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<p>This dissertation consisted of a mixed-methods investigation into expectations about what “counts” as an engineering career and how individuals make decisions about their futures. Presented as a set of three independent but closely related studies, I examined the ways that engineering students, alumni, and educators think and talk about careers and career decision-making. This work focused not only on the content of participants’ experiences, but also the extent to which their claims may reflect or inform commonly held beliefs about what is normal, expected, or assumed. Such a focus adds an additional layer to ongoing conversations about how we can support students in their future endeavors. </p> <p><br></p> <p>The participants were students, alumni, or educators from four engineering programs (i.e., biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering) at a single institution in the United States. The first study investigated the experiences of engineering undergraduate students with varying career plans at the cusp of the college-to-career transition. The fourteen students balanced an expectation of passion and fulfillment against an uncertainty of how to choose from their many and wide-ranging career options. I analyzed participants’ claims through discourse analysis and leveraged the concept of transformative decisions to highlight the difficulty of applying a rational decision-making framework to engineering students’ career decisions.</p> <p><br></p> <p>To complement the student perspective, I also investigated the perspectives of engineering alumni and educators. In the second study, I collected survey data from engineering undergraduate degree holders (n = 1,979) who earned their degree between 1970 and 2019. Using write-in data, I mapped alumni’s career pathways for their first four positions after graduation (i.e., their early career pathways). While some findings were unsurprising (e.g., the recent Millennial generation has shorter position durations compared to previous generations), the findings also highlight that the pathways of engineering degree holders have been generally consistent across time. Alumni have always moved in and out of roles that have “engineer” in the job title. In the survey, the alumni also named up to three educators at the institution that had been influential on their career pathways; those educators were targeted in the third study to better understand how to support students. I interviewed eleven influential educators about the strategies they used to help students make career decisions, which ranged from presenting themselves as approach to helping students figure out their interests. Beyond the pragmatic recommendations, the final study also highlights how the advice educators give do not always reflect their own experiences, underscoring why it is important to be aware of the expectations embedded in the messages we tell students.</p>

In today's globalized and technology-driven landscape, engineers wield unprecedented influence. As a response to calls from engineering accrediting and professional organizations, engineering educators have begun to further emphasize the importance of ethical decision-making within the curriculum. However, despite numerous attempts to integrate ethics, there remains a lack of consensus on effective strategies, particularly for larger-scale initiatives. This research, utilizing Lattuca and Stark's (2009) Academic Plan model, explores the Pathways curriculum reform at Virginia Tech, a university-wide initiative aimed at integrating intercultural awareness and ethical reasoning across general education courses. Through a case study methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 faculty in the College of Engineering. Participants shared insights on the barriers encountered, resources utilized, and perceptions of ethical culture within their various academic environments. Additionally, participants described their network interactions within and beyond the curriculum reform initiative. Findings suggest faculty leverage existing networks during curriculum reform, with identified barriers categorized as influence-driven and resource-driven. Integrating these insights into the Academic Plan model offers a nuanced, process-oriented understanding of curricular change. / Doctor of Philosophy / In today's globalized and technology-driven landscape, engineers wield unprecedented influence. As a response to calls from engineering accrediting and professional organizations, engineering educators have begun to further emphasize the importance of ethical decision-making within the curriculum. However, despite numerous attempts to integrate ethics, there remains a lack of consensus on effective strategies, particularly for larger-scale initiatives. This research explores the Pathways curriculum reform at Virginia Tech, a university-wide initiative aimed at integrating intercultural awareness and ethical reasoning across general education courses. To understand faculty experiences related to the curriculum reform, interviews were conducted with 12 faculty in the College of Engineering. Participants shared insights on the barriers encountered, resources utilized, and perceptions of ethical culture within their various academic environments. Additionally, participants described their personal collaborations within and beyond the curriculum reform initiative. Findings suggest faculty leverage existing networks during curriculum reform, with identified barriers categorized as influence-driven and resource-driven. By integrating these insights into one connected framework, we might be able to better understand and navigate the barriers associated with curriculum reforms.

<p dir="ltr"><b>Background:</b> Though ethics has been recognized as an important aspect of engineering education, there is not a definitive consensus on what ethical engineering is. This dissertation seeks to understand what constitutes ethical behaviors in engineering by distinguishing them from other normative behaviors.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Purpose:</b> This study aims to understand what ethical engineering looks like in practice by addressing the research question: To what extent do engineering ethics experts agree when normative behaviors in engineering are also ethical in nature? While definitions of what constitutes ethical engineering practice are varied in the literature and have been debated theoretically by scholars, this study adopts an empirical approach to understand how experts in engineering ethics conceptualize ethical behaviors in engineering.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Methods:</b> This dissertation study uses a Delphi process to build consensus among experts on what behaviors constitute ethical engineering practice. The Delphi panel consisted of 27 scholars, educators, and practicing engineers with expertise in engineering ethics who provided iterative feedback across three rounds of data collection through questionnaires. Round 1 generated 25 statements of normative behaviors in engineering. Round 2 prompted panelists to judge the ethicality of each behavior. Round 3 presented panelists with the aggregated responses and opinions from the previous round and invited them to revise their judgments.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Findings:</b><b> </b>The results of the Delphi process identified areas of consensus and disagreement among the panel on which normative behaviors in engineering are generally considered ethical or non-ethical in nature. Of the 25 statements, panelists agreed that 20 of the behaviors tended to be ethical in nature and one behavior tended to be non-ethical in nature, while the remaining four statements did not yield consensus.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Contribution:</b> This research aims to provide clarity around what constitutes ethical behaviors in engineering by differentiating them conceptually from other normative behaviors in engineering practice. The empirical approach taken in this study has implications for research, teaching, and assessment in engineering ethics education. Specifically, the questionnaire developed through the Delphi process can be deployed to study engineering students and practitioners to make broader claims about what is ethical in engineering.</p>

This study was designed to investigate a phenomenon, persistence of undergraduate women in their engineering majors, from a qualitative paradigm. Guided by the tenets of feminist and inclusive research, the assumption was made that all women, whether they persist or not in their engineering majors, have strengths and insights into their own personal experiences. The experiences of African American women, Asian women, Caucasian women, Hispanic women, women from rural geographical areas, and non-persisters were investigated. A developmental life-span and social learning perspective called for an examination of factors relevant to engineering major choice and persistence from early childhood to the present time, including family background and individual factors, environmental factors and experiences with the engineering culture, and social factors relevant to major choice and persistence. Twenty-eight (28) persisters and 8 non-persisters participated in the study which was conducted at a large land-grant university in the southeastern United States in the fall of 1996. The following questions guided the study: (1) What experiences have been influential in undergraduate women's selection of engineering as a major? (2) How does the culture and climate of engineering education influence the experiences of these undergraduate women? (3) How do individual, educational, social, and environmental characteristics and strategies contribute to undergraduate women's persistence in their engineering majors? (4) Which of these characteristics and strategies differentiate between female persisters and non-persisters, in other words, what are the differences between academically successful undergraduate women who leave their engineering majors and those who remain in them? (5) How do characteristics and strategies of persistence and non-persistence compare for special populations? Qualitative interviewing through in-depth individual interviews and small group interviews was the method of data collection; participants were recruited through a purposive sampling frame as well as through volunteering and snowball sampling. Criteria for inclusion in the persisters group were junior or senior level academic standing and academic eligibility. Grounded theory methodology was the primary tool of analysis. The findings clearly demonstrated two major groups of persisters and non-persisters. One group of persisters made early decisions and stayed the course through academic preparation and hands-on experiences. A second group of persisters made later decisions based on encouragement and the structure of opportunity for women and minorities in engineering. One group of non-persisters left engineering for majors that provided a better person-environment fit. A second group of non-persisters, many of whom were pressured to major in engineering although they lacked hands-on experience, left their engineering majors for a variety of different reasons including intimidation, isolation, lowered confidence in their abilities, and personal problems. Perceptions and experiences with the institution itself and perceptions of the culture of engineering education varied depending on the career decision making process, group membership, and individual factors such as personality. Therefore, persistence and non-persistence were found to be a function of a complex interaction of individual, environmental, and social factors. / Ph. D.

Engineering education is increasingly becoming considered an important component of STEM integration in formal pre-college settings. Professional development programs take a significant role in helping teachers develop necessary classroom practices to integrate engineering into their curriculum. The COVID pandemic has further complicated instructional conditions, necessitating emergency remote learning methods to continue instruction amidst safety concerns. Combined with a general struggle to scaffold integration of engineering in K-12 classrooms, emergent conditions that restrict instructional choices such as pandemics threaten to repeatedly aggravate future efforts and make it prudent to consider the pedagogical choices teachers are able to make for STEM integration and what future professional development programs should try to do with teachers to enable them. This research aims to describe and explain the conditions and dynamics related to teacher pedagogical choice to employ engineering design activities in their classes both within the context of a partnership program and during the COVID pandemic. Using end-of-program semi-structured interviews with participant teachers in the VT PEERS (Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools) program collected in the midst of the pandemic, data was coded with a focus upon identifying connections with a dynamic framework for pedagogical choice as well as identifying and explaining the expansion of practices in the two contexts. The coding process yielded a set of themes for conditions and developments teachers experienced in the process of conducting classes with changes induced by the program and by measures in response to COVID. Findings from the study show that teachers with supports that overcome or nullify inhibitive factors for pedagogical choice will be able to adopt and develop innovative practices. Teachers balance proposed changes with their own sense of professional expectations influenced by internalized, structural, and cultural conceptions of their work. Remote learning modalities and COVID-induced safety measures constrained the ability to teach according to familiar principles of instruction, harming teachers' beliefs and development in the practice of the modalities. Based on these findings, the framework for teacher pedagogical choice showed VT PEERS' effectiveness in its opening presentation and execution to set the stage for teachers to make innovative choices to employ engineering activities, yet it was not as useful in describing how the remote learning measures taken during COVID would not lead to expanded practices for that modality. Thus, there is a need for a model that includes complex interactions between the teachers and their environment that promote or inhibit teacher agency. Such a model would inform a more empowering design and execution of professional development initiatives than feature-dependent frameworks. COVID also demonstrates that preparation will be necessary to equip teachers with more efficacious and flexible practices for remote learning to prevent further damage to student outcomes given that the potential for recurring pandemic conditions in the future makes remote learning more of an expectation than an emergency. / Doctor of Philosophy / Engineering education, the E in STEM, continues to gain attention as a needed subject in pre-college schooling. To do this, teachers primarily receive help from professional development programs to learn how to use engineering in their classrooms. The COVID pandemic created a new condition for instruction that may complicate the process of using engineering, and the restrictions to how teachers teach may adversely affect their choices when it comes to engineering. Understanding the process of teachers making the innovative choices and how they come to do so is an important topic for research. This research aims to describe and explain the choices teachers make for the practices they use in the classroom to employ engineering design activities within the context of a partnership program and during the COVID pandemic. Using end-of-program semi-structured interviews with teachers as part of their involvement in VT PEERS (Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools), I looked at teachers' perspectives on their experiences and struggles using a theory of choice-making to inform analysis. Findings from the study show that teachers that receive appropriate support and feel free to choose what they do are able to make innovative choices and become more skillful. Teachers are influenced to make choices by what they believe their job requires of them; the way schools work and how others view the role of schools affects this belief as much as the teachers themselves do. However, when choice is restricted and teachers cannot teach the way they would choose to, such as during COVID with distant and computer-based classes, they are neither growing nor thriving in their job. The theory for teacher choice used to analyze these interviews helped understand the role of the partnership in helping teachers choose to use engineering activities in classrooms, but helped less to understand how teachers struggled during COVID. It appears that when teachers actually have choices, they can be innovative; therefore, professional development programs should consider that promoting teacher choice is a necessary initial step to bring about change in schools, including for engineering education. Furthermore, COVID may not be the last pandemic within this generation, and education reforms (including for engineering education) may need to account for future instances of remote schooling as an expectation rather than considering it to be an unfortunate, one-off issue of education.

The dilemma of making education an equitable system, especially for minoritized groups, has persisted for centuries. While there have been efforts aimed at decreasing disparities, there is still more work that needs to be done. An often-overlooked population in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is Black men—a group at the nexus of being a gender majority and racial minority. Thus, the purpose of this exploratory research study is to understand how Black men experience interpersonal relationships in undergraduate engineering programs. The overarching research question that guides this study is: What are the qualitatively different aspects of interpersonal relationships experienced by Black men in undergraduate engineering programs? Using Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory as a lens and a quasi-phenomenography methodology to understand the variance of the students' relationships, I conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with students who identified as a Black man and were a second-year or higher in their undergraduate engineering program. By examining interpersonal relationships, I clarify the meaningfulness of relationships at one historically Black college and university (N=1) and two historically white institutions (N=13). A total of seven relationship types and ten different ways students described their relationships were identified in the data. Each of the ways students described their relationship was organized on the emergent domains of academic, emotional/mental, financial, professional, social, and spiritual. Students also mentioned five environmental influences that impacted their experiences in engineering. My results indicate that students find value in relationships with people who were relatable, people who could provide insight or knowledge, and people who showed a sense of care or concern for the student. Students also mentioned how environmental influences bear significance on their over experience in engineering. The present study lays the groundwork for holistically examining the interpersonal relationships of Black men in undergraduate engineering programs. / Doctor of Philosophy / For decades, Black men have experienced educational hardships from as early as first grade. While many researchers have identified areas to improve the educational experience for Black men, few have looked at the educational experience of Black men in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). My research adds to the current conversations surrounding Black men in undergraduate engineering programs by looking at how relationships impact their educational experiences. I conducted a research study with 14 Black men in undergraduate engineering programs at two historically white institutions (N=13) and one historically Black university (N=1). I asked Black men about the types of relationships they had and why those relationships were meaningful to them. I also asked the students if there were outside influences such as stereotypes held by society that might impact how they look at their relationships. The students primarily discussed relationships with their STEM peers and professors. Relationships that were more meaningful for students were with people who were relatable, people who could provide insight or knowledge, and people who showed a sense of care or concern for the student. Outside influences that impacted students' relationships were their academic major, the type of institution they attended, their gender, their race/ethnicity, and National events. These findings contribute in several ways to our understanding of the value of relationships and provide a basis for future research involving Black men in STEM.

The purpose of my dissertation study is to better understand the educational experiences of undergraduate engineering students within non-curricular learning environments, specifically in the form of extracurricular engineering groups or programs. I first conducted a content analysis of engineering education literature to identify where engineering design learning occurs, and to synthesize the implications of studies regarding engineering design learning. Aiming to fill a gap in the literature regarding non-curricular learning contexts, this study investigated what extracurricular groups and programs can educationally provide undergraduate engineering students by observing and interviewing students engaging in these environments. This study also aimed to identify if and how engineering students find navigational flexibility within engineering curricula, and how non-curricular learning environments might provide navigational flexibility. With regard to where engineering design learning occurs, the literature points to various educational contexts that effectively deliver engineering design education. Strategies that involve authentic and longer-term engineering design experiences tend to be the most impactful in terms of student outcomes and perceptions, however those experiences are not always implementable at larger scale. More traditional educational approaches to engineering design learning, though less impactful, are still effective delivery methods for introducing key aspects of engineering design education (e.g. modeling, global/societal/economic/environmental factors, communication skills). However, there was limited literature regarding more non-curricular learning experiences, such as learning in designed settings, outreach learning, learning media, and everyday informal learning. This literature review is one of the first attempts towards synthesizing where and how engineering design learning occurs, and has identified a significant gap in the literature regarding non-curricular educational settings. Addressing the identified gap in engineering education literature regarding non-curricular learning experiences, this dissertation study investigated five non-curricular engineering learning sites for undergraduate engineering students at a large research-driven state institution. Informed by the preliminary findings of a pilot study, I first investigated the salient features of engineering-related non-curricular activities from the students' perspectives using a self-directed learner autonomy framework to guide the study. Students participating in extracurricular engineering environments exhibited strong attributes of self-directed learners, particularly a willingness and ability to be challenged and to learn. The educational environments of the extracurricular opportunities cultivated these self-directed learning attributes by providing students a space to be exposed to an engineering community, authentic engineering work, and accessible resources. Findings from this portion of the dissertation indicated necessary modifications to the self-directed learner autonomy framework used to guide this study. The modified framework contributes a possible approach towards future assessment or research pursuits regarding non-curricular learning experiences in engineering. I also investigated the role non-curricular activities play in providing engineering students navigational flexibility through engineering curricula. Extracurricular engineering environments afford navigational flexibility by offering students opportunities to work on motivating challenges with and among supportive communities. By providing a space for students to express their engineering selves in primarily self-directed ways, extracurricular engineering experiences cultivate students' drive to find and pursue personally meaningful curricular and non-curricular educational experiences. However, institutional barriers, particularly time constraints and institutionally recognized achievements, stifle students' flexibility and willingness to pursue personally meaningful experiences. The findings of this study have helped uncover the various affordances non-curricular learning experiences provide engineering students, but more importantly, have identified the institutional barriers that prevent students from taking full advantage of non-curricular learning experiences. Based on these findings, I recommend that university and program level structures be reevaluated to encourage and provide students with more flexibility to find personalized learning experiences in and out of the classroom. / Ph. D.

This dissertation illuminates patterns across disparate university data sets to identify the insights that may be gained through the analysis of large amounts of disconnected student data on first-year engineering (FYE) students and to understand how FYE instructors use data to inform their teaching practices. Grounded by the Academic Plan Model, which highlights student characteristics as an important consideration in curriculum development, the study brings together seemingly distinct pieces of information related to students' learning, engagement with class resources, and motivation so that faculty may better understand the characteristics and activities of students enrolled in their classes. In the dissertation's first manuscript, I analyzed learning management system (LMS) timestamp log-files from 876 students enrolled in the FYE course during Fall 2013. Following a series of quantitative analyses, I discovered that students who use the LMS more frequently are more likely to have higher grades within the course. This finding suggests that LMS usage might be a way to understand how students interact with course materials outside of traditional class time. Additionally, I found differential relationships between LMS usage and course performance across different instructors as well as a relationship between timing of LMS use and students' course performance. For the second manuscript, I connected three distinct data sets: FYE student's LMS data, student record data, and FYE program survey data that captured students' motivation and identity as engineers at two time points. Structural equation modeling results indicate that SAT Math was the largest predictor of success in the FYE course, and that students' beginning of semester engineering expectancy was the only significant survey construct to predict final course grade. Finally, for the third manuscript I conducted interviews with eight FYE instructors on how they use student data to inform their teaching practices. Ten themes emerged which describe the limited explicit use of formal data, but many instructors use data on an informal basis to understand their students. Findings also point to specific, existing data that the university already collects that could be provided to instructors on an aggregate, class-level basis to help them better understand their students. / Ph. D.

Many universities across the United States have been experiencing an increased demand for computer science majors. Adjusting curriculum to meet increased demand runs the risk of damaging ongoing efforts to broaden participation in computer science. To manage growth, and increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities in the field, we must first understand current patterns for participation, and factors that may impact access and persistence. Universities with common first-year engineering programs present an opportunity for addressing some of the barriers that have traditionally limited access to computer science to certain groups. In particular, common first-year programs could provide early positive experiences with computer programming which encourage more students to consider computer science as a viable major. To better understand how a common first-year engineering program may impact matriculation and persistence in computer science, I conducted studies to identify high-level patterns of participation in computer science, as well as how students experience programming instruction in an introductory engineering course. All studies share the same context: a large public research institution with a common first-year engineering program. Results indicate that women are leaving computer science at all points of the curriculum, contributing to a reduced representation of women earning CS degrees. In contrast, URM and first-generation students have higher representation at graduation than when declaring major interest before the start of their first year. / Doctor of Philosophy / Many universities across the United States have been experiencing an increased demand for computer science majors. Adjusting curriculum to meet demand runs the risk of damaging efforts to increase the diversity of the computer science workforce. To manage growth and increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities (students who are not white or East Asian) in the field, we must first understand who currently studies computer science, and factors that lead to their success in the major. Universities with general first-year engineering programs present an opportunity for addressing some of the barriers that have traditionally discouraged women and underrepresented minorities from pursuing computer science. In particular, these programs could provide early positive experiences with computer programming which encourage more students to consider computer science as a possible major. To better understand how experiences during students’ first-year transition to college may impact decisions to major in computer science, I conducted studies to explore who enters computer science, and how they succeed in the major, as well as how students experience programming instruction in an introductory engineering course. All studies share the same context: a large public research institution with a general first-year engineering program. Results indicate that women are leaving computer science at all points of the curriculum, contributing to a reduced representation of women earning CS degrees. In contrast, underrepresented minority students and students with parents who did not receive a college degree, make up a higher percentage in the group graduating with a CS degree than in the group who declare CS as their first major.