Icarus: the development of a voluntary research program to increase engineering students' engagement

In order to find ways to address problems of motivation and engagement in civil engineering students, and provide students with a space to develop sense of belonging and engage with their peers through a co-curricular experience, the School of Civil Engineering at [BLINDED FOR REVIEW] in 2015 developed the Icarus program. The purpose of this exploratory study is to present preliminary information about the implementation of Icarus, as an engineering education experiment. The program's goal was to provide students with a different space to develop the competencies and skills desired while simultaneously they form their identity as engineers. The sample was 116 civil engineering students, 49 of them enrolled in the Icarus program in its first semester. Results showed that the main motivation to join the Icarus program was to apply theory from class into engineering real world issues, and to work and engage with peers. In addition, Icarus students have higher levels of aspirations on how well they will do in their engineering courses, and higher levels of deep learning when compared to other non-Icarus engineering students in the same year. Further Implications are provided

Reality gaps in industrial engineering senior design or capstone projects

Undergraduate Senior Design or Capstone Projects (SDP) are intended to provide a culminating experience for undergraduate students. In SDP's, students are expected to put into practice their engineering competences to solve a realistic problem. Realism is pursued by setting up boundary conditions that mimic to some extent those found in the corporate world. For example, projects are defined by an external company that acts as a sponsor or client, last between one and two semesters, are carried out in teams, and, in some cases, are vaguely defined. Moreover, students are often requested to complete various stages of the system's life cycle, including formulating the problem, conceptualizing the solution, implementing a solution in part or whole, and presenting the solution to the client. However, while these project conditions provide a decent surrogate of a real industrial problem, students' solutions are purely academic: They lack key elements that any engineering solution to a real problem should have. For example, students' solutions tend to be deterministic, assume seamless implementation and adoption, do not create unintended consequences, and are free of risks. Furthermore, these weaknesses are not identified in the evaluation of projects because assessments remain academic. They focus on evaluating if industrial engineering tools and methods have been properly used, and if the development process described in class has been followed. However, evaluating the value of an engineering solution in the corporate world is driven by the identification of worst- and best-cases, the contextualization of the solution within ranges of expectation, the assessment of impacts of implementing and adopting the solution, and the identification of the solution's potential unintended consequences and resulting risks. In order to contribute to close this gap between industry and academia, we characterize in this paper SDP's in industrial engineering undergraduate programs across the USA. In particular, we identify the aspects of real engineering projects that are captured, and those that are missing, in the problems that students solve, and are exhibited in the solutions they create. Then, we use the results to define a set of guidelines that would contribute to improve the realism of SDP's, both in terms of their problem definition and of the evaluation and assessment of students' solutions

Characterizing students' intercultural competence development paths through a global engineering program

Global competence is increasingly recognized as an important skill for engineering students to develop in preparation for their entrance into the engineering workforce [1], [2]. A variety of global engineering programs have been developed to achieve this goal [3], and several studies have assessed the outcomes of such programs [1]. To date, literature on global engineering programs has emphasized program overviews and assessment of student learning outcomes. Although outcomes-based assessment is important for the continuous improvement of such programs, recent critiques of global education research suggest that another perspective is missing from the literature [4]. Few studies explore student conceptions of their global programs and how students may experience the same program in different ways. Understanding variation in students’ experiences is important to developing effective global programs, particularly as educators seek to improve the diversity of such programs. To address this need, our study piloted a fully-integrated complementary mixed-methods approach to identify and characterize unique student paths through a single global engineering program

Investing in instructors: Creating intelligent feedback loops in large foun-dational courses for undergraduate engineering

The drive to encourage young people to pursue degrees and careers in engineering has led to an increase in student populations in engineering programs. For some institutions, such as large public research institutions, this has led to large class sizes for courses that are commonly taken across multiple programs. While this decision is reasonable from an operational and resource management perspective, research on large classes have shown that students suffer decreased engagement, motivation and achievement. Instructors, on the other hand, report having difficulty establishing rapport with their students and a growing inability to monitor students’ learning gains and provide quality individualized feedback. To address these issues, our project draws from Lattuca and Stark’s Academic Plan model, which incorporates a thorough consideration of factors influencing curricular activities that can be applied at the course, program, and institutional levels, and assumes that instructors are key actors in curriculum development and revision. We aim to revitalize feedback loops to help instructors and departments continuously improve. Recognizing that we must understand both individual and systems level perspectives, we prioritize regular engagement between faculty and institutional support structures to collaboratively identify problems and systematically establish continuous improvement. In the first phase of this NSF IUSE Institutional Transformation project, we focus on specifically prompting and studying the experiences of 8 instructors of foundational engineering courses usually taught in large class sizes across 4 different departments at a large public research institution. We collected qualitative data (semi-structured interviews, reflective journals, course-related documents) and quantitative data (student surveys and institution-provided transcript data) to answer research questions (e.g., what data do faculty teaching large foundational undergraduate engineering courses identify as being useful so that they may enhance students’ experiences and outcomes within the classes that they teach and across students’ multiple large classes?) at the intersection of learning analytics and faculty change. The data was used as a baseline to further refine data collection protocols, identify data that faculty consider meaningful and useful for managing large foundational engineering courses, and consider ways of productively leveraging institutional data to improve the learning experience in these courses. Data collection for the first phase is ongoing and will continue through the Spring 2018 semester. Findings for this paper will include high-level insights from Fall interviews with instructors as well as data visualizations created from the population-level data characterizing student performance in the foundational courses within the context of pre-college characteristics (e.g., SAT scores) and/or other academic outcomes (e.g., major switching within or out of engineer, degree attainment)