This qualitative study inquired into the personal experience of three engineering professors and one associate dean who participated in an engineering education coalition—the Foundation Coalition—a National Science Foundation-funded project which attempted to reform undergraduate engineering curricula at six U.S. institutions of higher education. Through analysis of occupational life histories, and data from a larger study of curricular change processes, two dominant social narratives emerged. Cultural attributes of academia were conceptualized as a master narrative. The reform effort emerged as a counter-narrative by calling for a “culture change” in engineering education. I describe five areas where the counter-narrative challenged the master narrative: the rationale and need for educational change, the nature of faculty work, disciplinary relationships, relationships among faculty, and the incentive and reward system. The counter-narrative of reform promoted curricular and pedagogical change, more interdisciplinary and integrated foundations for engineering education, and encouraged partnerships and community over faculty isolation and autonomy. The counter-narrative challenged faculty complicity with the master narrative and offered alternative ways of viewing their role as faculty in higher education. The master and counter-narratives clashed over the nature of faculty work in research universities, fueling the ongoing debate about the relative value of research and teaching and the associated reward system. This study found that the four participants used different strategies to navigate the conflict between the two social narratives. One participant was informed by an ideal vision of engineering education, and never relinquished the quest for an opportunity to realize that vision. Another professor, energized by the collaborative environment created by the Coalition, continued to find creative avenues to partner with others to improve engineering education. A third participant worked, through compromise and accommodation, to craft an improved curriculum that worked within the local institutional culture. And finally, an associate dean, who rejected the duality of the master/counter-narrative worldview, reframed the reform effort by encouraging faculty working in educational change to view their work as scholarship. The findings from this study support faculty engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning and encourage faculty developers to find ways of supporting faculty in that effort.

This qualitative study inquired into the personal experience of three engineering professors and one associate dean who participated in an engineering education coalition—the Foundation Coalition—a National Science Foundation-funded project which attempted to reform undergraduate engineering curricula at six U.S. institutions of higher education. Through analysis of occupational life histories, and data from a larger study of curricular change processes, two dominant social narratives emerged. Cultural attributes of academia were conceptualized as a master narrative. The reform effort emerged as a counter-narrative by calling for a “culture change” in engineering education. I describe five areas where the counter-narrative challenged the master narrative: the rationale and need for educational change, the nature of faculty work, disciplinary relationships, relationships among faculty, and the incentive and reward system. The counter-narrative of reform promoted curricular and pedagogical change, more interdisciplinary and integrated foundations for engineering education, and encouraged partnerships and community over faculty isolation and autonomy. The counter-narrative challenged faculty complicity with the master narrative and offered alternative ways of viewing their role as faculty in higher education. The master and counter-narratives clashed over the nature of faculty work in research universities, fueling the ongoing debate about the relative value of research and teaching and the associated reward system. This study found that the four participants used different strategies to navigate the conflict between the two social narratives. One participant was informed by an ideal vision of engineering education, and never relinquished the quest for an opportunity to realize that vision. Another professor, energized by the collaborative environment created by the Coalition, continued to find creative avenues to partner with others to improve engineering education. A third participant worked, through compromise and accommodation, to craft an improved curriculum that worked within the local institutional culture. And finally, an associate dean, who rejected the duality of the master/counter-narrative worldview, reframed the reform effort by encouraging faculty working in educational change to view their work as scholarship. The findings from this study support faculty engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning and encourage faculty developers to find ways of supporting faculty in that effort.

Preparing engineering students for interdisciplinary practice in the workplace requires a meaningful understanding of interdisciplinary learning in engineering practice. Such an understanding could help to address the ongoing issues and concerns of the interdisciplinary learning of engineering students. The review of literature on interdisciplinary engineering education raises a major concern of the speculative approach to formulating learning outcomes of interdisciplinary engineering education, which results from the lack of understanding of how practising engineers engage in interdisciplinary learning in their workplaces. This thesis directly addresses this concern by providing the empirical evidence for a number of learning outcomes, and by identifying the associated learning practices found in three cases of interdisciplinary collaborations between engineers and life science practitioners. It also enhances the understanding of interdisciplinary learning in engineering practice by providing a detailed explanation of why engineers are more likely to engage in those learning practices and how they are more likely to achieve the learning outcomes. The main contribution of this thesis is in assembling the identified learning outcomes and the associated learning practices into one theoretical framework that embodies both the description and the explanation of interdisciplinary learning in engineering practice for a particular subclass – engineering for the life sciences. The framework describes interdisciplinary learning in terms of four epistemic practices and four learning outcomes. Additionally, it includes a contingent causal explanation for those practices and outcomes by validating the underlying causal relationships. The findings of this research could inform the formulation of learning outcomes and the deployment of learning practices in interdisciplinary engineering curricular. In addition, the generalisation of the findings to the education domain suggests practices that can help university students in their intellectual development.

The unique contribution to knowledge of this research is the study of the development of judgement capacity in apprentice and undergraduate engineering learners in Activity Led Learning (ALL) environments. Four case studies of engineering students investigated the learners' experiences of making judgements in various engineering undergraduate and apprenticeship programmes. A phenomenological research methodology was used to infer the learner's judgements from the learners' dialogues and actions that were observed during the learning activity. The findings of the study indicate that the experience and incidence of the learners' exertion of judgement is dependent upon the construct of the ALL environment to provide a problem space with potential for disjuncture, and the intentionality of the learners. The learners did not solve problems by a linear progression but repeatedly re-activated experiences and knowledge, exercising judgements until the states of disjuncture were satisfied leading to the conclusion of the problem. Heuristic judgements that may result in decision making errors tended to dominate the problem spaces though their incidence did not appear to be influenced by the technical or socio-technical demands of the project problem spaces. This thesis concludes that in ALL environments, projects of sufficient length and complexity similar to realistic professional practice, may enable students to acquire the practice of better judgement through disjuncture and by re-activating learning experiences and importing analogies into new problem spaces. However, to acquire skills and knowledge to improve judgement capacity, requires specific and purposeful interventions within ALL that enable the learner to know when heuristic judgements are reliable or otherwise unreliable, and acquiring reasoning strategies to compensate for the effects. It is proposed that in such interventions the learner learns to record their own judgements as they are exerted and to reflect critically on those judgements and their consequences. It also requires that any ALL project that aims to promote judgement capacity has in place assessment instruments that specifically consider the learner effort in the self-development of judgement.

<p>  </p> <p>The concept of computational thinking (CT) has become more prevalent across the engineering education research and teaching landscape. Yet much of the research to date has been more definitional and has not offered many ways to convert CT theory to practice. One prominent set of tools used across engineering disciplines is modeling and simulation, which allows students to create a representation of the outside world as they understand it. </p> <p>This three-paper dissertation connects modeling and simulation skills with eliciting CT by leveraging model-based reasoning as a theoretical framework. A learning design was created and delivered here via design-based research that includes educational frameworks such as productive failure and model-eliciting activities (MEAs) to structure the modeling activity within a classroom setting. The designed learning intervention used a four-part sequence to scaffold the modeling activity in the classroom: (1) planning the model, (2) building the model, (3) evaluating the model, and (4) reflecting on the model. A case study of a final-year capstone course in biological engineering implemented the four-week designed learning intervention as part of the course. </p> <p>The guiding research question for the study was <em>how do modeling and simulation activities elicit computational thinking practices in the context of undergraduate engineering education? </em>To approach this question, data were collected in audio transcripts and student-generated artifacts to identify areas where the modeling activity elicited different forms of CT in the student work. The first study examined how CT was elicited within the model-building phase and developed an initial codebook for CT practices and outcomes using thematic analysis. The second and third studies built upon that codebook and further the outcomes by analyzing the modeling activity's planning and evaluating/reflecting phases. The results indicate that CT is used throughout the entire modeling and simulation process as students engage in model-based reasoning. The identified CT practices of abstraction, algorithmic thinking, evaluation, generalization, and decomposition emerged from a thematic analysis, and each practice was further characterized and refined into a set of outcomes. Furthermore, each phase of the modeling activity emphasized unique CT outcomes suggesting that students would benefit from enacting the entire modeling and simulation process to acquire and practice a diverse range of CT outcomes. </p>

Engineering Education is a developing field, with new research and ideas constantly emerging and contributing to the ever-evolving nature of this discipline. Textual data (such as publications, open-ended questions on student assignments, and interview transcripts) form an important means of dialogue between the various stakeholders of the engineering community. Analysis of textual data demands consumption of a lot of time and resources. As a result, researchers end up spending a lot of time and effort in analyzing such text repositories. While there is a lot to be gained through in-depth research analysis of text data, some educators or administrators could benefit from an automated system which could reveal trends and present broader overviews for given datasets in more time and resource efficient ways. Analyzing datasets using Natural Language Processing is one solution to this problem. The purpose of my doctoral research was two-pronged: first, to describe the current state of use of Natural Language Processing as it applies to the broader field of Education, and second, to demonstrate the use of Natural Language Processing techniques for two Engineering Education specific contexts of instruction and research respectively. Specifically, my research includes three manuscripts: (1) systematic review of existing publications on the use of Natural Language Processing in education research, (2) automated classification system for open-ended student responses to gauge metacognition levels in engineering classrooms, and (3) using insights from Natural Language Processing techniques to facilitate exploratory analysis of a large interview dataset led by a novice researcher. A common theme across the three tasks was to explore the use of Natural Language Processing techniques to enable the computer to extract meaningful information from textual data for Engineering Education related contexts. Results from my first manuscript suggested that researchers in the broader fields of Education used Natural Language Processing for a wide range of tasks, primarily serving to automate instruction in terms of creating content for examinations, automated grading or intelligent tutoring purposes. In manuscripts two and three I implemented some of the Natural Language Processing techniques such as Part-of-Speech tagging and tf-idf (text frequency-inverse document frequency) that were found (through my systematic review) to be used by researchers, to (a) develop an automated classification system for student responses to gauge their metacognitive levels and (b) conduct an exploratory novice led analysis of excerpts from interviews of students on career preparedness, respectively. Overall results of my research studies indicate that although the use of Natural Language Processing techniques in Engineering Education is not widespread, although such research endeavors could facilitate research and practice in our field. Particularly, this type of approach to textual data could be of use to practitioners in large engineering classrooms who are unable to devote large amounts of time to data analysis but would benefit from algorithmic systems that could quickly present a summary based on information processed from available text data. / Ph. D.

This study of cooperative learning in post-secondary engineering education investigated achievement of engineering students enrolled in two intact sections of a computer-aided drafting (CAD) course. Quasi-experimental and qualitative methods were employed in comparing student achievement resulting from out-of-class cooperative and individualistic learning structures. The research design was a counterbalanced, repeated measures, nonequivalent control group design. During the first half of the semester, one course section served as the experimental group (cooperative learning) and the other section served as the control group (individualistic learning). During the second half of the semester, the treatment and control conditions were switched to the other section. Data collection involved a pretest, a mid-term exam, a final exam, weekly homework drawing grades, an introductory demographic survey, weekly peer reviews, and interviews. The data analyses showed that the differences between the treatment and control group means on the mid-term and final exams were not significant. However, the treatment group means on the weekly homework drawings were significantly higher than those for the control group in each half of the semester. The data revealed main effects of race, prior experience, time of achievement test administration, and prerequisite grade. A post-hoc analysis did not show significant differences among the various levels of prerequisite grade. Also, there were first-order interactions for gender-by-time, experience-by-time, method-by-time for the year as engineering major demographic variable, and method-by-academic year. Qualitative data revealed that most participants had positive group experiences, more participants preferred working in cooperative groups during more difficult activities than introductory material, academically stronger participants might have "carried" weaker participants in the cooperative groups, and there were times identified for cooperative group work during which groups did not work cooperatively. Based upon the findings in this study, one might reasonably conclude that cooperative and individualistic learning structures result in approximately equal student achievement. Thus, when deciding on the use of one learning structure over the other, instructors might focus on which approach seems more appropriate/practical for a particular instructional activity. / Ph. D.

Machinists are skilled tradespeople responsible for running a variety of machine tools to produce precision components for end-users or use in other manufacturing. This project identifies the current and future change in the number of machinists in the Tri-Cities area, especially the five-county service area of Northeast State Community College. Using an industry survey, the need for machinists is identified and evaluated to understand local employers’ needs. The results indicate industry needs more machinist to keep up with demand, as 6 out of 14 companies have open positions and, 8 reported difficulty filling openings. Furthermore, most companies are growing or stable overall, but have an average 15% of their machinists eligible to retire. The survey results show a need for more students to enroll in programs, such as the Machine Tool degree, or even for regional policy changes to encourage more young people to pursue machining.

In this dissertation, the focus was on the classroom climate of engineering students in the context of either their community college or their four-year university. Previous research on the classroom climate for STEM majors suggests that women and minorities may experience a "chilly climate" and find the classroom unwelcoming; this negative climate may in turn have an impact on a student's success or persistence in attaining a degree. The purpose of this study was to examine engineering students' perceptions of their classroom climate and how these perceptions are related to fundamental skills in engineering. Data from a 2009 National Science Foundation sponsored project, Prototype to Production: Processes and Conditions for Preparing the Engineer of 2020 (P2P), which contains information from students in 31 four-year colleges and 15 pre-engineering community college programs, were examined. After establishing measures for classroom climate and fundamental skills related to engineering through an exploratory factor analysis, results indicated that university students had higher perceptions of their fundamental engineering skills as compared to community college students. Community college engineering students, on the other hand, perceived their classroom climates as warmer than university engineering students. In order to explore differences in student perceptions by individual characteristics and by institution, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used. Results indicated that for both community college and university engineering students, a warmer perception of classroom climate was associated with a higher perception of fundamental engineering skills. For the community college data, there was significant but low variation between schools, suggesting that student level characteristics may explain more of the variation. At the individual level, the interaction terms for gender and race were significant, indicating that the association between gender and perceptions of fundamental engineering skills depends on race. For the university students, only gender was significant, with male students reporting higher perceptions of their fundamental engineering skills. Almost all of the engineering disciplines were significant, which led to an additional HLM analysis with engineering program as the highest nested unit. Results from this model indicated that the highest percentage of variation in fundamental skills in engineering was at the program level. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was (1) to develop a guideline for cooperative education; (2) to determine the current status of cooperative vocational education in Utah; and (3) to compare current practices with the established guideline. This study was completed in two parts. The first part involved the construction and verification of a guideline for cooperative education in Utah; the second, a survey of the current status of cooperative education. A descriptive survey technique was employed to gather data required for determination of the guideline's validity and relevance, and the current status of cooperative education in Utah. All 13 key administrators in the state office, 75 coordinators representing 84 percent of the initial mailings and 112 cooperating employers or 74 percent of the selected sample participated in this study. Opinions from the 13 key administrators in the Utah State Division of Vocational and Technical Education were largely in agreement with the tentative guideline derived from the two nationally accepted guides in cooperative education. Due to the lack of an official guide for cooperative education in Utah, many of the coordinators' interpretations of federal legislation and state regulations were based on their own convenience. Inconsistencies in programs, standards and requirements were frequently found among cooperative programs in Utah. There appear to be some discrepancies existing between the current practices and the established guideline mainly because in a majority of the programs: (1) students spend insufficient numbers of hours in attending school or receiving on- the-job training; (2) schools provide inadequate in-school instruction; and (3) students receive substandard on-the-job supervision.