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1. Work in Progress: Teaching Engineering Students to Self-Transform: Parallelisms between Product Innovation and Student Career Path Planning

   Vargas_Hernandez, Noe; Ortega, Javier; Lozano, Karen; Fuentes, Arturo; Marquez, Eleazar (June 2024, ASEE Conference)

   Freshman engineering students can have a hard time transitioning to college. The freshman year is critical to the students’ academic success; in this year they learn basic skills and establish essential networks with other students, faculty, and resources. How can we help these freshman engineering students in this transition? We propose that freshman students can learn from the engineering design innovation process and apply it by analogy to the design of their academic pathways. There are multiple similarities between product innovation (i.e., technology) and the continuous academic challenges faced by the student. Engineers as designers and innovators have a vast and rich repository of techniques, tools, and approaches to develop new technologies, and a parallelism can be drawn between the design and innovation of a technology (e.g., redesign of a kitchen appliance), and the “design” of the students’ academic career pathways. During the Spring 2023 semester pilot, students in Intro to Mechanical Engineering (Course A) worked in teams in a 6-week product innovation project to redesign a simple kitchen appliance. Students learned basic concepts of the design process (e.g., creative exploration of solutions, decision making, multi objective evaluation, etc.). These same students concurrently took Course B (Learning Frameworks) where they worked on a 6-week project to define their career pathways. Both projects, product innovation and career pathways, followed the Challenge Based Instruction (CBI) approach. Periodically, participant students were shown how to use the lessons from product innovation by analogy and reflection in their career pathways project. The objective is for students to learn about the engineering design process and to apply it to their academic challenges by analogy. This prepares students with meta skills to help solve future problems in their academic path, and at each iteration, the students transform themselves, hence the use of the term self-transformation (also referred as “self-innovation”). Data collected from pre and post surveys will be presented to measure self-efficacy in engineering design, grit, motivation to learn, and STEM identity. Participant interviews provide a qualitative insight into the intervention. This project is funded by NSF award 2225247. 

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2. HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: THE FRESHMAN YEAR INNOVATOR EXPERIENCE (FYIE): BRIDGING THE URM GAP in STEM

   Vargas_Hernandez, Noe; Ortega, Javier; Lozano, Karen; Marquez, Eleazar; Fuentes, Arturo (June 2024, 2024 ASEE Conference)

   The Freshman Year Innovator Experience (FYIE) program at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, a Minority Serving Institution (MSI), aims to enhance the freshman experience for incoming students by developing key academic success skills. The program is developing self-transformation skills in freshman mechanical engineering students to help them overcome academic and professional challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. FYIE participants are taking two courses simultaneously: Introduction to Engineering (Course A) and Learning Frameworks (Course B). In Course A, students will complete a 6-week engineering design project, and in Course B, they are completing a 6-week academic career path project. During these parallel projects, timed interventions demonstrate the analogies between the engineering design process and the academic career pathways project. The objective is for students to realize that they can apply the design thinking skills they learn in the engineering design process to solve their academic career challenges. A pilot of the FYIE program began in the 2023 Spring semester, with instructors from Course A and B introducing the parallel projects. The pilot continues in the 2023 Fall semester, with refinements to the parallel projects and the definition of analogy intervention points for self-transformation. The authors of the paper will present the results from the pilot implementations, as well as discuss the challenges and future work. This proposed initiative is designed with the intention of adhering to the ongoing mission of the College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS) at the UTRGV to 1) increase the number of STEM degrees awarded to Hispanics, 2) broadening participation of females in STEM related fields, and 3) increase the persistence and self-efficacy in STEM fields amid COVID-19. This project is funded by NSF award 2225247. 

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3. The Freshman Year Innovator Experience (FYIE): Bridging the URM Gap in STEM

   Vargas_Hernandez, Noe; Ortega, Javier; Lozano, Karen; Marquez, Eleazar; Fuentes, Arturo (June 2023, ASEE Conference)

   The project focuses on increasing “effective STEM education and broadening participation” in underrepresented minority (URM) STEM students at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) to successfully face academic and professional challenges, recently exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Freshman Year Innovator Experience proposes the development of self-transformation skills in freshman mechanical engineering students to successfully face academic and professional challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic while working on two parallel projects of technical design innovation and academic career pathways. The authors will present the work in progress and preliminary results from a pilot implementation of the Freshman Year Innovator Experience. This project is funded by NSF award 2225247. 

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4. NSF S-STEM Project Update: A Pathway to Completion for Pursuing Engineering and Engineering Technology Degrees

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35004  

   Bullington, Kim; Tomovic, Cynthia; Jovanovic, Vukica; Dean, Anthony; Landaeta, Rafael (January 2021, ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line)

   null (Ed.)

   This poster showcases the progress of students who are receiving scholarships from the National Science Foundation S-STEM project: A Pathway to Completion for Pursuing Engineering and Engineering Technology Degrees. Thus far, 20 academically high-achieving students who demonstrate financial need have participated in the project. Thirty-six scholarships have been awarded to date, in which a maximum of twelve scholarships are awarded per semester; some students have received scholarships multiple times. Students are from electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, civil engineering technology, and modeling and simulation majors. As part of this S-STEM project, students also receive academic support, mentorship related to the development of professional workforce skills, career search skills, and opportunities to participate in industry-related field trips. Role models, many of whom are practicing engineers with STEM degrees and are military veterans, serve as presenters and share their personal career pathways and answer students’ questions in the required one-hour weekly seminar. Although the students participating in this project meet the strenuous academic criteria set by the project (3.0/4.0), many of the students struggle financially, due to having expended their G.I. benefits, which can impede their academic performance and graduation. While many student success programs focus on freshman and sophomore students, what makes this project unique is its focus on enabling student success at the junior and senior years. This project provides a portfolio of different activities for the more mature student, e.g. financial aid through scholarships, community-based learning opportunities, and academic success strategies that enable stronger retention and student completion rates. Project activities are tailored to veterans and adult learners as this group of students is particularly vulnerable given their need to simultaneously juggle academic, family, and financial obligations. 

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5. Board 330: Iron Range Engineering Academic Scholarships for Co-Op Based Engineering Education

   Spence, Catherine M. Siverling (June 2023, Review directory American Society for Engineering Education)

   This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Over its six year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 120 unique full-time students who are pursuing Bachelor of Science degrees in engineering. First semester junior, primarily transfer, students at Iron Range Engineering will receive scholarships for one semester. The Iron Range Engineering (IRE) STEM Scholars Program provides a financially sustainable pathway for students across the nation to graduate with an engineering degree and up to two years of industry experience. Students typically complete their first two years of engineering coursework at community colleges across the country. Students then join IRE and spend one transitional semester gaining training and experience to equip them with the technical, design, and professional skills needed to succeed in the engineering workforce. During the last two years of their education, IRE students work in industry, earning an engineering intern salary, while being supported in their technical and professional development by professors, learning facilitators, and their own peers. The IRE STEM Scholars project will provide access to a financially responsible engineering degree for low-income students by financially supporting them during the transitional semester, which has two financial challenges: university tuition costs are higher than their previous community college costs, and the semester occurs before they are able to earn an engineering co-op income. In addition, the project will provide personalized mentorship throughout students’ pathway to graduation, such as weekly conversations with a mentor. By providing these supports, the IRE STEM Scholars project aims to prepare students to be competitive applicants for the engineering workforce with career development and engineering co-op experience. Because community colleges draw relatively representative proportions of students from a variety of backgrounds, this project has the potential to learn how transfer pathways and co-op education can support financially sustainable pathways to engineering degrees for a more diverse group of students and contribute to the development of a diverse, competitive engineering workforce. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. As part of the scope of this project, a concurrent mixed-methods research study will be done on engineering students’ thriving, specifically their identity, belonging, motivation, and overall wellbeing (or mental and physical health). Student outcomes have previously been measured primarily through academic markers such as graduation rates and GPA. In addition to these outcomes, this project explores ways to better support overall student thriving. This study will address the following research questions: How do undergraduate students’ engineering identity and belongingness develop over time in a co-op-based engineering program? How do undergraduate students’ motivation and identity connect to overall wellbeing in a co-op-based engineering program? In the first year of the IRE STEM Scholars Project, initial interview data describe scholars’ sense of belonging in engineering, prior to their first co-op experiences and survey data describe IRE students’ experiences in co-op and overall sense of belonging. Future work will utilize these values to identify ways to better support the IRE STEM scholars’ identity development as they move into their first co-op experiences. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students. 

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