A PHENOMENOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING STUDENTS\u27 EXPERIENCES WITH PROBLEMS INVOLVING MULTIPLE POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Engineers are expected to solve problems that are ill-structured. These problems are presented with a lack of necessary information and allow for different ways of engaging with the problem; they are open-ended and involve multiple possible solutions with multiple means of evaluation. In order to allow maximum time for students to develop skills for solving such problems, undergraduate engineering programs can introduce such problems during the first year of students’ education, in the form of cornerstone design tasks. This provides students with more opportunities to develop their ability to engage with ill-structured problems, which are characteristic of engineering work. Researchers have documented variation within both the behavior and perceptions of students’ early experiences with design problems. General themes include novice-like design behavior, discomfort with lack of information, difficulty with problem scoping, and resistance to ambiguity. To build on these generalizations of students’ experiences, a more thorough understanding of the variation in how students experience this phenomenon of engaging with ill-structured problems is needed to design effective learning environments

The Central Serotonergic And Cholinergic Systems As Activators Of The Electrocorticogram And Behavior

Experiments were performed on the role of ascending cholinergic and serotonergic electrocortical activating systems and their role in normal physiology and behavior. In urethane-anesthetized rats, electrocortical activation could be obtained by electrical stimulation of the amygdala, the dorsal raphe, the locus coeruleus area, the superior colliculus, and the orbitofrontal cortex. Activation elicited from the amygdala, the locus coeruleus area, and most orbitofrontal sites was abolished by systemic administration of the cholinergic-muscarinic antagonists scopolamine or atropine. Activation elicited from the dorsal raphe or superior colliculus was largely resistant to anti-muscarinic treatment but was abolished by methiothepin, a serotonergic antagonist. Infusions of the local anesthetic lidocaine into the basal forebrain abolished activation elicited from the amygdala. Basal forebrain cells which increased their firing during cortical activation (putative cholinergic cortically-projecting cells) could be excited by single pulse stimulation of the amygdala or locus coeruleus area.;In unanesthetized rats treated with reserpine (a monoamine depletor) and scopolcunine, all cortical activation was abolished. Subsequent treatment with pargyline (a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that restores cerebral serotonin levels after reserpine treatment) restored normal activation. However, various serotonergic receptor agonists produced only partial or no activation in rats treated with reserpine and scopolamine.;Differences between the effects of serotonergic antagonists in freely moving and urethane-anesthetized rats suggest that urethane produces anti-serotonergic effects. This hypothesis was confirmed in experiments using rat aortic rings in an organ bath; urethane antagonized the effects of serotonin and strongly enhanced the action of a serotonergic antagonist without altering the action of a noradrenergic antagonist.;Behavioral experiments with p-chlorophenylalanine (an inhibitor of serotonin synthesis) and buspirone (an agonist at serotonin autoreceptors) were consistent with the hypothesis that ascending serotonergic pathways play a role in the generation of spontaneous locomotion.;Together, these results indicate that (a) ascending cholinergic and serotonergic pathways provide final common pathways for cortical activation through which other brain systems can act; (b) serotonergic activation is linked to certain types of motor activity; and (c) experiments on serotonergic transmission in anesthetized animals may produce results that are irrelevant to the unanesthetized state

How do first-year engineering students experience ambiguity in engineering design problems: The development of a self-report instrument

Citation: Dringenberg, E., & Wertz, R. E. H. (2016). How do first-year engineering students experience ambiguity in engineering design problems: The development of a self-report instrument.Design is widely recognized as a keystone of engineering practice. Within the context of engineering education, design has been categorized as a type of ill-structured problem solving that is crucial for engineering students to engage with. Improving undergraduate engineering education requires a better understanding of the ways in which students experience ill-structured problems in the form of engineering design. With special attention to the experiences of first-year engineering students, prior exploratory work identified two critical thresholds that distinguished students' ways of experiencing design as less or more comprehensive: accepting ambiguity and recognizing the value of multiple perspectives. The goal of current (work-in-progress) research is to develop and pilot a self-report instrument to assess students' relation to these two thresholds at the completion of an ill-structured design project within the context of undergraduate engineering education. The specific research questions addressed in this study are 1) if the piloted self-report instrument can be used to identify discrete constructs, and 2) how these constructs align with prior qualitative research findings. The objective of this study was addressed using a quantitative exploratory research design. Items for the self-report Likert-scaled instrument were designed to distinguish student experience that either accept or reject the presence of ambiguity and the value of multiple perspectives. The instrument was disseminated to a total of 214 first-year engineering students. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the constructs that emerge from the self-report data, and these constructs were checked for alignment with the previously identified thresholds. The results of this investigation will be used to help advance progress towards an easily administered instrument able to assist engineering educators with the identification of students in need of intervention or explicit instruction related to critical aspects of learning engineering design. The instrument could also be used to track student growth over time, and, with further development, to provide evidence for ABET student outcomes. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2016

Ways of Being Smart in Engineering: Beliefs, Values, and Introductory Engineering Experiences

Common discourse conveys that to be an engineer, one must be “smart.” Our individual and collective beliefs about what constitutes smart behavior are shaped by our participation in the complex cultural practice of smartness. From the literature, we know that the criteria for being considered “smart” in our educational systems are biased. The emphasis on selecting and retaining only those who are deemed “smart enough” to be engineers perpetuates inequity in undergraduate engineering education. Less is known about what undergraduate students explicitly believe are the different ways of being smart in engineering or how those different ways of being a smart engineer are valued in introductory engineering classrooms. In this study, we explored the common beliefs of undergraduate engineering students regarding what it means to be smart in engineering. We also explored how the students personally valued those ways of being smart versus what they perceived as being valued in introductory engineering classrooms. Through our multi-phase, multi-method approach, we initially qualitatively characterized their beliefs into 11 different ways to be smart in engineering, based on a sample of 36 engineering students enrolled in first-year engineering courses. We then employed quantitative methods to uncover significant differences, with a 95% confidence interval, in six of the 11 ways of being smart between the values personally held by engineering students and what they perceived to be valued in their classrooms. Additionally, we qualitatively found that 1) students described grades as central to their classroom experience, 2) students described the classroom as a context where effortless achievement is associated with being smart, and 3) students described a lack of reward in the classroom for showing initiative and for considerations of social impact or helping others. As engineering educators strive to be more inclusive, it is essential to have a clear understanding and reflect on how students value different ways of being smart in engineering as well as consider how these values are embedded into teaching praxis

An Intervention to Promote Growth Mindset and STEM Self-Efficacy of High School Students: Exploring the Complexity of Beliefs

The marginalization of women in engineering is a persistent problem. The overall goal of our collaborative project was to promote interest and participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), particularly for high school girls. We took an action research approach with a local high school science teacher to develop, implement, and research the impact of a classroom-based intervention designed to encourage growth mindset and STEM self-efficacy beliefs using mixed methods. We analyzed pre- and postsurvey data collected using a control-treatment design to determine the impact of the intervention on high school boys’ and girls’ self-efficacy and mindset beliefs. We also conducted semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with purposefully selected participants from the treatment group to further explore students’ mindset and STEM self-efficacy beliefs qualitatively. We found that the intervention did result in a statistically significant change towards more growth-oriented beliefs for the high school girls who received the intervention as compared to the control group. We found that the intervention did not result in any statistically significant change in the girls’ self-efficacy beliefs, the boys’ mindset beliefs, or the boys’ self-efficacy beliefs. The qualitative analysis revealed that after receiving the intervention, students held contradictory beliefs about the role of effort and the role of innate ability in STEM achievement. Further, we found that context and gender mattered in how students justified their self-efficacy: boys and girls both expressed the belief that effort would lead to their ability to succeed in science classes, but the girls were less likely than the boys to express the belief that effort would lead to their ability to succeed in the context of a science career. By connecting our findings to broader cultural narratives, we suggest that for the continued success of intervention efforts aimed at promoting a growth mindset and STEM self-efficacy, particularly for girls, such efforts should include opportunities for students to reflect upon and unpack the broader cultural narratives about effort, innate ability, and the gendered stereotypes about STEM ability that inform their beliefs. Finally, from the perspective of a high school science teacher, we also advocate for more representation of women among science teachers and classroom speakers and the importance of explicitly connecting class content and success in classrooms to real-world contexts

Granzyme A Required for Regulatory T-Cell Mediated Prevention of Gastrointestinal Graft-versus-Host Disease

In our previous work we could identify defects in human regulatory T cells (Tregs) likely favoring the development of graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) following allogeneic stem cell transplantation (SCT). Treg transcriptome analyses comparing GvHD and immune tolerant patients uncovered regulated gene transcripts highly relevant for Treg cell function. Moreover, granzyme A (GZMA) also showed a significant lower expression at the protein level in Tregs of GvHD patients. GZMA induces cytolysis in a perforin-dependent, FAS- FASL independent manner and represents a cell-contact dependent mechanism for Tregs to control immune responses. We therefore analyzed the functional role of GZMA in a murine standard model for GvHD. For this purpose, adoptively transferred CD4+CD25+ Tregs from gzmA-/- mice were analyzed in comparison to their wild type counterparts for their capability to prevent murine GvHD. GzmA-/- Tregs home efficiently to secondary lymphoid organs and do not show phenotypic alterations with respect to activation and migration properties to inflammatory sites. Whereas gzmA-/- Tregs are highly suppressive in vitro, Tregs require GZMA to rescue hosts from murine GvHD, especially regarding gastrointestinal target organ damage. We herewith identify GZMA as critical effector molecule of human Treg function for gastrointestinal immune response in an experimental GvHD model

You’re an Engineer? You Must Be Really Smart! A Theoretical Discussion of the Need to Integrate “Smart” into Engineering Identity Research

Background: Those who participate in engineering are often assumed to be smart by others. At the same time, the cultural construction of what counts as “smart” is biased and therefore functions as a barrier to broadening participation in engineering. While considerable work has been done to understand engineering identity, how students understand themselves as smart is rarely made explicit in engineering identity research. Purpose: This paper is a theoretical discussion which highlights the need for engineering identity research to integrate students’ understanding of themselves as smart. By not incorporating students’ understanding of themselves as smart explicitly in work on engineering identity, we allow the bias in what gets recognized as smart to remain implicit and oppressive. Scope: In this paper, we argue that the idea of smart is very salient in engineering contexts and contributes to inequity. Then, we demonstrate how three different framings of identity allow for the explicit integration of how students are understanding themselves as smart. We also present selected examples from our empirical data to illustrate the concrete ways in which students’ understandings of themselves as smart manifest in an engineering context. Conclusions: We provided explicit opportunities for researchers to integrate students’ understandings of themselves as smart across three different framings of identity and how such understanding has shown up in our empirical research. In doing so, we conclude that making “smart” explicit in engineering identity provides a way to understand the exclusionary nature of engineering, and a new lens to apply when considering efforts to broaden participation in engineering