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1. Collaborative Research: Supporting Agency among Early Career Engineering Education Faculty in Diverse Institutional Contexts." American Society for Engineering Education

   McCave, E.; Faber, C.; Bodnar, C.; Lee, W.; Smith-Orr, C.; and Coso Strong, A. (January 2018, ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   Given the infancy of engineering education as an established field and the recent increase in early career faculty aligning themselves with the discipline, it is imperative that the community better understand the experiences of these new faculty members. As a result, we will be able to enhance national efforts to train and develop faculty prepared to drive change in engineering education. Accordingly, this two-phased study investigates how institutional context influences the agency of our research team and other early career engineering education faculty as it relates to facilitating change in engineering education. Faculty play a central role in making change, thus there is a need to further understand the factors that influence their ability to do so. This work leverages collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography to explore the lived experiences of our research team, which consists of six engineering education faculty who have different roles and responsibilities and are positioned in varied settings at diverse institutions. We represent a variety of perspectives with regard to our goals, visions, and training in engineering education. This project officially started in May 2017; however, we began collecting data in August 2015. Our poster will present a summary of our current progress, which includes the use of the Q3 Research Quality workshop to guide data collection and analysis. In addition to the methodological impact of our study, the results will provide the engineering education community with evidence-based insights on conditions that facilitate change efforts by early career engineering education faculty. By sharing our findings with current and developing engineering education graduate programs, we will enable them to make programmatic changes to benefit future faculty. These findings also will provide a mechanism for divisions of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) to develop programming and resources to support the sustained success of their members. 

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2. PhD Student Funding Patterns: Placing Biomedical, Biological, and Biosystems Engineering in the Context of Engineering Sub-disciplines, Biological Sciences, and Other STEM Disciplines

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s43683-024-00142-w  

   Knight, David_B; Grote, Dustin_M; Kinoshita, Timothy_J; Borrego, Maura (March 2024, Biomedical Engineering Education)

   Abstract Whether doctoral students are funded primarily by fellowships, research assistantships, or teaching assistantships impacts their degree completion, time to degree, learning outcomes, and short- and long-term career outcomes. Variations in funding patterns have been studied at the broad field level but not comparing engineering sub-disciplines. We addressed two research questions: How do PhD student funding mechanisms vary across engineering sub-disciplines? And how does variation in funding mechanisms across engineering sub-disciplines map onto the larger STEM disciplinary landscape? We analyzed 103,373 engineering and computing responses to the U.S. Survey of Earned Doctorates collected between 2007 and 2016. We conducted analysis of variance with Bonferroni post hoc comparisons to examine variation in funding across sub-disciplines. Then, we conducted a k-means cluster analysis on percentage variables for fellowship, research, and teaching assistantship funding mechanism with STEM sub-discipline as the unit of analysis. A statistically significantly greater percentage of biomedical/biological engineering doctoral students were funded via a fellowship, compared to every other engineering sub-discipline. Consequently, biomedical/biological engineering had significantly lower proportions of students supported via research and teaching assistantships than nearly all other engineering sub-disciplines. We identified five clusters. The majority of engineering sub-disciplines grouped together into a cluster with high research assistantships and low teaching assistantships. Biomedical/biological engineering clustered in the high fellowships grouping with most other biological sciences but no other engineering sub-disciplines. Biomedical/biological engineering behaves much more like biological and life sciences in utilizing fellowships to fund graduate students, far more than other engineering sub-disciplines. Our study provides further evidence of the prevalence of fellowships in life sciences and how it stretches into biomedical/biological engineering. The majority of engineering sub-disciplines relied more on research assistantships to fund graduate study. The lack of uniformity provides an opportunity to diversify student experiences during their graduate programs but also necessitates an awareness to the advantages and disadvantages that different funding portfolios can bestow on students. 

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3. A Professional Development Program for Emerging STEM Education Researchers

   El-Adawy, S.; Hass, C.; Vasserman, E. Y.; Kustusch, M. B.; Franklin, S.; Sayre, E. C. (July 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   In this evidence-based practice paper, we discuss design rationale, implementation and evidence from a professional development program for emerging education researchers (PEER). Many STEM faculty, trained only in disciplinary research, transition into research on the teaching and learning side of their discipline, with transitions occurring after typical formal training opportunities (e.g. grad school, postdocs) are over. There are limited opportunities for professional development when starting education research, and options are highly dependent on home institution type, department priorities, and faculty career stage. The PEER program helps faculty at any institution jumpstart their transition into discipline-based education research. Our goal is to help foster the next generation of STEM education researchers. PEER participants develop quality research projects, engage in targeted experiential work to develop their projects and skills, and collaborate and form a long-term support community of peers, mentors and collaborators. Over the last 8 years, more than 1000 participants have engaged in PEER field schools worldwide. In this paper, we lay out the guiding principles of PEER: collaboration, responsiveness, communication, and playfulness. We situate the program within existing models for faculty professional development and describe the available modalities of PEER field schools: extended introductory in-person field schools (3-5 days), online or in-person gateway workshops (1.5 hours), and the new advanced in-person field schools (5 days). Each of these modalities is built off collaborative work among participants, blending development of foundational skills in education research with individual progress in their own specific education research projects. Drawing on evidence from interviews and surveys with STEM participants, we demonstrate the impact of different module activities on their professional skills, identity, and self-efficacy. We discuss the affordances and constraints of different formats and implications for faculty professional development. We prefer to present this work through a roundtable discussion, but we are also open to a lightning talk or a poster. 

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4. Defining academic engineering education roles within the United States

   Bodnar, C.A.; McCave, E.J.; Smith-Orr, C.; Coso Strong, A.; Faber, C.; and Lee, W. (January 2021, Proceedings of the Research in Engineering Education Symposium & Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference)

   CONTEXT Engineering education is an interdisciplinary research field where scholars are commonly embedded within the context they study. Engineering Education Scholars (EES), individuals who define themselves by having expertise associated with both engineering education research and practice, inhabit an array of academic positions, depending on their priorities, interests, and desired impact. These positions include, but are not limited to, traditional tenure-track faculty positions, professional teaching or research positions, and positions within teaching and learning centers or other centers. EES also work in diverse institutional contexts, including engineering disciplinary departments, first-year programs, and engineering education departments, which further vary their roles. PURPOSE OR GOAL The purpose of this preliminary research study is to better understand the roles and responsibilities of early-career EES. This knowledge will enable PhD programs to better prepare engineering education graduates to more intentionally seek positions, which is especially important given the growing number of engineering education PhD programs. We address our purpose by exploring the following research question: How can we describe the diversity of academic or faculty roles early-career EES undertake? APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS We implemented an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study starting with a survey (n=59) to better understand the strategic actions of United States-based early-career EES. We used a clustering technique to identify clusters of participants based on these actions (e.g., teaching focused priorities, research goals). We subsequently recruited 14 survey participants, representing each of the main clusters, to participate in semi-structured interviews. Through the interviews, we sought to gain a more nuanced understanding of each participant’s actions in the contexts of their roles and responsibilities. We analyzed each interview transcript to develop memos providing an overview of each early-career EES role description and then used a cross case analysis where the unit of analysis was a cluster. ACTUAL OUTCOMES Five main clusters were identified through our analysis, with three representing primarily research-focused day-to-day responsibilities and two representing primarily teaching-focused day-to-day responsibilities. The difference between the clusters was influenced by the institutional context and the areas in which EES selected to focus their roles and responsibilities. These results add to our understanding of how early-career EES enact their roles within different institutional contexts and positions. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This work can be used by graduate programs around the world to better prepare their engineering education graduates for obtaining positions that align with their goals and interests. Further, we expect this work to provide insight to institutions so that they can provide the support and resources to enable EES to reach their desired impact within their positions. 

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5. Defining academic engineering education roles within the United States

   Bodnar, C.A.; McCave, E.J.; Smith-Orr, C.; Coso Strong, A.; Faber, C.; and Lee, W (January 2021, Research in Engineering Education Symposium & Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference)

   CONTEXT Engineering education is an interdisciplinary research field where scholars are commonly embedded within the context they study. Engineering Education Scholars (EES), individuals who define themselves by having expertise associated with both engineering education research and practice, inhabit an array of academic positions, depending on their priorities, interests, and desired impact. These positions include, but are not limited to, traditional tenure-track faculty positions, professional teaching or research positions, and positions within teaching and learning centers or other centers. EES also work in diverse institutional contexts, including engineering disciplinary departments, first-year programs, and engineering education departments, which further vary their roles. PURPOSE OR GOAL The purpose of this preliminary research study is to better understand the roles and responsibilities of early-career EES. This knowledge will enable PhD programs to better prepare engineering education graduates to more intentionally seek positions, which is especially important given the growing number of engineering education PhD programs. We address our purpose by exploring the following research question: How can we describe the diversity of academic or faculty roles early-career EES undertake? APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS We implemented an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study starting with a survey (n=59) to better understand the strategic actions of United States-based early-career EES. We used a clustering technique to identify clusters of participants based on these actions (e.g., teaching focused priorities, research goals). We subsequently recruited 14 survey participants, representing each of the main clusters, to participate in semi-structured interviews. Through the interviews, we sought to gain a more nuanced understanding of each participant’s actions in the contexts of their roles and responsibilities. We analyzed each interview transcript to develop memos providing an overview of each early-career EES role description and then used a cross case analysis where the unit of analysis was a cluster. ACTUAL OUTCOMES Five main clusters were identified through our analysis, with three representing primarily research-focused day-to-day responsibilities and two representing primarily teaching-focused day-to-day responsibilities. The difference between the clusters was influenced by the institutional context and the areas in which EES selected to focus their roles and responsibilities. These results add to our understanding of how early-career EES enact their roles within different institutional contexts and positions. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This work can be used by graduate programs around the world to better prepare their engineering education graduates for obtaining positions that align with their goals and interests. Further, we expect this work to provide insight to institutions so that they can provide the support and resources to enable EES to reach their desired impact within their positions. 

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