<p> One of the most sought after abilities in matriculating engineering students is the ability to negotiate cultural differences and build sustainable partnerships with others. This core attribute of the National Academy of Engineers' Engineer of 2020 is one of the least researched areas in engineering education literature. The ABET Engineering Accreditation Committee requires engineering programs to addresses this need in student outcomes "(g) an ability to communicate effectively, (h) the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context, and (i) a recognition of the need for and an ability to engage in life-long learning". The essential learning outcomes of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) requires that graduating students be able to use practical and intellectual skills to address contemporary and enduring issues with a core component of this being the ability to communicate with diverse others to negotiate shared meanings. These qualities are foundational requirements for engineers' sustained participation in the diverse, multinational workforce where teaming, design, and innovation are imperative. </p><p> Current research efforts in this area use a cacophony of terms to describe these qualities within the engineering education literature. This creates silos of research and inhibits collaborative conversations. This research seeks to negotiate shared meaning through the following two goals to aid in quieting the din. 1) To offer a term with generative promise for the inclusive practice of engineering. 2) To provide a multi-dimensional portrait of the ways first-year engineering students communicate and make meaning around cultural differences. The first goal is considered through the lens of Politically Attentive Relational Constructionism. This research explores terms and associated theories by considering their histories and the opportunities they offer for the inclusive practice of engineering. Generative promise of the terms was considered based upon how they accounted for the communicative nature of understanding of otherness, the relational nature of the negotiation of meaning, the political nature of encounters with cultural others, the historical and socio-cultural context of encounters, and whether these attributes are considered in the context of a bio-psycho-socio-cultural developmental continuum. The term cultural humility defined as "the lifelong, geopolitically situated, developmental process of negotiating cultural difference in the creation of sustainable, mutually beneficial as defined by all participants, partnerships" has the most opportunity for educational practices. The second goal is reached by taking a mixed-methods approach to locate first-year engineering students within the developmental continuum. The quantitative portrait of first-year students used both the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale - Short (M-GUDS-s) and the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). IDI results revealed that first-year students as a cohort are in polarization. The qualitative montage provides an understanding of how first-year students communicate their experiences with cultural others using polarizing and minimizing language. Collectively these studies establish a starting point from which engineering educators can begin a collaborative effort in creating evidence based practices to engage first-year students in this lifelong process.</p>

<p> Proper hand hygiene is the most effective and efficient method to prevent over 1.3 million deaths annually from diarrheal disease and Acute Respiratory Infections (ARIs). Hand hygiene is also indispensable in achieving the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to reduce the childhood mortality rate by 2/3rds between 1990 and 2015. Handwashing has been found in a systematic review of studies to reduce diarrhea by 47% and is, thus, capable of preventing a million deaths (Curtis et. al., 2003). Despite this evidence, hand washing rates remain seriously low in the developing world (Scott et al., 2008). </p><p> This study developed and implemented a comprehensive monitoring strategy of five usage variables (i.e., soap usage, functionality, presence of cleansing agent, ground wetness under station, amount of water in the jug) for 42-64 appropriate technology handwashing stations. These stations were monitored throughout 2011-2013 in two communities in Mali, West Africa. Statistically significant (p &lt; 0.05) results include: 1) a 29% decrease in soap usage from dry (October&ndash;June) to rainy seasons (July&ndash;September), 2) 35% decrease in stations with presence of cleansing agent between 2011 and 2012, 3) higher station usage for stations in households with higher scores on the Progress out of Poverty Index^&reg;, 4) 27% less of the stations far from a water source (35 meters&ndash;172 meters away) had a cleansing agent present than stations close to a water source (less than 35 meters) during the rainy season. Station usage also differed based on gender of the handwashing station owner in the two communities where stations built by women were used more in Zeala than those in Nci'bugu. In contrast to Zeala, handwashing stations built by men in Nci'bugu had higher soap usage and usage variable proportions than those built by women. Handwashing training and promotions resulted in 98% of households reporting that they wash their hands with soap in 2012 from 0% in 2011. Altogether, this study designed and implemented a robust monitoring system that succeeded in quantifying handwashing station usage for over two years. In-depth analysis of the data established six sustainability factors for handwashing stations (gender, training, water, seasonality, wealth, and monitoring) that are critical for lasting handwashing behavior change and successful hygiene interventions to save lives.</p>

<p> The representation of female students and students of color within the civil engineering discipline has been relatively stagnant during the last thirty years. <i>Leaky pipeline</i> approaches attempt to provide measures or programs that try to reduce the exiting of female students or students of color without necessarily addressing the social complexities of the environment itself. This ethnographically informed case study provides an explanation of social complexities that may prevent female students and students of color from fully fitting inside their civil engineering discipline. </p><p> Specifically, this study explored how female students and students of color navigated their civil engineering discipline as juniors or seniors at a medium-sized public university in the United States Southwest. During 2013, five staff members (all female) and eight students&mdash;both male and female&mdash;were interviewed. In addition, the researcher observed two upper division classes for a month and half, three times a week. The researcher also observed public spaces inside the engineering building. Finally, the researcher reviewed and analyzed public websites, syllabi, degree progression plans, and newsletters to further support findings. </p><p> Using a Grounded Theory approach and informed by critical and post-structural feminist and race theory, the researcher adapted a Grounded Theory Paradigm Model (Strauss &amp; Corbin, 1990) to expose contradictions for explaining the social complexities of the context. The researcher found that students who identified outside the dominant white male role saw nuances of the context because of their Border Identities. Border identities, which evolved as a result of students coming from a different ethnicity, community background, and gender, allowed contradictions to be exposed and examined. As a result, the researcher discovered that highly regulatory educational contexts such as a civil engineering discipline support rituals leading to professionalization of students (in this case, as future engineers). Professionalization, which espouses values of sameness as related to the individual, in fact penalizes "the different." Through the professionalization of students, values of hard work, productivity, meritocracy, and effort intend to homogenize the experience of civil engineering students across the board, despite differences of identity, in order to maintain and preserve the dominant white male context.</p>

<p> Recent advances in technology and ideology have unlocked entirely new directions for education research. Mounting pressure from increasing tuition costs and free, online course offerings are opening discussion and catalyzing change in the physical classroom. The flipped classroom is at the center of this discussion. The flipped classroom is a new pedagogical method, which employs asynchronous video lectures, practice problems as homework, and active, group-based problem-solving activities in the classroom. It represents a unique combination of learning theories once thought to be incompatible--active, problem-based learning activities founded upon constructivist schema and instructional lectures derived from direct instruction methods founded upon behaviorist principles. The primary reason for examining this teaching method is that it holds the promise of delivering the best from both worlds. A controlled study of a sophomore-level numerical methods course was conducted using video lectures and model-eliciting activities (MEAs) in one section (treatment) and traditional group lecture-based teaching in the other (comparison). This study compared knowledge-based outcomes on two dimensions: conceptual understanding and conventional problem-solving ability. Homework and unit exams were used to assess conventional problem-solving ability, while quizzes and a conceptual test were used to measure conceptual understanding. There was no difference between sections on conceptual understanding as measured by quizzes and concept test scores. The difference between average exam scores was also not significant. However, homework scores were significantly lower by 15.5 percentage points (out of 100), which was equivalent to an effect size of 0.70. This difference appears to be due to the fact that students in the MEA/video lecture section had a higher workload than students in the comparison section and consequently neglected to do some of the homework because it was not heavily weighted in the final course grade. A comparison of student evaluations across the sections of this course revealed that perceptions were significantly lower for the MEA/video lecture section on 3 items (out of 18). Based on student feedback, it is recommended that future implementations ensure tighter integration between MEAs and other required course assignments. This could involve using a higher number of shorter MEAs and more focus on the early introduction of MEAs to students.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1670. Adviser: Scott D. Johnson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-105) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: engineering education; traffic engineering; active learning; transportation engineering. Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-83).

This thesis presents a design for an Intelligent Educational System to support the teaching of design evaluation in engineering. The design consists of a simple computerbased tool (or 'learning environment') for displaying and manipulating infonnation used in the course of problem solving, with a separate dialogue component capable of discussing aspects of the problem and of the problem solving strategy with the user. Many of the novel features of the design have been incorporated in a prototype system called WOMBAT. The main focus of this research has been on the design of the dialogue component. The design of the dialogue component is based on ideas taken from recent work on rational agency. The dialogue component has expertise in engaging in dialogues which support collaborative problem solving (involving system and user) in domains characterised as justified beliefs. It is capable of negotiating about what to do next and about what beliefs to take into account in problem solving. The system acquires problem-related beliefs by applying a simple plausible reasoning mechanism to a database of possible beliefs. The dialogue proceeds by turn-taking in which the current speaker constructs their chosen utterance (which may consist of several propositions and questions) and explicitly indicates when they have finished. When it is the system's turn to make an utterance, it decides what to say based on its beliefs about the current situation and on the likely utility of the various possible responses which it considers appropriate in the circumstances. Two aspects of the problem solving have been fully implemented. These are the discussion about what criteria a decision should be based on and the discussion about what decision step should be taken next. The system's contributions to the interaction are opportunistic, in the sense that at a dialogue level the system does not try to plan beyond the current utterance, and at a problem solving level it does not plan beyond the next action. The results of a formative evaluation of WOMBAT, in which it was exposed to a number of engineering educators, indicate that it is capable of engaging in a coherent dialogue, and that the dialogue is seen to have a pedagogical purpose. Although the approach of reasoning about the next action opportunistically has not proved adequate at a problem solving level, at a dialogue level it yields good results.

<p> The ability to solve problems in creative and innovative ways is more critical than ever in today&rsquo;s rapidly-changing society. To support these demands, the educational curricula in the U.S. and other countries adopted engineering design as a learning platform to promote students&rsquo; creativity, communication and design skills, and innovative problem-solving abilities. When using engineering design, many educators use a variety of engineering design process models. However, little is known about the problem-solving processes in terms of design cognition. Therefore, in this study, the researcher examined the problem-solving patterns of students who engage in engineering design using a cognitive pattern approach. </p><p> This study was conducted as part of the NSF-funded Science Learning through Engineering Design (SLED) project for elementary science students&rsquo; grades three to six. The researcher adopted the sequential analysis method to identify students' problem-solving patterns. Sequential analysis is a statistical research method to detect behavioral or psychological patterns by analyzing repeated cognitive events. The researcher sampled a total of 48 Concurrent Think-Aloud (CTA)sessions to examine the statistical significance of the sequential analysis. Two coders independently conducted data coding using Halfin&rsquo;s codes and confirmed a high range of inter-rater reliability with 97.22 % overall agreements and .86 Kappa coefficients. </p><p> The first research question aimed to identify the common cognitive strategies used by elementary science students in engineering design. The researchers pooled 48 CTA sessions to investigate the common cognitive strategies. The results indicated that the students largely concentrated on idea generation (DE) and sketching (MO) while less emphasized on questioning (QH), predicting (PR), managing (MA), and analyzing (AN). Moreover, the researcher confirmed that the upper level graders showed higher frequencies of cognitive strategies than lower graders. </p><p> The second research question aimed to investigate the common problem-solving sequential patterns of the engineering design process. After pooling the 48 CTA sessions, the researcher analyzed the statistical significances of two-event sequential patterns using GSEQ software. The statistical analysis yielded 14 significant two-event sequential patterns at the right-tailed 0.05 level and two-sided z distribution. Using the significant sequential patterns, the researcher built a pattern-based design process model. The model illustrates various iterations between the problem and solution strategies. The iterations in the problem strategies showed recursive cycles between defining the problem, analyzing, and managing. The solution focused iterations often began with questioning and proceeded to designing and modeling or designing and predicting. Moreover, the pattern model shows that managing and questioning played a key role in bridging problem and solution strategies. </p><p> The third research question was to identify how the cognitive strategies vary by design tasks. The researcher compared eight engineering design tasks used in the SLED project and confirmed that the structure of design problems was associated with the students&rsquo; problem-solving strategies. The results of data analysis showed that the participant students commonly emphasized on <i>Designing</i> and <i>Modeling</i> strategies. However, the researcher found that the modeling-driven design tasks required accurate mechanical designing lead students&rsquo; high concentrations on the <i> Modeling</i> strategy. </p><p> The last research question was to identify the differences of cognitive problem-solving patterns by design tasks. The study analyzed eight engineering design tasks and each task pooled six CTA sessions. The results confirmed that higher graders&rsquo; design tasks showed more complicated design pathways than younger graders&rsquo; design tasks. Additionally, the researcher found that each design task yielded distinct problem-solving pattern models. </p><p> Based on these results, the researcher suggested that engineering and technology educators need to highlight the multiple pathways of the engineering design process. The results showed many alternative problem-solving pathways rather than the standardized process models. The researcher also proposed that when adopting an engineering design approach in elementary curriculum, the program developers need to align its design procedure with learners&rsquo; sequential patterns of the design process. Engineering design problems provide rich opportunities to develop the cognitive abilities of young students. Additionally, the researcher encourages engineering and technology education programs to adopt multiple design process models aligned with the corresponding design problem types.</p><p>

<p> From a sociocultural point of view, this qualitative case study explored how upper-level, female undergraduate engineering students perceived the possibility of or experience with stereotype threat as shaping their experiences. The study also investigated how these students explained their reasons for choosing their engineering major, the challenges they encountered in the major, and their reasons for persevering in spite of those challenges. Using Steele and Aronson&rsquo;s (1995) stereotype threat theory as a framework, and considering the documented underrepresentation of females in engineering, the study sought to examine how stereotype threat shaped the experiences of these students and if stereotype threat could be considered a valid reason for the underrepresentation. </p><p> The study was conducted at a large, four-year public university. First, students in the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology completed the Participant Screening Survey. Based on responses from the survey, six female engineering students from the college were identified and invited to participate in the study. The participants came from the following majors: Electrical Engineering, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. After receiving the study consent letter and agreeing to participate, the students were involved in a 90-minute focus group meeting, a 45-minute one-on-one interview, and a 30-minute follow-up interview. </p><p> After conducting the data collection methods, the data were then transcribed, analyzed, and coded for theme development. The themes that emerged coincided with each research question. The themes highlighted the complex interactions and experiences shared by the female engineering majors. </p><p> The female students were enveloped in an environment where there existed an increased risk for activating stereotype threat. In addition, the female students described feeling pushed to prove to themselves and to others that the negative stereotype that &lsquo;females are bad at engineering&rsquo; was untrue. The findings illustrated the need for systematic changes at the university level. Intervention recommendations were provided. In regards to female underrepresentation in science fields, including engineering, stereotype threat certainly had the potential to cause the female students to question themselves, their abilities, their choice of an academic major, and subsequently remove themselves from a hostile learning or working environment. Thus, educational institutions and workplace organizations are responsible for not only educating themselves regarding stereotype threat, but also for taking steps to alleviate the pernicious effects of stereotype threat.</p><p>