Developing a computer program is not an easy task. Studies reported that a large number of computer science students decided to change their major due to the extreme challenge in learning programming. Fortunately, studies also reported that learning various self-regulation strategies may help students to continue studying computer science. This study is interested in assessing students’ self-regulation, in specific their task understanding and its revision during programming endeavors. Task understanding is specifically selected because it affects the entire programming endeavor. In this qualitative case study, two female and two male senior computer science students were voluntarily recruited as research participants. They were asked to think aloud while answering five programming problems. Before solving the problem, they had to explain their understanding of the task and after that answer some questions related to their problem-solving process. The participants’ problem-solving process were video and audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. This study found that the participants’ were capable of tailoring their problem-solving approach to the task types, including when understanding the tasks. Given enough time, the participants can understand the problem correctly. When the task is complicated, the participants will gradually update their understanding during the problem-solving endeavor. Some situations may have prevented the participants from understanding the task correctly, including overconfidence, being overwhelmed, utilizing an inappropriate presentation technique, or drawing knowledge from irrelevant experience. Last, the participants tended to be inexperienced in managing unfavorable outcomes.

Education is always changing and science education is no exception, with many influential publications passing through science education over the years. The latest wave in science standards is called the Next Generation Science Standards. The Next Generation Science Standards are anticipated to have a significant effect on state science standards around the entire country. One thing about these new standards is very different from all previous science standards—they include the principle of engineering design in them. Asking science teachers to teach engineering design is asking them to teach a principle for which their teaching licensure would not have formally prepared them. Consequently, the hypothesis of this study was that the feeling of preparedness to teach engineering design would be low among public secondary education Utah science teachers. This study shows that hypothesis to be correct: Utah science teachers do not feel prepared to teach engineering design. The feelings of teacher preparedness can be improved through professional development and inclusion of engineering design into science teacher education programs. It should be infused into these arenas now that teachers have indicated their low feelings of preparedness. More teacher preparation should be sought because an unprepared teacher will not prepare students as well as a prepared teacher. And, creating prepared students is the goal of the education system.

This mixed-methodological study determined which factors contributed to undergraduate student attrition, and evaluated reasons ten undergraduate engineering students failed to complete their engineering degree at a major western research university. Institutional data were collected on engineering students over a multi-year period. These data were separated into groups of engineering students who persisted to the Junior year of their undergraduate engineering program (persisters), and those students who left their engineering program before their Junior year (nonpersisters). A quantitative analysis comparing these two groups of students uncovered significant predictors of persistence/nonpersistence in the engineering program. Qualitative inquiry was used to identify factors leading to nonpersistence from the perspective of ten nonpersisting student volunteers from the institutional data population. Together, the quantitative and qualitative methods of inquiry formed a mixed-methodological study which provided a vivid picture of the challenges facing a major western research university regarding persistence of engineering undergraduates. Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis of the institutional data collected on engineering undergraduate students uncovered several factors predictive of persistence/ nonpersistence. These include projected age at graduation, high school GPA and ACT scores, residency status, scholarship, and financial aid. Common themes for ten students who dropped out of engineering included individual factors such as poor academic performance, feeling unprepared for demands of the engineering program, difficulty fitting into engineering, and institutional factors such as disappointment with engineering advising. New concepts uncovered in this paper, which were not prevalent in existing research, include a deeply emotional attachment between participants and the concept of being an engineer, a deeper understanding of student’s sense of loss and failure, and their easy transition from engineering to another major.

The present dissertation research examined the effects of applying the enhanced hands-on intervention to reveal and correct student misunderstandings of the concepts in engineering dynamics, especially particle dynamics. We involved 36 student volunteers for three different research topics. The student participants were divided into two groups in each research topic: enhanced hands-on intervention and pure textbook groups. An interview and intervention was conducted with each participant individually. The author introduced the “Think-Aloud” method with two kinds of interventions mentioned above. The participants were required to speak out their thought process loud as they worked on the two sets of assessment questions with intervention between them, and the entire process was audio and video recorded. The audio records were transcribed into text files and segmented with meaningful codes. In all of the codes, the relationship between misconceptions found and potential reasons for these misconceptions were revealed. The effects were assessed by qualitative and quantitative research methods. Statistical analysis of the coding results verified the efficacy of the coding process. The qualitative research focused on the reasoning progress of the participants and the quantitative research focused on the score increase rates and normalized learning gains of the participants in both intervention groups. It was found that the groups who utilized the enhanced hands-on intervention achieved a better performance than those who accepted only textbook interventions in score increase rates, normalized learning gains, and code reduction rates, for all three research topics. In addition, the enhanced hands-on intervention showed a higher effectiveness than the textbook intervention for lower-level concepts, but it was harder to correct those misconceptions related to applications with higher abstraction of the concept itself. From the results of the normalized learning gains, the enhanced hands-on intervention benefitted the top students more than the struggled students. The research results suggested that the enhanced hands-on intervention should be added to the current engineering curricula in order to help students to improve their academic performance.

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This paper discusses the creation of a makerspace on Mississippi State’s campus. A makerspace is a location that provides prototyping and design tools, and is made available to students, faculty, and staff. The process of starting, staffing, and funding the space are discussed, as well as, the liability of operating the space. The paper outlines the operation of the space as a student organization partnered with the university, and the unique approach of networking existing campus resources into a shared organizational structure.

Much has been written in academic and popular publications about organizational change. Topics have ranged from case studies to anecdotal stories of how leaders can change an organization. There is little written on changing the culture and vision of a profession at the macro level. This dissertation shows that one key to effecting change within a profession is to educate those at the entrant level and thereby effect change with the profession. Over time, these new entrants to the profession will rise to senior positions and be able to effect greater change through the hiring, training, and mentoring processes inherent in the professions and the organizations for which they work. One way to effect change in these entrants is through education in college and professional schools. This study is specifically focused on effecting change in the interdisciplinary field of engineering and public policy. Public policy involves countless infrastructure issues at all levels of government. Engineers are well-versed in dealing with the technical issues of infrastructure but their voice is often lacking at the policy level. Similarly, political scientists are well-versed in policy but are often lacking in a thorough understanding of the technical aspects of the policy. Through an introductory course in engineering and public policy, undergraduate students from the seemingly disparate fields of engineering and political science were placed in a common classroom and through lectures, writings, presentations, and guided discussions their attitudes on key areas were changed. Areas studied were professional interest, legitimacy, deference, the public policy process, and education outside of a specific field. Through the process of education, changes in each of these areas was possible. Further, the movement was towards making students in each discipline more open to the input, opinions, and attitudes of others, and specifically in shifting engineers toward a more positive view of the public policy process. Being exposed to these topics and to each other’s thought processes, changes in professional attitudes were made. While there is not a specific profession for which any research has been done, the military is used, in places, as an analog to the profession of engineering.

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<p>This dissertation is premised on using an asset-based framework to investigate how engineering educators provide culturally relevant engineering education to Nigerian students at the undergraduate level. Its research questions are as follows: <i>How do engineering educators provide culturally relevant teaching to Nigerian students? What can we learn about culturally relevant teaching in engineering education from a comparative study of institutions and educators in the Nigerian context? What are the affordances, challenges, and recommendations</i><i>?</i> This dissertation leverages the socio-psychological teacher conceptions of “knowledge,” “social relations,” and the “self” and “others” described by Gloria Ladson Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) framework. Schools located in all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones and participants fluent in her three major spoken languages are represented in the study. The analyzed data for this study include surveys, in-person and virtual classroom observations, teacher reflection journals, classroom artifacts, school policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with 37 engineering faculty members, 2 provosts, 5 engineering college deans, and 2 students. The findings reveal a strong penchant for <b>analogies and proverbs as analogical bridges</b> that engineering instructors in this context used when traditional experiments, classroom demonstrations, or available educational resources failed. Nuances of culturally-relevant teacher conceptions include: <u>using proverbs to build cognitive reasoning in Nigerian engineering classrooms; visual and auditory cues as a type of formative feedback; analogies as a pedagogical form; advocating for active and authentic learning through tutorials; leveraging the communal nature of the culture in the classroom; colonial antecedents responsible for certain school policies; manifestations of Ladson-Billings’ conceptions in this context; and peculiarities of the three CRP criteria in this context.</u> The dissertation concludes with implications of the study for culturally relevant engineering education and useful recommendations for instructors looking for culturally relevant ways of supporting students of Nigerian origins in their engineering classrooms.</p>

In the past two decades, there has been an increased demand for more innovative individuals and organizations. In response to this need, a number of groups have begun to teach innovation courses to improve people's innovation skills. While many of these groups report success in helping people become more innovative, there is no way to test the effectiveness of the innovation courses. This study describes the development and initial validation of an innovation test instrument. It demonstrates how the author identified the content domain of the test and created test items. Then it describes initial validation testing of the instrument. This study found that this assessment is a good first step in creating an innovation assessment that covers more of the full process of innovation than previous tests. It still needs further validation and improvement to make strong claims about its ability to determine the effectiveness of an innovation course.