Three Deadly Venoms: Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Philosophical Constructs to Expand Engineering Education Research Methodologies and Philosophy

The Engineer through a Multidisciplinary Lens Our work invokes multiple theoretical approaches to the question of the engineer’s perception of his/her place in the field of engineering through lenses within social psychology and modern philosophy. We aim to help augment current conversations on and further dialogue as to what engineering is from ethnomethodological (or existential phenomenological) and symbolic interactionism points of view. The foundation of our work is the current state of engineering and how to address the engineer’s negotiation of his/her state of affairs. We believe this work has strong implications amidst recent publications invoking epistemologies based upon modern philosophers, and strive to engender critical thought around some misused methodologies in engineering education. With the advancement of such approaches to engineering thought and philosophy, a more grounded understanding of what engineers do and what they are should emerge along with new tools to address engineering problems. The lack of a unified engineering history of science or an engineering philosophy is evident by a dearth of core philosophical descriptions of the engineering field and a robust language to communicate such concepts. While there are treatises that eloquently describe the foundation of design, there is no social psychological theory of engineering contained within a generalizable ethnomethodology or symbolic interactionism framework. Such constructs could prove invaluable not only to the engineering education community, but to the outside community as they develop a better understanding of our emerging discipline. In this paper we will discuss what one can know and how one could know what the engineer experiences from first principles in multiple disciplines, provide framework that intersects ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism for engineering perception and action, and map these constructs to current research within engineering design and philosophy

Exploring Curriculum Flexibility and Compliance through the Use of a Metric for Curricular Progression

The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) contains academic records for students at ten partner institutions comprising over 10% of the United States’ engineering students. The potential of MIDFIELD for curricular exploration is vast and has never been previously attempted. By using department graduation requirements for each ABET EAC-accredited MIDFIELD program and more than 400,000 engineering students, we construct a set of curricular checkpoints based on semester requirements being fully completed or not. While we discovered expected patterns within the construction of the metric, we also discovered indicators that engineering majors are vastly more flexible than previously thought. Almost 50% of students who graduated with degrees in engineering do not complete every course required by their major in their first, four semesters in the traditional manner. Furthermore, students not only enjoy flexibility in their early curricula but also enjoy through their later semesters where specialization courses dominate the curriculum. The aim of this research is to provide a new metric for describing the flexibility of engineering majors and further the discussion into how student progression through a major will require significant, future work

Pre-College Engineering Participation Among First-Year Engineering Students

In recent years, engineering content is increasingly appearing in the K-12 classroom. This growth can be attributed to increased acceptance of engineering as an area of study at the K-12 level, the growing inclusion of engineering content in state and national educational standards,and the growth of outreach activities intended to increase students’ interest in pursuing degrees and careers in engineering. As pre-college engineering programs grow, first-year engineering students are arriving in university engineering programs with significant prior exposure to engineering content and practices. Despite this growth, little research exists that explores the prevalence of participation in these programs or the effects of participation on first-year engineering students.In this paper, we present the results of a survey of first-year engineering students on their participation in pre-college engineering programs and activities. Students enrolled in four sections of a first-year engineering program at a large public university were asked to complete a survey indicating the settings where they encountered engineering prior to college, named and described the various activities that they participated in and the approximate amount of time they spent doing each activity. Participants also provided demographic information.Results indicate that 89 percent of domestic students enrolling in first-year engineering classes at the university have experiences they describe as engineering prior to college. High school classes are the most common way that students are exposed to engineering content by a significant margin, followed by extra-curricular activities, summer camps or programs, and middle school classes. While the majority of respondents reported participating in one or two different activities, some reported participating in as many as nine different pre-college engineering programs or activities. These activities ranged in exposure from short term class projects or activities, to students involved for multiple years in an engineering course sequence or extracurricular activity.In the full paper, we will explore the relationships between pre-college engineering participation and students’ demographics such as race and gender. We will also explore the relationship between participation in various types of pre-college engineering activities and students’ choice of engineering major

The Dynamics of Attracting Switchers: A Cross-Disciplinary Comparison

A Hazards Model Study of Pathway Analysis in Engineering Factors that indicate, explain, or predict if a student will persist or exit an engineering degree have been a subject of a lot of research in engineering education. Findings from these studies identify factors that lead to success or barriers that lead premature exit from an engineering degree; however, they often focus on students who matriculate into engineering or analyze students once they have matriculated into engineering. We propose studying an alternate pathway, students who switch into engineering from other majors. Examining alternate pathways may yield a fuller picture of the ways into and through engineering degrees and may be leveraged through different institutional policies and programs for attracting engineering students from other fields.Survival analysis is a longitudinal statistical method used to model the hazard or risk of an event occurring for some population. Our study implemented discrete survival analysis and a subset of a database comprising more than 1,000,000 unique students. For our current research, we use a sample population of first-time in college (FTIC) students initially matriculating into non-engineering disciplines in two years with population of ~55,000 at nine institutions. The event of interest is switching into engineering, and time is measured by terms. To better understand the dynamics of “attraction” into engineering we also run similar analyses with Science, Technology and Math (as a similar comparator) and Social Science (as a dissimilar comparator). Survival analysis results allow us to graph the term by term hazard or risk of attraction into engineering(and the comparators) as well as the “survival” rate in the pool of individuals who have not experienced the event, providing us insights into the relative attraction rates of engineering contrasted with other disciplines.Our preliminary results show that the attraction (hazard) rates for engineering are lower than both STM and social science attraction rates; furthermore, the pool of students who abstain from switching is greatest for engineering, and significantly less for STM and social science. Thus engineering has the lowest attraction rates and the highest abstention (which would be viewed as retention from their current department) rates. Interestingly, the hazard rate displays a similar pattern for all three groups, peaking at semester four and dropping markedly after semester six.In the full study, we also plan to examine if attraction and abstention rates differ by gender and ethnicity across engineering and the comparators. These findings agree with other studies using the same database, which gives confidence in the model. The unique contribution of this work will be findings regarding the switching population that yield insight into those students and related insights regarding the students who matriculate in engineering

Sectionality or Why Section Determines Grades: an Exploration of Engineering Core Course Section Grades using a Hierarchical Linear Model and the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development

Grades, how they are earned, and the institutional impetuses that drive them, are an issue of central importance in the engineering discipline. (1-4) How grades are earned, how different institutions address grades and grade inequities, how instructional practices and policies affect grades, and other grading notions have been studied widely in engineering education. (5-8) The effect of faculty on student grades, while studied, (9) has not been probed as extensively within engineering education using a hierarchical linear model (HLM).One of the great, open questions in engineering education is whether or not the section makes a difference in a student’s grade. In other words, the effect of sectionality on grades to a large extent is unknown. Sectionality combines instructor effects, effects related to time-of-day of instruction, effects related to any tendency for students to coordinate their enrollment, and other effects. Experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that sectionality affects grades, but large-scale empirical studies of this phenomenon do not exist. Due to the inherent structured nature between course sections and students, standard linear regression models do not offer a robust solution to probing longitudinal systems containing multilevel variables. Hierarchical Linear Models (HLMs) provide a robust solution to studying nested or hierarchical systems when compared with standard regression techniques. We constructed a simple HLM to probe inter-section and intra-section variability in grades within the Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) by the calculation of intraclass correlation coefficient (ICCs). (10, 11) We then examined grades from three sets of courses endemic to the first year engineering experience: the first chemistry course; the first calculus course; and the first physics course. Our preliminary results indicate that the choice of a HLM to analyze our longitudinal database is correct due to strong variability in grades explained by the high intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for most of our MIDFIELD institutions across all three course types analyzed

Exploring the Motivations for Migration Among Engineering Students

Students often graduate from a major other than that in which they first enrolled. A large proportion of this migration happens within engineering with students moving from one discipline of engineering to another. This movement between disciplines sometimes happens several times. While there has been extensive examination of why students leave engineering,very little research has looked into why students leave one engineering discipline for another.Longitudinal data collected from several engineering colleges has shown that there are definite trends within the movement of engineering students.This study examines the reasons for some of these trends using a unique approach which combines both environmental and personality factors. The study uses measures based on Social Cognitive Career Theory, which has previously been extensively utilized to explore vocational choice in engineering, in conjunction with measures of social influence, and personality to explain disciplinary choices. In addition this study considers the climate students are exposed to in the various engineering disciplines. The intent is to create a model to connect the motivational, personality, and the climate variables in order to construct a clearer picture of how internal and external factors come together to influence students’ vocational choices; specific ally their decision to remain in engineering and to migrate from one engineering discipline to another.This study uses a survey administered electronically to engineering students beyond their sophomore year (to capture those who have had an opportunity to experience and evaluate their major choice and possibly make changes) at a large engineering program. Data collection is ongoing and will be completed within the next two months. The survey questions students about their goals, their outcome expectations, their self-efficacy beliefs, and the barriers and supports they have encountered, their differential orientation to persons or things (believed to be highly predictive of engineering attitudes), their locus of control, their agentic and communal disposition, their orientation to engineering as a social system, basic measures of personality, and their perceptions of the engineering climate in their disciplines.The survey is expected to yield personality profiles of students in various disciplines, student perceptions of the climate in various disciplines, motivation for migration among disciplines, as well as which personality and environmental factors are most strongly predictive of persistence in engineering. Structural equation modeling will be used to explore the relationships among the variables and develop a theory which would explain how these internal and external factors result in students’ choices

Degree program changes and curricular flexibility: Addressing long held beliefs about student progression

In higher education and in engineering education in particular, changing majors is generally considered a negative event - or at least an event with negative consequences. An emergent field of study within engineering education revolves around understanding the factors and processes driving student changes of major. Of key importance to further the field of change of major research is a grasp of large scale phenomena occurring throughout multiple systems, knowledge of previous attempts at describing such issues, and the adoption of metrics to probe them effectively. The problem posed is exacerbated by the drive in higher education institutions and among state legislatures to understand and reduce time-to-degree and student attrition. With these factors in mind, insights into large-scale processes that affect student progression are essential to evaluating the success or failure of programs. The goals of this work include describing the current educational research on switchers, identifying core concepts and stumbling blocks in my treatment of switchers, and using the Multiple Institutional Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) to explore how those who change majors perform as a function of large-scale academic pathways within and without the engineering context. To accomplish these goals, it was first necessary to delve into a recent history of the treatment of switchers within the literature and categorize their approach. While three categories of papers exist in the literature concerning change of major, all three may or may not be applicable to a given database of students or even a single institution. Furthermore, while the term has been coined in the literature, no portable metric for discussing large-scale navigational flexibility exists in engineering education. What such a metric would look like will be discussed as well as the delimitations involved. The results and subsequent discussion will include a description of changes of major, how they may or may not have a deleterious effect on one\u27s academic pathway, the special context of changes of major in the pathways of students within first-year engineering programs students labeled as undecided, an exploration of curricular flexibility by the construction of a novel metric, and proposed future work