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As part of National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE), we have been focusing on inclusive teaching strategies for engineering professors. Now, in the presence of a pandemic and protests for racial justice in America, underrepresented students are facing unprecedented challenges as they navigate new situations of remote learning. This paper describes inclusive teaching strategies in the current context of isolating situations. Where possible, we point to examples of some specific virtual tools that instructors can use in their remote learning courses. 

In light of both social and ABET expectations, engineering educators need to consider how to effectively infuse engineering ethics education into current engineering curricula. This article describes our initial efforts in that realm. We considered how to improve ethics education in engineering through establishing an academic-industry partnership, which facilitated conversation between engineering faculty members and practicing engineers in industry. We formed a College-level Ethics Advisory Council with representation from industry partners across all 13 engineering departments in Purdue’s College of Engineering. As the first official activity, we held an Ethics Advisory Council Workshop to define common goals and share mutual expectations for long-term relationships. This article shares some basic information about the academic-industry partnership and outputs from the Ethics Advisory Council Workshop. We also discuss lessons we learned from the initial work on the partnership, including limitations and other considerations important for potential adopters of such a strategy at their institution. This article can provide insights to engineering educators who are interested in adopting the academic-industry partnership approach to facilitate direct conversations between academia and industry, especially for better engineering ethics education. 

In this work-in-progress paper, we present a study design for exploring strategies to involve engineering faculty in inclusive teaching practices, which are practices that integrate informal mentoring strategies into everyday communication with students in efforts to improve their interest, capacity, and belongingness in engineering. As part of a larger NSF-funded study on the interactions of engineering professional formation with diversity and inclusion, we will use semi-structured interviews to investigate an electrical and computer engineering (ECE) faculty’s intention to implement inclusive teaching practices, using Fishbein and Ajzen’s reasoned action model to define intention. The interviews will be focused around an inclusive teaching “tip sheet” that was recently distributed to the ECE faculty. These interviews will allow us to characterize factors that influence the development of such an intention within the context of an engineering department, in order to make recommendations for administration. 

Three broad and enduring issues have been identified in the professional formation of engineers: 1) the gap between what students learn in universities and what they practice upon graduation; 2) the limiting perception that engineering is solely technical, math, and theory-oriented; and 3) the lack of diversity (e.g., representation of a wide range of people, thought, and approaches toward engineering) and lack of inclusion (e.g., belonging and incorporating different perspectives, values, and ways of thinking and being in engineering) in many engineering programs. Although these are not new challenges in professional formation, these issues are highly complex, interconnected, and not amenable to simple solution. That is, they are “wicked” problems, which can be best understood and mitigated through design thinking, a human-centered approach based on empathy, ideation, and experimentation, as it is a useful perspective for addressing complex and ambiguous issues. Thus, this NSF-funded RFE study utilizes a design thinking approach and research activities to explore foundational understandings of formation and diversity and inclusion in engineering while concurrently addressing three project objectives: 1) To better prepare engineers for today’s workforce; 2) To broaden understandings of engineering practice as both social and technical; and 3) To create and sustain more diverse and inclusionary engineering programs. In this paper, we provide an overview of the multi-year project and discuss emerging findings and key outcomes from across all phases of the project. Specifically, we will showcase how the research has identified the concurrent ways that understandings of diversity and inclusion are impacted significantly by the local contexts (and cultures) of each department while being compounded by the larger College/University/discipline-wide understandings of who is an engineer and what skills legitimize the identity of “an engineer.” 

This WIP paper describes a team approach to phenomenography on ethical engineering practice in the health products industry and its potential impact on research quality. Although qualitative researchers often conduct phenomenography collaboratively, most often a single individual leads the data collection and analysis; others primarily serve as critical reviewers. However, quality may be enhanced by involving collaborators as data analysts in “sustained cycles of scrutiny, debate and testing against the data” [1, p. 88], thus interweaving unique perspectives and insights throughout the analysis process. Nonetheless, collaborating in this intensive data analysis process also presents unique challenges. In this paper, we (1) describe the processes we are applying in an integrated team-based phenomenographic study, (2) identify how the team approach affects research quality, and (3) reflect on the challenges inherent to this process. We ground this reflective case study in the methodological literature on phenomenography. Our team strategies include multiple interviewers (and, when possible, two interviewers per inter-view), team communication through reflective memos, and integration of individual and team-based data analysis with peer critique of individual analyses. We compare our team approach with typical individual phenomenographic approaches, and we align our procedures with the five strategies of the Qualifying Qualitative Research Quality Framework, or Q3, designed by Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam [2]. In aligning strategies, we consider benefits and trade-offs. 

This Research Work-in-Progress paper builds on previous literature related to the professional formation of engineers and issues pertaining to diversity and inclusion within engineering though a comparative analysis of two different disciplines. These issues are complex, interrelated and challenging to untangle, and thus require innovative strategies to explore them. Our larger study utilizes design thinking with an embedded mixed-methods research approach to investigate foundational understandings of professional formation and diversity and inclusion in engineering. Herein, we describe preliminary findings from co-design sessions we conducted in Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Purdue University. We compare the design solutions generated by stakeholders and discuss insights regarding the unique contexts and needs of each program, as well as the impacts of the different activities and contexts of the design sessions themselves. 

This Work-in-Progress Research paper describes (1) the contemporary research space on ethics education in engineering; (2) our long-term research plan; (3) the theoretical underpinnings of Phase 1 of our research plan (phenomenography); and (4) the design and developmental process of a phenomenographic interview protocol to explore engineers’ experiences with ethics. Ethical behavior is a complex phenomenon that is complicated by the institutional and cultural contexts in which it occurs. Engineers also have varied roles and often work in a myriad of capacities that influence their experiences with and understanding of ethics in practice. We are using phenomenography, a qualitative research approach, to explore and categorize the ways engineers experience and understand ethical engineering practice. Specifically, phenomenography will allow us to systematically investigate the range and complexity of ways that engineers experience ethics in professional practice in the health products industry. Phenomenographic data will be obtained through a specialized type of semi-structured interview. Here we introduce the design of our interview protocol and its four sections: Background, Experience, Conceptual, and Summative. We also describe our iterative process for framing questions throughout each section. 

Three broad issues have been identified in the professional formation of engineers: 1) the gap between what students learn in universities and what they practice upon graduation; 2) the limiting perception that engineering is solely technical, math, and theory oriented; and 3) the lack of diversity (representation of a wide range of people) and lack of inclusion (incorporation of different perspectives, values, and ways of thinking and being in engineering) in many engineering programs. These are not new challenges in engineering education, rather they are persistent and difficult to change. There have been countless calls to recruit and retain women and underrepresented minority group members into engineering careers and numerous strategies proposed to improve diversity, inclusion, and retention, as well as to calls to examine socio-technical integration in engineering cultures and education for professional formation. Despite the changes in some disciplinary profiles in engineering and the curricular reforms within engineering education, there still has not been the deep transformation needed to integrate inclusionary processes and thinking into professional formation. In part, the reason is that diversity and inclusion are still framed as simply “numbers problems” to be solved. What is needed instead is an approach that understands and explores diversity and inclusion as interrelated with the epistemological (what do engineers need to know) and ontological (what does it mean to be an engineer) underpinnings of engineering. These issues are highly complex, interconnected, and not amenable to simple solutions, that is, they are “wicked” problems. They require design thinking. Thus our NSF-funded Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE) study utilizes a design thinking approach and research activities to explore foundational understandings of formation and diversity and inclusion in engineering while addressing the three project objectives: 1) Better prepare engineers for today’s workforce; 2) Broaden understandings of engineering practice as both social and technical; and 3) Create and sustain more diverse and inclusionary engineering programs. The project is organized around the three phases of the design process (inspiration, ideation, and implementation), and embedded within the design process is a longitudinal, multiphase, mixed-methods study. Although the goal is to eventually study these objectives on a broader scale, we begin with a smaller context: the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Purdue University. These schools share similarities with some common coursework and faculty, but also provide contrasts as BME’s undergraduate population, on average for recent semesters, has been 44-46% female, where ECE has been 13-14% female. Although BME has slightly more underrepresented minority students (7-8% versus 5%), approximately 60% of BME students are white, versus 40% for ECE. It is important to note that Purdue’s School of ECE offers B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer Engineering (CmpE), which reflect unique disciplinary cultures. Additionally, the schools differ significantly on undergraduate enrollment. The BME enrollment was 278, whereas ECE’s enrollment was 675 in EE and 541 in CmpE1. In this paper we describe the background literature and the research design, including the study contexts, target subject populations, and procedures for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. In addition, we present the data collected during the first phase of the research project. In our poster, we will present preliminary analysis of the first phase data. 

Educating engineers to reason through the ethical decisions they encounter when developing or implementing new technologies is a critical challenge. However, engineering educators have not widely adopted a framework for preparing engineering students to analyze ethical issues.

We developed and tested an approach for enhancing the ethical reasoning of engineering students. This approach integrates reflexive principlism, an ethical reasoning approach, within a structured learning framework, scaffolded, interactive, and reflective analysis, or SIRA. We hypothesized that students' ethical reasoning abilities and empathic perspective‐taking tendencies would increase.

We implemented and tested the integrated approach over five semesters with graduate‐level engineering students through a quasi‐experimental, controlled research design. We measured changes in ethical reasoning using the Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) and the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT2) and empathic tendencies using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). We examined relationships among measures through correlation analysis.

The EERI instrumentation indicated that the approach significantly increased the ethical reasoning abilities of graduate‐level engineering students. However, the DIT2 findings did not indicate change. The IRI indicated perspective‐taking tendencies were enhanced and personal distress tendencies were reduced. Postcourse correlational data indicated moderate relationships between perspective‐taking and ethical reasoning as measured by the IRI and the EERI indexes.

This study provides a theoretical approach for developing ethical reasoning and empathic perspective‐taking among graduate‐level engineering students. It also provides a theoretical framework, a pedagogical approach, and evaluation methods that others may utilize.