IJEE International Journal of Engineering Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Searching, compiling, understanding, and explaining the literature relative to one’s research or project represents an essential 21-st century skill for students. The innovation in the present work is that the full range of these diverse topics can be integrated and team taught, in a single unified course format. There is widespread awareness that the rapid advances in technology have greatly accelerated fundamental progress in science, engineering, and medicine as well as in the entrepreneurial development in these fields. Simultaneously, there have been, perhaps less publicized, advances in information science, database technology, literature searching tools, data compilation tools, and data sharing tools. To be competitive, students need to learn about and to incorporate these powerful tools into their research and engineering project work while they are in school and after graduation. Lessons learned in developing a productive academic research laboratory (Optics Laboratory at Georgia Tech) were used to formulate an inclusive suite of the needed topics and to introduce these via a course for undergraduate students to be team taught by an engineering professor and several librarians. After five offerings, this course has earned permanent listing. The resulting 2-credit hour elective “Research Methods” course has gotten high course evaluations. The course has enrolled not only the intended undergraduate students, but also has attracted graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty as well. 

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