Daria Kotys-Schwartz - US grants

This effort will create a new organization, Engineering for American Communities (EFAC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder to involve students in community-based projects for service learning. The role of EFAC, which in concept is a derivative of Engineers Without Borders, is to provide innovative and reasonably-priced design services for local, low-income customers aimed at creating significant impact on lives while being extremely affordable ? costing less than a single day?s pay. The products either result directly in an improved quality of life or provide customers with tools and solutions that might allow them to earn more money and attain a higher standard of living. This project represents an opportunity to conduct groundbreaking engineering education research to fully understand the impacts of altruistic engineering on student learning and attitudes, including commitment to engineering as a career. It integrates design for affordability throughout the K-16 engineering curriculum. Its ramifications will be assessed with a multitude of metrics, layered repeatedly throughout design activities. The investigation will develop an understanding of how participation in these activities changes student attitudes towards engineering, what students learn from participation, and whether the social context provided by these design activities may differentially recruit and retain students who have not traditionally been attracted to engineering.

The EFAC program provides powerful academic experiences for students in the University of Colorado at Boulder?s College of Engineering and Applied Science and its partner K-12 institutions, while building community with people in urban Denver and rural Colorado. This project seeks to discover how altruistic engineering affects a diverse audience of students and how to better prepare engineering students to meet the needs of a changing society. This model is replicable at almost any American university, where either an urban or a rural customer focus is within easy reach of its engineering students. It generates an opportunity to help U.S. citizens living below the poverty line, provides an innovative and unique learning situation for engineering students, and lays the framework for large-scale engineering education research with a cross-disciplinary set of set of researchers, teachers and learners.

This engineering education research project seeks to further explore the results from a pilot project that indicated that students who come to college under-prepared academically but who develop an engineering professional identity early in the curriculum perform better and are more likely to be retained. By understanding the role of identity on retention and academic success, more effective curricula can be created. A second aspect of the study is to examine, using the national MIDFIELD data set, the potential pool of students from under-represented groups, who can benefit from similar programs, and how identifying such students can expand the pool of qualified students to draw from.

The broader significance and importance of this project arises from the potential to dramatically increase the pool of students who have the ability to succeed in undergraduate engineering programs. If the project succeeds in verifying the hypothesis that there is a large pool of students from under-represented groups capable of success, this can significantly increase the STEM pipeline for these groups, and address pressing workforce issues. This project overlaps with NSF's strategic goals of transforming the frontiers through preparation of an engineering workforce with new capabilities and expertise. Additionally NSF's goal of innovating for society is enabled by creating results and research that are useful for society by informing educational policy and practices.

The objective of this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project is to to understand the design practices of contemporary engineering workplace and to understand how the design process is organized. A related purpose is to understand how professional practices relate to nominally similar practices in university engineering classes, and how any continuities and discontinuities between work and school might inform efforts to design engineering classes. These objectives are being accomplished through an exploratory, comparative, field-based ethnographic study of the design practices of professional engineers versus engineering students. Researchers are observing practicing engineers in the workplace - what they do, who they communicate with, what they say, and how they are organized. The results of the research will be the documentation and analysis of these observations.

The primary benefits of this research come in two areas: First, current theories of engineering design can be tested for validity against real data on what real engineers do every day. Second, education of engineers can be enhanced by preparing students more directly for what they will be doing in the workplace.

This collaborative research study seeks to develop a detailed, empirically grounded understanding of new engineers'transitions from schools to workplaces, and thereby to identify continuities and discontinuities between undergraduate education and professional practice in engineering. The study builds upon NSF-funded research by two of the investigators that followed engineering students through their undergraduate engineering experiences; this project represents a next step towards improving engineering education and furthering learning sciences research in neglected areas like STEM workplace learning. The engineers studied in this project will be recent graduates, taking positions typical of students from their institutions, and in economically important or expanding engineering sectors. The central methodology will be learning ethnographies, an innovative approach using ethnographic fieldwork to discover what these new engineers need to learn, how they learn it, what they appear to adapt or use readily from their prior educational experience, and the consequences of these for their workplace participation and developing identities as engineers. The learning ethnographies will ground two further aspects of the study: a comparison of workplace practices with those of these engineers' undergraduate programs, and a survey generalizing ethnographic findings to a broader population. Women and members of underrepresented minority groups will be oversampled to provide a basis for comparative analysis intended to understand distinctive experiences and challenges that members of these groups may face as they move into the workplace.

Lack of continuity between school and work in engineering is often noted, but details of mismatches are insufficiently understood to effectively inform practice; this research addresses this gap in understanding. For industry, it can inform reorganization of workplace practices to better facilitate transitions from school to work. For undergraduate programs, the research can provide a basis for educational practices to be adopted or deemphasized, allowing schools of engineering to better prepare students to be creative and successful engineers. For students, this research may lead to the development of more relevant and practically useful engineering knowledge and more accurate understandings of their possible future careers. It is also expected that this research will inform attempts at recruitment and retention of members of underrepresented groups.

1338154
Ferguson

The proposed system facilitates multimodal analysis of a single ROI on one modular platform by integrating an Atomic Force Microscope, an Ultra Nanoindentation Tester (max depth = 100 ìm; load = 50 mN), a Nanoindentation Tester (1000 ìm; 500 mN), and an optical microscope through which 2-D Raman microscopy (514 or 785 nm lasers) is performed. A high precision translation stage moves samples between modules. This proposed instrument will facilitate combined mechanical analysis, across multiple small length-scales, with determination of chemical composition at a single ROI. AFM and nanoindentation are well-established techniques for assessing stiff, conventional engineering materials. Yet most commercially available nanoindenters fail to accurately test materials that are hydrated, soft, or subjected to thermal changes. The CSM Instruments platform adeptly overcomes limitations of existing indenter systems by using one independent probe to find a sample's surface and continuously monitor thermal drift while a second probe indents the sample - critical for soft or fluid-like surfaces. Integration with a Raman microscope will facilitate combined analysis of mechanical behavior and materials chemistry in one exact ROI. Acquisition of this system at CU Boulder will inform design of cutting-edge materials in an unparalleled fashion and enhance our activities in world-class materials research.

Extant research pinpoints gaps between school and work in respect to engineering practice. For example, a recent American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) study identified a number of student weaknesses, such as: practical experience, project management, problem solving, and design. Equally important, industry supervisors have also identified these gaps. The misalignment between the engineering classroom and workplace poses serious challenges with the professional formation of engineers. Generally speaking, capstone courses are key academic experiences that can bridge these gaps. Few studies, if any, have examined the effectiveness of capstone courses in helping students make the transition from engineering classrooms to the workplace. Instead, most research focuses on course structure, pedagogy, assessment, and end-of-course outcomes. To address the knowledge gaps, the investigators draw on Wenger's concept of communities of practice to study students' experiences as they move from capstone courses to the workplace.

Using a multi-case study design, the project is focusing on four primary research questions:
(a) What skills, practices, and attitudes fostered through the capstone experience do individuals draw on or apply in their early work experiences?
(b) What differences do individuals identify between their capstone design and early work experiences, and how do those differences help or hinder their school-to-work transition?
(c) What specific pedagogical practices or aspects of the capstone course do students identify as helping or hindering their transition?
(d) In what ways do individuals perceive themselves to be underprepared in their early work experiences?

Further, with a particular focus on women and Hispanics, the investigators proposed to study the extent that capstone design courses prepared these students to enter communities of practice in engineering workplaces. This project is closely aligned with the National Science Foundation's strategic priorities to build the STEM workforce with capable individuals, as well as broadening participation in engineering among underrepresented groups.

In the scientific literature, there are numerous studies that highlight the gaps between theory and practice in relation to engineering education and the workplace, yet capstone courses are common practices that engineering instructors use to help students gain more in-depth engineering knowledge. There is a dearth of studies that have examined the effectiveness of capstone courses and how these courses may help students to translate and apply prior engineering coursework to the engineering workplace. With this in mind, this project has immense potential to positively impact engineering instruction across the nation. It also possesses great potential in helping engineering faculty to develop more effective capstone courses, while maximizing their instructional resources to create such courses. Ultimately, this project will benefit U.S. engineering industries seeking to hire adaptable engineering graduates who are technically and professionally prepared to enter the engineering workforce.