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This empirical research full paper describes a project aimed at increasing graduation rates among low-income, academically talented engineering students by implementing first-year student initiatives. The project, supported by an NSF-SSTEM (National Science Foundation Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) grant at a Northeastern US institution, is in its second year of a four-year plan. Grounded in Tinto’s conceptual model of student motivation and persistence, the project emphasizes early interventions, which are critical for low-income students facing external challenges that may impact their decision to stay in college or enter the workforce. We developed and integrated the SSTEM project aiming to increase four key elements, which based on Tinto will also increase persistence. The SSTEM project includes scholarships, an Engineering Learning Community (ELC) that promotes cohort-based learning and living, mentorship, and participation in personal and professional development seminars. Additionally, inclusive practices have been integrated into first-year engineering lab courses to improve curriculum accessibility. This paper evaluates the validity of an instrument designed to assess the project's impact on students’ college experiences and persistence. It builds on prior exploratory factor analysis (EFA) research by presenting confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) findings to further validate the instrument. 

Engineering graduates have significant opportunities for meaningful careers and social mobility, yet there needs to be more support for financially disadvantaged, academically gifted students. To improve these circumstances, we have introduced the Engineering Persistence project, an NSF-funded S-STEM scholarship program, at Rowan University. This project provides a group of students, selected by financial need and academic talent, with scholarships up to 10,000 USD per year, depending on financial need. In addition to these scholarships, we integrated a support system that includes interventions to support first-year engineering students’ social and professional growth in their degree plans. We include in this paper the data collection and analysis process for the first year of this project, including the administration of the pre-survey, and the exploratory factor analysis conducted on the resulting data. This work in progress research paper aims to validate an instrument to assess the impact of an integrated support system on students’ persistence in Rowan’s engineering students. 

There is substantial opportunity for engineering graduates to enter the workforce to engage in a fulfilling career and achieve social mobility, but there is a lack of adequate support for low income, academically talented students. The purpose of this poster is to describe the interventions designed to support S-STEM scholarship students at [blinded for review] University in the first year of our S-STEM project. Our S-STEM project objectives are threefold: 1) Provide scholarships to encourage talented students with low incomes and demonstrated financial need to initiate and graduate from engineering majors in the College of Engineering at [blinded] University and subsequently enter the engineering workforce or a graduate program; 2) Develop a support system that integrates multiple elements and services to foster a learning environment that motivates scholarship students to persist in their engineering studies; and 3) Foster an inclusive learning environment by engaging all engineering students in diversity, equity, and inclusion experiences and nurturing an equity mindset in student leaders through participation in training programs. To accomplish these goals, we identified 10 low-income, academically talented students to receive scholarships. We also identified 80 additional engineering students who wished to participate in the Engineering Living/Learning Community (ELC). The scholarships students and other interested students were placed in the ELC starting in Fall 2023, where they are experiencing first year engineering as a cohort. This cohort experience includes required seminars, required attendance of Engineering I and Calculus I in a designated section, and the option of living in a shared dorm to facilitate further collaboration. Seminars that are part of the ELC are focused on adjusting to college life (e.g., time management, course registration, resume design) and diversity, equity, and inclusion subjects, including upstander training and coping with imposter syndrome. Scholarship students are also being encouraged to engage in leadership training offered through the University. This leadership training also focuses on DEI topics, and encourages students to be informed advocates. Finally, this project is assessed by an external evaluator to determine the project’s impact on students’ motivation, sense of belonging, and their equity mindset. Evaluation data involve pre- and post-surveys of all first-year engineering students, and focus groups of project leaders, ELC mentors, scholarship students, and other engineering students. 

The existing curriculum and models for civil engineering graduate programs assume that graduating Ph.D. students will primarily pursue career opportunities in research or academia. However, the number of civil engineering Ph.D. graduate students continues to increase, while the number of opportunities in academia for civil engineers remains stagnant. As a result, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the civil engineering graduate programs must be reevaluated to assist students entering industry after graduation. As part of a larger research study funded through the NSF Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE), we aim to answer the following research questions: 1) How can a research-to-practice model assist students in preparing for a transportation engineering career outside of academia?, 2) What impacts does the research-to-practice graduate model have on the development of transportation engineering doctoral students’ professional identity?, 3) How does the cognitive apprenticeship framework prepare doctoral students for professional practice in transportation engineering?, and 4) What influences does the research-to-practice model have on doctoral students’ motivation toward degree completion? As part of the first phase for the project, two surveys were developed: a graduate engineering student motivation survey based on Expectancy-Value-Theory, and an instrument based on the Cognitive Apprenticeship framework. The motivation survey was based on an instrument designed and validated by Brown & Matusovich (2013) which aimed to measure undergraduate engineering students' motivation towards obtaining an engineering degree. The survey prompts were reviewed and rewritten to reflect the change in context from undergraduate to graduate school. Revised survey prompts were reviewed with a group of graduate engineering students through a think aloud protocol and changes to the instrument were made to ensure consistency in interpretation of the prompts (Rodriguez-Mejia and Bodnar, 2023). The cognitive apprenticeship instrument was derived from the Maastricht Clinical Teaching Questionnaire (MCTQ), originally designed to offer clinical educators feedback on their teaching abilities, as provided by medical students during their clerkship rotations (Stalmeijer et al., 2010). To tailor it to the context of engineering graduate students, the MCTQ's 24 items were carefully examined and rephrased. A think aloud was conducted with three civil engineering graduate students to determine the effectiveness and clarity of the cognitive apprenticeship instrument. Preliminary results show that minimal clarification is needed for some items, and suggestions to include items which address support from their mentors. The other part of the project assessment involves students completing monthly reflections to obtain their opinions on specific events such as seminars or classes, and identify their perceptions of their identity as professionals, scientists, or researchers. Preliminary results suggest that the students involved place an emphasis on developing critical thinking and planning skills to become an engineering professional, but de-emphasize passion and enjoyment. This paper will report on initial findings obtained through this first phase of the IGE project. 

This work investigates how innovations propagate through two professional networks (guilds): the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) and the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE). Previous research has demonstrated that the adoption of pedagogical innovations is supported by the socialization of the innovation among potential adopters. In this work, we use social network analysis to explore the impact of professional connections on innovation adoption. Our research questions are: (1) How does overall social structure differ between guilds? (2) How do measures of social network structures relate to innovation adoption? A survey was distributed to members of KEEN and CPREE to capture the interactions respondents had while adopting the guild’s innovation. Social networks were generated for each guild and each respondent. These networks were analyzed to identify relationships between social network measures and the frequency of use of the innovation. Responses to open-ended questions were analyzed using thematic coding. The guilds’ overall structures impacted the formation and structure of distinct clusters/cliques, but these differing structures did not appear to affect sustained adoption. Individuals’ ego networks demonstrated a weak negative correlation between the frequency of adoption and the individual’s ego network density. Our results imply that having a diverse network exposes instructors to more ideas or allows them to see one idea from many perspectives. 

Background: The National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations have spent millions of dollars each year supporting well-designed educational innovations that positively impact the undergraduate engineering students who encounter them. However, many of these pedagogical innovations never experience widespread adoption. To further the ability of innovation developers to advance engineering education practice and achieve sustained adoption of their innovations, this paper explores how one community-based model, engineering education guilds, fosters propagation across institutions and individuals. Engineering education guilds seek to work at the forefront of educational innovation by creating networks of instructor change-agents who design and implement a particular innovation in their own context. The guilds of interest are the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN). With these guilds as exemplars, this study’s purpose is (1) to articulate how the approaches of engineering education guilds align with existing literature on supporting sustained adoption of educational innovations and (2) to identify how these approaches can advance the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education community’s discussion of propagation practices through the use of the Designing for Sustained Adoption Assessment Instrument (DSAAI). The DSAAI is a conceptual framework based on research in sustained adoption of pedagogical innovations. It has previously been used in the form of a rubric to analyze dissemination and propagation plans of NSF educational grant recipients and was shown to predict the effectiveness of those propagation plans. Results: Through semi-structured interviews with two leaders from each guild, we observed strong alignment between the structures of CRPEE and KEEN and evidence-based sustained adoption characteristics. For example, both guilds identified their intended audience early in their formation, developed and implemented extensive plans for engaging and supporting potential adopters, and accounted for the complexity of the higher education landscape and their innovations in their propagation plans. Conclusions: Our results suggest that guilds could provide another approach to innovation, as their structures can be aligned with evidence-based methods for propagating pedagogical innovations. Additionally, while the DSAAI captures many of the characteristics of a welld-esigned propagation strategy, there are additional components that emerged as successful strategies used by the CPREE and KEEN guild leaders. These strategies, including having mutual accountability among adopters and connecting adoption of innovations to faculty reward structures in the form of recognition and funding should be considered as educational innovators work to encourage adoption of their innovations. 

Engineering education guilds, such as the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), seek to work at the forefront of educational innovation by creating networks of instructor change agents who design and implement a particular innovation in their own context to further the professional formation of engineers (PFE). While many of the innovations facilitated by CPREE and KEEN have been published extensively, it is unclear how successful the propagation of reflection and entrepreneurial mindset has been in the engineering education community. The major aim of this project is to characterize these two engineering education guilds with respect to their dissemination/propagation plans and, in the future, quantify the propagation of the innovations championed by CPREE and KEEN. The research questions we seek to answer in this paper are: (1) What are the planned dissemination/propagation approaches of well-established engineering education guilds? and (2) To what extent do their characteristics align with the Designing for Sustained Adoption Assessment Instrument (DSAAI)? The DSAAI was developed in 2016 to provide education developers, grant writing consultants, and funding agencies with a tool for assessing the propagation plans of researchers developing educational change strategies. To answer these questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the leaders of CPREE and KEEN. The transcriptions of the interviews will be used to create within-case reports for each guild. The within-case reports will consist of a rich description of the pedagogical innovation as well as the history of the guild and its goals. Using the DSAAI, we will qualitatively code the techniques that each guild is using to facilitate widespread adoption as well as the extent to which they are following a dissemination or propagation paradigm. Lastly, thematic analysis will be used to capture emerging themes that arise from the interviews.