Spatial ability represents our ability to mentally arrange, rotate, and explore objects in multiple dimensions. This ability has been found to be important for engineers and engineering students. Past research has shown that many interventions can be created to boost an individual’s spatial ability. In fact, past research has indicated that engineering students significantly increase in spatial ability without an intervention while they are enrolled in certain engineering courses. Some researchers have claimed that the spatial ability boosts are permanent after an intervention. However, most researchers do not check the validity of that claim with continued assessment after more than a week past the end of an intervention. Additionally, if engineering education researchers are trying to measure the impact of their separate spatial ability intervention while the participating engineering students are actively enrolled in engineering courses, a confounding variable is introduced as the courses can impact students’ spatial ability. To resolve this, the work presented in this paper reflects research on engineering students’ spatial ability maintenance during the winter break between semesters. It was found that newer students exhibit spatial ability improvement during the break, while older students maintain their spatial ability at the same level. A deeper statistical analysis revealed that there are other factors that play a role in spatial ability changes over the break that are more significant than how far students had progressed in their studies. Those factors include with academic performance, the sex of the students, playing music during the break, and prior life experiences.

<p>Black women make up 1.3% of undergraduate engineering students, 1% of bachelor’s engineering degrees awarded, and 0.6% of employed engineers. The magnitude of underrepresentation of Black women is strongly evident given the juxtaposition between these statistics and the percentage of Black women within the U.S. population. This underrepresentation of Black women in engineering exemplifies serious equity concerns involving the quality of women’s experiences in education and employment systems. The issues related to representation and retention in engineering among Black women signify that professional engineering environments that can be characterized by raced and gendered practices; practices that should be changed if engineering desires to be a more inclusive space for Black women. This reality brings up the question of whether undergraduate engineering education programs prepare Black women for the workplace and the extent to which their preparation process accounts for the raced and gendered challenges. This study examines the undergraduate preparation experiences of ten Black women engineers, exploring the challenges they have experienced that are associated with the raced and gendered culture of the engineering workplace. The goal of this study is to consider how undergraduate engineering education can better meet the needs of Black women so that they can successfully navigate the raced and gendered culture of engineering. Grounded in critical race feminism, this study leveraged narrative inquiry and counter-storytelling to address the following research question: How do Black women engineers describe their preparation to navigate the challenges in the engineering workplace associated with the raced and gendered culture of engineering? Findings from this study indicate that the formal curriculum of undergraduate engineering programs did not prepare Black women engineers for the raced and gendered culture of engineering. However, co-curricular activities, situated learning experiences, faith and spirituality, knowledge gained from graduate coursework, and the subsequent community cultural wealth gained from those experiences were instrumental in the preparation of Black women engineers for the raced and gendered culture of engineering. Two major implications of this work prompt the need for an ecosystems approach to change the culture of engineering and a formal preparation process for the raced and gendered culture of engineering.</p>

The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate engineering self-efficacy measures for undergraduate students (N = 321) and to examine whether students' engineering self-efficacy differed by gender, year level, and major. The relationships between engineering self-efficacy and academic achievement and intent to persist in engineering were also investigated. Data from engineering students from two southeastern universities were collected in spring 2013. Exploratory factor analyses resulted in a unidimensional general engineering self-efficacy scale and a three-factor (i.e., research skills, tinkering skills, and engineering design) engineering skills self-efficacy scale. Multivariate analyses of variance revealed that self-efficacy did not differ by gender or year level. Students in different engineering sub disciplines reported different levels of tinkering self-efficacy. Multiple regression analysis showed that engineering self-efficacy measures predicted academic achievement outcomes but not intent to persist in engineering. Engineering self-efficacy significantly contributed to the prediction of achievement after controlling for prior achievement. Research funded by the National Science Foundation, EEC Award No.1240328.

In this work, the vector equation of a straight line, a topic in vector geometry that students often struggle to understand, was investigated in an interactive, immersive augmented reality (AR) experience. In a user test, 28 undergraduate engineering students solved different collaborative tasks using the AR tool during a student-centred learning activity in a university mathematics course. Augmented reality combines virtual content with the reality to a create a coherent experience. Compared to desktop or mobile applications, immersive AR experiences, often using head-mounted displays (HMD), can be more engaging due to its multi-sensory user interaction, such as hand gesturing, spatial movement, and the perception of true three-dimensionality in a stereoscopic view. Due to recent improvements in hardware and decreasing costs, AR has been used more frequently in educational settings. Still, compared to the mobile form factor, HMD-based AR studies are underrepresented. While multiple studies report benefits of AR in education, such as increased student performance, achieving these benefits depends on the context of use and the specific AR implementation. The results of this work suggest that the three-dimensional and dynamic nature of immersive AR is well suited to investigating mathematical concepts such as the vector equation of a straight line. Compared to virtual reality (VR) experiences, immersive AR facilitates peer-to-peer interaction. Students were motivated to use the technology and reported task-related learning outcomes from the activity. For university curricula to benefit from immersive AR, interdisciplinary teams need to share knowledge to create appropriate AR experiences. Moreover, an AR implementation should follow a long-term approach and include students from both educational and technical domains into the design process.