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  1. ; ; ; ( , Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education)
    This Work-in-Progress paper studies the mental models of engineering faculty regarding assessment, focusing on their use of metaphors. Assessments are crucial components in courses as they serve various purposes in the learning and teaching process, such as gauging student learning, evaluating instructors and course design, and documenting learning for accountability. Thus, when it comes to faculty development on teaching, assessments should consistently be considered while discussing pedagogical improvements. To contribute to faculty development research, our study illuminates several metaphors engineering faculty use to discuss assessment concepts and knowledge. This paper helps to answer the research question: which metaphors do faculty use when talking about assessment in their classrooms? Through interviews grounded in mental model theory, six metaphors emerged: (1) cooking, (2) playing golf, (3) driving a car, (4) coaching football, (5) blood tests, (6) and generically playing a sport or an instrument. Two important takeaways stemmed from the analysis. First, these metaphors were experiences commonly portrayed in the culture in which the study took place. This is important to note for someone working in faculty development as these metaphors may create communication challenges. Second, the mental model approach showed potential in eliciting ways engineering faculty describe and discuss assessments, offering opportunities for future research and practice in faculty development. The lightning talk will present further details on the findings. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2024
  2. ; ; ( , International Journal of STEM Education)
    Abstract

    Although advising relationships are key for doctoral student success, little research has addressed how they form. Understanding the formation of advising relationships can help contextualize their later development and ultimately support a student’s decision to persist in the doctorate. To understand relationship formation, the purpose of this qualitative study is to identify and describe the types of advisor–advisee selection processes that exist in engineering, science, and math doctoral programs and examine patterns across disciplines within those fields. We conducted interviews with doctoral program directors and engaged in document analysis of graduate student handbooks from 55 doctoral programs in the aforementioned fields in high research institutions across the United States. Using principal–agent theory as a theoretical lens, our findings showed that engineering programs tend to decentralize the advisor selection process by funding students across different funding sources upon enrollment. Contrariwise, science and math programs tended to fund all students in a cohort from a common funding source, which allowed students to have more time to gather information, meet, and select an advisor. These findings also show important nuances when comparing graduate education in these programs that directly impact the doctoral student experience and reiterates the necessity to study these fields separately.

     
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  3. ; ; ; ; ( , 2022 IEEE FIE)
    In this Research Full Paper we explore the factors that traditionally minoritized students consider when selecting a graduate school to pursue a doctoral degree in an engineering discipline. To this end, we used case study methods to analyze the experiences of ten traditionally minoritized students through interviews conducted immediately after they had selected their graduate programs, but before they had commenced their studies. Our findings show that in choosing an institution, the most salient ideals these students hold are related to the offer of funding towards their degree and an alignment with their initial research interests. However, they described having made compromises on ideals related to their personal experience and racial identity, the most prominent being finding a faculty mentor with a similar racial background, finding a racially diverse institution, or being located in a geographical location they perceived to be more amenable to their individual identities. These findings suggest that continuing to increase the recruitment of traditionally minoritized faculty in engineering schools would have a direct impact on minoritized student recruitment, by thus helping to create spaces where more of their racial identity ideals are met and fewer compromises are made. Equally important to the recruitment of traditionally minoritized students is the transparency of funding opportunities during the recruitment and application processes, and the publication of current research opportunities within the institution. 
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  4. ; ; ; ( , College Teaching)
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  5. ; ; ; ( , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)
    The Skillful Learning Institute is preparing a virtual short course experience for engineering educators to expand the explicit engagement of engineering students in their metacognitive development, which is currently lacking. Participants will develop a unique metacognitive activity for their context. The ultimate goal is to enhance the education of engineers through explicit metacognitive training, and we focus on instructors for their enduring and multiplicative impact on current and future engineering students, and secondary impacts on their colleagues. We have designed the short course as a series of three two-hour synchronous virtual workshops over a six-week period in the summer. The experience is designed to build instructors’ capacities to teach metacognition and to continue to use and develop engaging metacognitive activities. By eliminating the time and cost of travel, this project will enable populations that might otherwise be limited in attendance such as professional-track faculty, teaching focused faculty, community college faculty, adjunct faculty. 
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  6. ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)
    In this Lessons Learned paper, we describe the implementation of an on-campus workshop focused on supporting faculty as they develop metacognitive interventions for their educational contexts. This on-campus workshop at Duke University included faculty from engineering as well as other faculty from campus and was developed and implemented by members of the Skillful Learning Institute Team. First, we describe the purpose and intent of the workshop by the host institution (Duke University) and the workshop development team (Skillful-Learning Institute Team). We then provide the workshop overview across the two day period, including a description of instruction provided and structured breakout sessions. Next, we provide a lessons learned section from the perspectives of the host institution and the workshop developers. Finally, we offer insights into how those lessons learned are being incorporated into the development of future workshops. By providing the two perspectives, our lessons learned should help those who invite speakers in for faculty development and those who are creating faculty development activities. 
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    Accepted Manuscript Full Text Available
  7. ; ; ; ( , ASEE Annual Conference)
    null (Ed.)
    Helping middle school students explore potential career opportunities based on local culture and values was the foundation of a study of rural Appalachian middle school students conducted at a major university in the United States. Specifically we focused on positively impacting locally and culturally-relevant conceptions of engineering through participation in multiple classroom activities developed through a partnership of teachers, researchers, and local industry partners. To date, the study has revealed a positive change in the understanding and conception of the field of engineering by students who participated in the culturally relevant classroom activities. As a basis for this work, ample literature was found to describe middle school students’ conceptions of engineering but there was limited available research on the value of relating the field of engineering to a student’s local culture. We are offering a resource exchange session to introduce the approach of designing and using classroom engineering exploration activities directly connected to the students’ local environment, featuring the types of engineering work performed in the area and local problems related to engineering. Effective practices for working with industry partners to help design and deliver the classroom activities will also be shared. An example of a classroom intervention will be featured where students explored potential and kinetic energy by designing and building mountain roads out of simple hardware store materials. This activity allowed students to make connections between the roads they built in the classroom and the geography of their local mountainous, rural area. Industry partners participated in this intervention by offering insights from their technical backgrounds and company practices and assisted with the hands-on lessons in the classroom. This was one of six culturally relevant engineering activities provided to 757 sixth-grade students at seven Appalachian middle schools. 
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  8. ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , ASEE Annual Conference)
    null (Ed.)
    K-12 teachers serve a critical role in their students’ development of interest in engineering, especially as engineering content is emphasized in curriculum standards. However, teachers may not be comfortable teaching engineering in their classrooms as it can require a different set of skills from which they are trained. Professional development activities focused on engineering content can help teachers feel more comfortable teaching the subject in their classrooms and can increase their knowledge of engineering and thus their engineering teaching self-efficacy. There are many different types of professional development activities teachers might experience, each one with a set of established best practices. VT PEERS (Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Communities) is a program designed to provide recurrent hands-on engineering activities to middle school students in or near rural Appalachia. The project partners middle school teachers, university affiliates, and local industry partners throughout the state region to develop and implement engineering activities that align with state defined standards of learning (SOLs). Throughout this partnership, teachers co-facilitate engineering activities in their classrooms throughout the year with the other partners, and teachers have the opportunity to participate in a two-day collaborative workshop every year. VT PEERS held a workshop during the summer of 2019, after the second year of the partnership, to discuss the successes and challenges experienced throughout the program. Three focus groups, one for each grade level involved (grades 6-8), were held during the summit for teachers and industry partners to discuss their experiences. None of the teachers involved in the partnership have formal training in engineering. The transcripts of these focus groups were the focus of the exploratory qualitative data analyses to answer the following research question: How do middle-school teachers develop teaching engineering self-efficacy through professional development activities? Deductive coding of the focus group transcripts was completed using the four sources of self-efficacy: mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion and physiological states. The analysis revealed that vicarious experiences can be particularly valuable to increasing teachers’ teaching engineering self-efficacy. For example, teachers valued the ability to play the role of a student in an engineering lesson and being able to share ideas about teaching engineering lessons with other teachers. This information can be useful to develop engineering-focused professional development activities for teachers. Additionally, as teachers gather information from their teaching engineering vicarious experiences, they can inform their own teaching practices and practice reflective teaching as they teach lessons. 
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  9. ; ; ; ( , Journal of Engineering Education)
    Abstract Background

    Calls to improve learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and particularly engineering, present significant challenges for school systems. Partnerships among engineering industry, universities, and school systems to support learning appear promising, but current work is limited in its conclusions because it lacks a strong connection to theoretical work in interorganizational collaboration.

     Purpose/Hypothesis

    This study aims to reflect more critically on the process of how organizations build relationships to address the following research question: In a public–private partnership to integrate engineering into middle school science curriculum, how do stakeholder characterizations of the collaborative process align with existing frameworks of interorganizational collaboration?

     Design/Method

    This qualitative, embedded multiple case study considered in‐depth pre‐ and post‐year interviews with teachers, administrators, industry, and university personnel during the first year of the Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools (PEERS) program. Transcripts were analyzed using a framework of interorganizational collaboration operationalized for our context.

     Results

    Results provide insights into stakeholder perceptions of collaborative processes in the first year of the PEERS program across dimensions of collaboration. These dimensions mapped to three central discussion points with relevance for school–university–industry partnerships: school collaboration as an emergent and negotiated process, tension in collaborating across organizations, and fair share in collaborating toward a social goal.

     Conclusions

    Taking a macro‐level look at the collaborative processes involved enabled us to develop implications for collaborative stakeholders to be intentional about designing for future success. By systematically applying a framework of collaboration and capitalizing on the rich situational findings possible through a qualitative approach, we shift our understanding of collaborative processes in school–university–industry partnerships for engineering education and contribute to the development of collaboration theory.

     
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  10. ; ( , Journal of Engineering Education)
    Abstract Background

    The use of metacognition is critical to learning, especially in fields such as engineering that involve problem‐solving and difficult conceptual material. Due to limitations with current methodological approaches, new methods are needed to investigate engineering students' metacognitive engagement in learning situations that are self‐directed, such as study groups.

     Purpose

    Our purpose was to develop an approach to investigate the metacognitive engagement of undergraduate engineering students in self‐directed learning environments. The Naturalistic Observations of Metacognition in Engineering (NOME) Observational Protocol and Coding Strategy is a qualitative data collection method that allows researchers to observe the behaviors of students who are studying in groups to determine the student's engagement in different metacognitive practices. The NOME is intended to be used by researchers interested in studying online metacognitive behaviors without the direct interference of a methodological approach.

     Design/Method

    We observed three study groups where students were working on an engineering problem‐solving homework assignment. Using a taxonomic definition of metacognition, we coded episodes of observation transcripts to identify behaviors that represented key definitions in the taxonomy.

     Results

    We combined subcodes and descriptions of behaviors with key definitions to develop a coding strategy useful for future observational studies. Evidence of intercoder agreement and agreement in unitizing indicates that the coding strategy can reliably be used by multiple trained coders to identify metacognitive engagement.

     Conclusions

    The reliability evidence shows that the NOME may be a useful tool for researchers in engineering education interested in studying the metacognitive habits of engineering students in self‐directed study.

     
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