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Most engineering programs in the United States are accredited by ABET under the guidelines known as EC-2000. The EC-2000 framework is broadly based on the continual quality management (CQM) movement in industry where programs are striving to constantly improve the quality of their output, in this case the skills of graduates. Broadly speaking, ABET evaluates engineering programs on eight different criteria; some are related to processes, some to resources, but those central to CQM are program educational objectives, that define hoped for long-term accomplishments of graduates, and outcomes which articulate what students can do when they graduate. Degree programs must convince ABET they have a documented and effective process to improve outcomes to gain accreditation. CQM of course is not the only framework by which educational development can be framed or measured. This paper explores ABET processes through the lens of the economist Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which is broadly applied in the developing world in areas of inequity, poverty, and human rights. The capability approach is often used when a focus on diverse individuals is desirable for understanding aspects of development. Central to Sen’s approach are capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are the resources and supports in an individual’s environment that provide opportunities to pursue a life they value. Functionings are what they actually become and do. Thus capabilities can be thought of as the potential for functionings; alternatively capabilities are opportunities and functionings are outcomes. This paper compares ABET’s accreditation criteria with a published set of capabilities in education. The comparison shows there are some areas where criteria overlap with capabilities, but also several areas where the overlap is low. The capabilities that aligned most with ABET criteria overlap with engineering epistemologies and a view of students as the ‘product’ of engineering education. 

Most engineering programs in the United States are accredited by ABET under the guidelines known as EC-2000. The EC-2000 framework is broadly based on the continual quality management (CQM) movement in industry where programs are striving to constantly improve the quality of their output, in this case the skills of graduates. Broadly speaking, ABET evaluates engineering programs on eight different criteria; some are related to processes, some to resources, but those central to CQM are program educational objectives, that define hoped for long-term accomplishments of graduates, and outcomes which articulate what students can do when they graduate. Degree programs must convince ABET they have a documented and effective process to improve outcomes to gain accreditation. CQM of course is not the only framework by which educational development can be framed or measured. This paper explores ABET processes through the lens of the economist Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which is broadly applied in the developing world in areas of inequity, poverty, and human rights. The capability approach is often used when a focus on diverse individuals is desirable for understanding aspects of development. Central to Sen’s approach are capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are the resources and supports in an individual’s environment that provide opportunities to pursue a life they value. Functionings are what they actually become and do. Thus capabilities can be thought of as the potential for functionings; alternatively capabilities are opportunities and functionings are outcomes. This paper compares ABET’s accreditation criteria with a published set of capabilities in education. The comparison shows there are some areas where criteria overlap with capabilities, but also several areas where the overlap is low. The capabilities that aligned most with ABET criteria overlap with engineering epistemologies and a view of students as the ‘product’ of engineering education. 

This work in progress paper assesses whether a first-year ePortfolio experience promotes better reflection in subsequent engineering courses. While reflection is vital to promote learning, historically, reflection receives less attention in engineering education when compared to other fields [1]. Yet, cultivating more reflective engineers yields several important benefits including building self-efficacy and empowering student agency. Through continued practice, engineering students can develop a habit of reflective thinking which increases students’ ability to transfer knowledge across contexts. The adoption of ePortfolios is becoming an increasingly popular strategy to improve student learning and establish a culture of reflection. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States is beginning to incorporate ePortfolios into courses. Professors of a first-year design course developed an ePortfolio assignment that gives students a space to reflect on their potential career paths and envision themselves as future engineers. We were curious about the impact this experience might have on students’ reflective thinking as they continue through the program. This work was guided by the research question: Do student ePortfolios in a first-year design course promote better reflection in subsequent technical courses? In this paper, we investigate this question by coding instances of reflection in student lab reports from a second-year design course. As a control group, lab reports from students the previous year who had not completed the ePortfolio activity were compared. We provide a quantitative summary of our analysis which concludes students that were provided with a reflective ePortfolio experience in their first-year are more reflective thinkers in their second-year. 

In higher education, our students experience a wide range of vulnerabilities, which we define as a lack of physical, social, and emotional security. Vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed and stratified by race, gender, and socioeconomic status. What is the role of vulnerability in facilitating the development and expansion of capabilities, a core mission of higher education in many Western nations? On the one hand, a lack of resources can substantially undermine students’ abilities to learn and integrate new knowledge. On the other hand, vulnerability has been theorized as a catalyst for transformation, a condition of suffering and fragility that engenders change. Operational definitions of vulnerability in higher education need to acknowledge its dual-sided nature and potential to help and harm student growth. In this paper we ask what kinds of vulnerability facilitate and inhibit students’ development of capabilities? To guide our thinking, we analyze the life history interviews of three engineering students attending a liberal arts college in the Northeastern United States: one American student of above-average academic performance (representing the normative case), one immigrant student of color of above-average academic performance, and one immigrant student of color of below-average academic performance. Utilizing qualitative structured coding methods, we coded each interview using Walker’s (2006) capabilities list for higher education contexts. We also inductively coded instances of vulnerability that arose during the interviews, which often overlapped with one or more of Walker’s capabilities, and noted their proximity to other capabilities at that time in their lives. Coding was performed by three members of the research team using consensus coding techniques to reduce individual biases. We suggest that vulnerability acts as a conversion factor, which both enables and inhibits capability development. Vulnerability is often the product of structural factors, which distribute vulnerability unequally by gender, race, social class, and country of origin. However, the valence of vulnerability is mediated by individual agency, through which individuals may experience transformation through reframing vulnerability as personal triumph over adversity. We argue that the capabilities approach offers a better balance between structure and agency than two competing models, shame resilience theory and psychological safety. This study contributes to new ways of conceptualizing and measuring vulnerability and human development at the micro-level in universities. Higher education systems are central to citizens’ capability development, and understanding student vulnerabilities helps such systems respond to rapid societal changes. 

This paper reports on the initial implementation of a two student “tiger team” in an engineering capstone design class. A tiger team is a small group of individuals that covers a range of expertise and is assigned when challenges arise that helps address the root issues causing the challenge. The term was coined in the 1960’s in the Cold War; tiger teams are used in industry, government, and military organizations. While tiger teams in these situations are usually formed around an issue then disbanded, in the capstone class the tiger team was formed for the duration of the two semester long class; details on formation and the larger context and organization of the class are discussed in the paper. The rationale for the tiger team was the observation over many years of a capstone class that as projects are functionally decomposed and subsystems assigned to individual students, a not insignificant fraction of students become “stuck” at some point in time – the concept of “stuckness” is further derived in the full paper. The result is that if delays accumulate on critical parts of the project, teams often struggle to get the project back on track and end up with a cascading series of missed deadlines. The rationale for the tiger team is to help teams identify when parts of the project are getting behind schedule and to have additional, short-term help available. In the initial implementation described here, the tiger team was two students—one from electrical and one from computer engineering—who volunteered for the position and were confirmed in that role by the other students in the class. Initial data shows that during the problem identification phase of the project the tiger team attended team meetings, helped evaluation project milestone reviews, worked to solve individual and team issues, and regularly met with the faculty. Early in the semester the two tiger team students described their role as unclear and worried their technical exposure would be limited. Later, as the teams developed technical representations, the tiger team provided independent feedback and addressed multiple technical challenges. Finally, as teams started to build technical prototypes the tiger team role again shifted to helping individuals with specific aspects of their project; this role continued throughout the remainder of the year-long course. This in-depth case-study of the experience of implementing a tiger team draws on observations from students, faculty, the tiger team members, and an external ethnographer. This work may help other capstone instructors who may be considering similar interventions. 

In this paper we explore the ability of educational frameworks focused on developing the entrepreneurial mindset to be used to develop students’ abilities to approach convergent problems. While there is not a single widely accepted definition of convergence, there are some general aspects noted by the NSF including: socially relevant, multidisciplinary, complex, and not being adequately addressed by current methods and practices. Convergent problems require existing disciplines to collaborate to create new knowledge, skills, and approaches in order to be appropriately addressed. We believe that there are aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset and the learning of it that can support the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to approach convergent problems. This is relevant because most work on convergent problems happens at the graduate level and beyond and our interest is to create experiences for undergraduates that prepare them to embark on this work after graduation. This study maps entrepreneurial mindset learning (EML) onto a framework based on prior work on convergence to identify the aspects of EML that directly support convergence work or preparation for convergence work. The existing dataset of KEEN cards is used as a proxy for existing work in this space, as well. If existing work in EML can address some or all of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for convergent problem solving then engineering educators have a set of tools and practices that can contribute towards creating engineers who are better prepared to work on the hard problems of tomorrow. 

This NSF Grantees poster discusses an early phase Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project which is designed to address preparing engineering students to address large scale societal problems, the solutions of which integrate multiple disciplinary perspectives. These types of problems are often termed “convergent problems”. The idea of convergence captures how different domains of expertise contribute to solving a problem, but also the value of the network of connections between areas of knowledge that is built in undertaking such activities. While most existing efforts at convergence focus at the graduate and post-graduate levels, this project supports student development of capabilities to address convergent problems in an undergraduate disciplinary-based degree program in electrical and computer engineering. This poster discusses some of the challenges faced in implementing such learning including how to decouple engineering topics from societal concerns in ways that are relevant to undergraduate students yet retain aspects of convergence, negotiations between faculty on ways to balance discipline-specific skills with the breadth required for systemic understanding, and challenges in integrating relevant projects into courses with different faculty and instructional learning goals. One of the features of the project is that it builds on ideas from Communities of Transformation by basing activities on a coherent philosophical model that guides theories of change. The project has adopted Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom or capabilities framework as the organizing philosophy. In this model the freedom for individuals to develop capabilities they value is viewed as both the means and end of development. The overarching goal of the project is then for students to build personalized frameworks based on their value systems which allow them to later address complex, convergent problems. Framework development by individual students is supported in the project through several activities: modifying grading practices to provide detailed feedback on skills that support convergence, eliciting self-narratives from students about their pathways through courses and projects with the goal of developing reflection, and carefully integrating educational software solutions that can reduce some aspects of faculty workload which is hypothesized to enable faculty to focus efforts on integrating convergent projects throughout the curriculum. The poster will present initial results on the interventions to the program including grading, software integration, projects, and narratives. The work presented will also cover an ethnographic study of faculty practices which serves as an early-stage baseline to calibrate longer-term changes. 

Cyclical models are often used to describe how students learn and develop. These models usually focus on the cognitive domain and describe how knowledge and skills are learned within a course or classroom. By providing insights into how students learn and thus how an instructor can support learning, these models and the schemas drawn from them also influence beliefs about learning and thus how educational programs are designed and developed. In this paper the authors present an alternative cyclical model of learning that is drawn from a philosophy of enactivism rather than rational dualism. In comparison with the dualism inherent in viewpoints derived from Descartes where learners construct internal mental representation from inputs received from the external world, in enactivism development occurs through continual dynamic interactions between an agent and their environment. Enactivism thus emphasizes the role environments play in learning and development. The model developed in this paper hypothesizes that the environment in which learning typically occurs can be represented by three elements: the learner’s identity and culture which informs personally significant goals and values; the affordances a degree program offers in areas of knowledge, identity, and context which informs the capabilities of the environment; and the implicit and explicit goals of education as they are negotiated and understood by learners and teachers. These three elements are strongly coupled and together define the ever-changing learning environment. The paper explores how changing technologies and cultures affect each of these three elements in regards to students’ ability to become technologically literate. While rational or dualist views of education see such environmental changes as peripheral to developing accurate representations of truth, enactivism posits that environment significantly affects the process of education. Because each student or faculty member is a participant in a learning organization changes within the organization—whether externally or internally driven—change the learning process. If education is deemed successful when students can transfer learning to new contexts, dualist models assume transfer is weakly coupled to educational environments while the enactivist viewpoint posits that environments strongly affect transfer. The enactivist model can inform efforts to encourage technological literacy. Like many areas in STEM, education technological literacy has sought to identify and support learning outcomes that specify effective teaching or content interventions which enable learners to become more technologically literate. From the enactivist perspective, however, technological literacy is achieved by placing individuals into an environment in which they must navigate technology-induced challenges, with success defined as learning processes that allow learners to manage tensions inherent in their environment. Because most students already live in such environments teaching definable or enumerable outcomes makes less sense than helping student to be metacognitive and reflective how they manage and relate with technology. 

This paper reports on the development of a second-year design course intended to support student design capabilities in a coherent four-year design thread across an Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) curriculum. At Bucknell University students take four years of design starting by building an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor module in first year, a robust IoT product in the second year, using the product to address societal challenges in the third year, followed by a culminating capstone experience in the fourth year. While the first year introduces students broadly to the ECE curriculum, the second-year course reported here is designed to provide students’ abilities in electronic device fabrication and test and measurement, areas students at Bucknell have had little previous exposure to. This course is designed to anchor the remainder of the design sequence by giving all students the capability to independently fabricate and test robust electronic devices. The second-year course has students individually build an IoT appliance—the Digital / Analog Modular Neopixel-based Electronic Display, or DAMNED project—by going through twelve sequential steps of design from simulation through PCB layout, device and enclosure fabrication, to application development. Because this course is most students’ first encounter with electronic fabrication and test and measurement techniques, the course has students build the project in twelve steps. Each weekly step is heavily scaffolded to allow students to work independently out of class. The paper discusses how such scaffolding is supported through design representations such as block diagrams, pre-class preparation, rapid feedback, and the use of campus makerspaces and educational software tools. The paper also shares results of making iterative improvement to the course structure using action research, and early indications that students are able transfer skills into subsequent design courses. 

One of the major changes in the higher education ecosystem over the last decade has been a rise in the availability of education-based software products, including education-based web-pages and web-services. Globally the investment in education-based startups in 2017 was $9.5B which surged to $18.7B in 2019 [1]. The COVID-19 pandemic further fueled record investment in this sector, with the US seeing $2.2B invested in 130 startups in 2020, up from $1.7B in 2019 and $1.4B in 2018 (see [2] and [3]). Early indicators show that 2021 will again see further increases [4]. While the majority (92%) of these investments are aimed at consumer and corporate sectors, there is potential for the innovations developed to diffuse into both the P-12 and higher education spaces [5]. What is evident from the investment numbers is that an integration of learning technologies specifically into higher education is progressing at a relatively slower pace [5]. It is the goal of this work-in-progress to identify some of the reasons for this slower progress. Our hypothesis is that, while some of these reasons may be obvious, there are also more subtle and/or counterintuitive reasons for the reduced interest in higher education. The motivation and need for the proposed study grew out of an ongoing NSF RED project where we endeavor to fuse the concept of convergence, loosely defined as “deep integration,” into our undergraduate engineering curriculum. Increasingly software and data systems at colleges and universities, and the affordances they do and do not offer, are integral to university structures. If the respective software systems do not support certain activities and functions then the programs are simply not useful to the faculty [6]. Additionally, any subset of systems needs to seamlessly integrate to form a coherent and usable learning support system that faculty, students, and staff can use without issue and/or barrier. The goal of the proposed activity within our grant is, thus, to build structures to collect, analyze, and display data in support of developing skills in addressing convergent problems.