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This full research paper documents assessment definitions from engineering faculty members, mainly from Research 1 universities. Assessments are essential components of the engineering learning environment, and how engineering faculty make decisions about assessments in their classroom is a relatively understudied topic in engineering education research. Exploring how engineering faculty think and implement assessments through the mental model framework can help address this research gap. The research documented in this paper focuses on analyzing data from an informational questionnaire that is part of a larger study to understand how the participants define assessments through methods inspired by mixed method strategies. These strategies include descriptive statistics on demographic findings and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and coding on the open-ended response question asking the participants to define assessments, which yielded cluster themes that characterize the definitions. Findings show that while many participants defined assessments in relation to measuring student learning, other substantial aspects include benchmarking, assessing student ability and competence, and formal evaluation for quality. These findings serve as foundational knowledge toward deeper exploration and understanding of assessment mental models of engineering faculty that can begin to address the aforementioned research gap on faculty assessment decisions in classrooms.

This research full paper presents research around the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program that serves two key purposes to: 1) provide a structured approach for engineering students to engage in real-world, service-based projects and 2) provide technical support and expertise that may be critical to local and global community organizations. Hence, EPICS strives to offer a platform that fosters the collaboration of engineering students and communities. EPICS helps develop undergraduate students’ professional skills extending beyond the theoretical knowledge acquired in classrooms. EPICS has been a fixture in engineering education for over 15 years, with a strong focus on curricular and pedagogical interventions to help students gain professional skills. The purpose of this paper is to explore the perspectives of over 650 students who participated in EPICS at a U.S. university during the academic years of 2019/2020 and 2020/2021. We used natural language processing (NLP) to thematically analyze students’ responses to an open-ended survey administered at the end of their semester participating in the EPICS program. Students’ responses reflect their perspectives on the design process, teamwork, real-world experiences, and the challenges they face during the design process related to other people and the program. In our findings, students’ leastmore »favorite parts of EPICS were lectures and design reviews, while their favorite parts of EPICS were teamwork and engaging with community partners. Understanding the themes emerging from the data can help us better implement community-based educational initiatives and find ways to better engage students in community service-learning projects. Our research provides implications for practice and research.« less

In this work-in-progress (WIP) study, we begin to identify explicit links between ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in engineering education and closely related fields. We use systematic literature review procedures coupled with a qualitative content analytic approach to identify these explicit links within engineering education journals and conference papers. Through this WIP, we identify preliminary themes that represent explicit discourses connecting ethics and DEI and we cite associated literature. We unpack four themes that have a prominent presence in the abstracts that we have reviewed: cultural, global, social, and sustainable. These explicit connections will support future systematic review procedures wherein we will aim to identify implicit DEI and ethics connections via an analysis of whole manuscripts. While preliminary, we hope that these four themes can prompt strategies to connect ethics and DEI more purposefully when teaching towards these and related topics.

The United Nations recognizes reducing the effects of global warming as a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) (#13). This goal is interconnected and critical to improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth globally. Civil engineers will play a vital role in meeting this goal. To understand how civil engineering students perceive global warming, we surveyed a national sample of civil engineering students in their final semester of college (n = 524). We asked them (a) if they recognize both the technical and social issues associated with global warming and (b) when they believe global warming will start to have a severe effect on themselves, others, and the planet. Civil engineering students are significantly more likely to recognize the technical issues associated with global warming than social issues. In particular, the majority of students understand global warming is an immediate issue for the environment, engineering, health, and science, but less than half recognize global warming presents social justice, poverty, and national security issues. Moreover, civil engineering students hold an inverse relationship between spatial distance and the timing of the effects of global warming. The majority of students believe global warming is currently having a severe impact on plant andmore »animal species, the environment, people in developing countries, and the world's poor but do not recognize themselves in this group. Instead, civil engineering students predominantly believe the effects of global warming will start to have a serious impact on themselves, their family, and people in their community in 25 to 50 years. These results are troubling because if those beliefs translate into students waiting to address climate change for another two to five decades locks in more emissions and increases the chance of future and more severe global humanitarian crises. Educational interventions are needed to change these perspectives about time and impact.« less

This paper explores how the relationship between ethics and engineering has been and could be framed. Specifically, two distinct framings will be conceptualized and explored: ethics in engineering and engineering in ethics. As with other disciplines, engineering typically subsumes ethics, appropriating it as its own unique subfield. As a framing, ethics in engineering produces specialized standards, codes, values, perspectives, and problems distinct to engineering thought and practice. These form an engineering education discourse with which engineers engage. It is epistemological in its focus, meaning that this framing constructs knowledge of proper disciplinary conduct. On the other hand, engineering in ethics as a framing device insists that engineering become a specialized articulation of ethical thought and action. Here, “engineer” and “engineering” are not nouns but verbs, referring to particular processes and technologies for transformation. One is not an “engineer;” rather, one “engineers.” One is first an ethical subject – an historical aggregate of continuous experiences/becomings – concerned with the pursuit of “the good” in the present; then, when contextually relevant, such a subject’s engineering knowledge and skills may be employed as powerful means for the becoming-good of shared worlds. In this paper, engineering in ethics is further conceptualized through a playfulmore »intermingling of an ethic of care, via the scholarship of Joan Tronto, and a Deweyian approach to ethical inquiry. Tronto’s four elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness – are joined with what are arguably four key components of Dewey’s process of ethical inquiry: awareness, judgment, experimentation, and iteration. This paper argues that 1) being attentive is required to achieve awareness of a given need or problem, 2) taking responsibility is a necessary practice for making and acting on one’s judgements related to the need at hand, 3) competence in a relevant skill is needed to experiment with one’s judgements, and 4) careful consideration of how others respond to how one has addressed a need is essential for the purposes of iteration. While all four contribute to the notion of engineering in ethics, the relationship between competence and experimentation is where engineering is most evidently seized as an ethical expression. How one competently wields engineering knowledge and skillfully performs disciplinary techniques is, here, foremost about actively inquiring into how to provide care for a specific need and, in doing so, creating a world aligned with one’s vision of “the good.” This paper will close with a brief consideration of the educational implications of engineering in ethics.« less