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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. 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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3. Teaching Engineering Students to Self-Transform: Parallelisms between Product Innovation and Student Career Path Planning

   Vargas_Hernandez, Noe; Fuentes, Arturo; Ortega, Javier; Lozano, Karen; Marquez, Eleazar (February 2023, 2023 UTRGV STEMED Conference)

   Focus/Problem Statement 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? Theoretical or Conceptual Framework 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. Methodology/Design of the Study or Organization The pilot for the Spring 2023 semester will have Intro to Mechanical Engineering (MECE 1101) students work in teams in a semester-long product innovation project to redesign a simple kitchen appliance. Students will learn theory and methodology of the design process (e.g., creative exploration of solutions, decision making, multi objective evaluation, etc.). These same students will concurrently take UNIV 1301 (Learning Frameworks) where they will have a semester-long project to define their career pathways. Both projects, product innovation and career pathways, will follow the Challenge Based Instruction (CBI) approach. Periodically, a connection will be established between the projects to show the students how to use the lessons from product innovation by analogy and reflection in their career pathways project. The authors believe that the MECE 1101 project initiates a process for students to become innovators and entrepreneurs, while the UNIV 1301 project prepares students as self-innovators for future academic, personal, and professional challenges. Findings/Conclusions In this session, the authors will share their experiences and plan of implementation as well as details from recent NSF IUSE HSI funding for this purpose. The authors expect audience engagement to receive suggestions and ideas to improve freshman student success. 

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4. Board 357: Psychosocial and Skills-Based Outcomes of Participating in Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP)

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--46940  

   Stewart, Craig; Preza, Chrysanthe; Ivey, Stephanie (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   Challenge or problem-based learning help students develop deeper content understanding and enhanced STEM skillsets and provide opportunities for learning across multiple contexts. Educational interventions that include active learning, mentoring, and role modeling are particularly important in recruiting and retaining female and minority students in STEM. With this framework in mind, we implemented the Vertically-Integrated Projects (VIP) model at a public urban research university in the 2022-2023 academic year with the goal of helping participating students increase engineering and STEM identity and other psychosocial outcomes. This paper reports the results from the first year of our VIP program. At the beginning and end of the academic year, participants completed measures of engineering identity; engineering self-efficacy; engineering mindset; intention to remain in the engineering major; intention to have a career in engineering; and STEM professional identity. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks (N=10) tests showed no statistically significant differences on any of these measures. Participants also responded to 20 items assessing their perceptions of their level of knowledge and skills in a variety of areas relevant to their experience in the VIP program. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks tests (N=10) revealed some statistically significant differences between pre- and post-test. Specifically, students tended to see themselves as having greater knowledge or skills in planning a long-term project, communicating technical concepts and designs to others, designing systems, components, or processes to meet practical or applied needs, understanding computer hardware and systems, working on a multidisciplinary team, and making ethical decisions in engineering/research. Finally, at the end of the Spring semester, participants rated the extent to which they perceived the VIP program helped them to develop their skills on the same 20 items. Most participants believed the VIP program helped them to develop each skill either somewhat or a great deal. Overall, while participation in the VIP program did not influence student engineering identity, self-efficacy, mindset, or major/career intentions, it was associated with increased self-perceived abilities on six specific skills. Additionally, most participants agreed that the VIP program helped them develop 20 skills at least “somewhat.” 

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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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