Cynthia J. Atman - US grants

The University of Washington College of Engineering proposes to mount a major new initiative to integrate biology into the engineering curriculum for undergraduate and graduate students. They will develop this initiative in phases. In the first phase, key elements will be developed under Action Agenda support. In later phases A three-tiered system is proposed that will affect all undergraduate engineering students at the University of Washington.

First Tier: The first level will include all engineering undergraduates, and will involve the integration of intriguing biological examples of engineering concepts ("mini-modules") into the existing core engineering curriculum at the Freshman and Sophomore levels. In addition, they will create ENGR/BIO Freshman Interest Groups to create a forum for students with early interest in the engineering/biology interface to interact.

Second Tier: The second level will involve development of a new Junior-level course entitled,
"Biological Frameworks for Engineers." This will be a hands-on project based course in fundamental engineering-based biological concepts that will develop in engineers the common language and concepts of biology.

Third Tier: The third level is a more in-depth learning experience in the interface between biology and engineering. These experiences take many forms: 1) a large number of existing and planned courses in more specialized subjects, 2) undergraduate research opportunities, and 3) industrial internships at the engineering/biology interface. Once students have taken the new junior-level course, they will be better prepared to take advantage of each of these opportunities.

This project will take a research-informed approach to understanding how undergraduate engineering majors progress in their studies of engineering design. Its goal is to better understand and describe design expertise and a learner's growth towards acquiring that expertise. In this work, the investigators intend to undertake research in three areas:
(1) The development of a continuum of design expertise as a way of describing learners' growth toward acquiring expertise, (2) A study of design expertise that will provide information to help populate the continuum, and (3) The demonstration of a research-informed approach in design education through the use of the continuum to enhance and assess student
learning of engineering design during their cooperative (coop) experiences. This research should help us to better understand how students learn design principles in engineering, and the continuum, itself, may be of great help to engineering faculty in their efforts to teach design.

EIA-0121345
Tanimoto, Steven
University of Washington

ITR/PE: A Learning Environment for Information Technology Concepts Using Intensive, Unobtrusive Assessment





Although many learning environments have been developed that effectively engage students in assembling computational objects, simulations, or mathematical constructions, for the most part these systems fail to take pedagogical advantage of the wealth of assessment-related data that results from the fact that the students are working on computers. This is due less to the newness of these environments than to the challenges of effectively utilizing the event logs, student writing, and student constructions as evidence of cognitive state, learning preferences, and skills. We propose to integrate and extend two software systems for online education in order to perform a series of experiments that assess the impact of using intensive, unobtrusive assessment tightly integrated with a constructive learning environment upon learning outcomes and efficiencies. The integrated learning environment will be tested primarily with University of Washington freshmen but also with Mercer Island High School seniors, in problem solving and construction activities involving digital image representation and processing, web-based communication, and computer programming. The students' writing, online constructions, online sketches and computer-generated activity logs will be analyzed using a combination of computer-assisted and automated mark-up. The results of mark-up will trigger pedagogical recommendations to instructors, and in some cases, directly to the students. Such interventions may take a variety of forms; for example, a group of students stuck at the point of frustration in solving some problem may benefit by having a key step, performed well by a student in another group, called to their attention. Our objective will be to determine effective methods both for extracting pedagogically useful information from the products and byproducts of online learning and for designing the instruction to enable and benefit from the use of this information.

The instructional development program of the University of Washington provides a rich context for learning about the challenges that faculty face in efforts to enhance their teaching, and how to help faculty face these challenges. This project will:

1. Document the unique instruction-related concerns/questions of engineering faculty and the types of responses that fulfill these concerns.
2. Document the complexities associated with designing and executing instructional development services in the context of engineering.
3. Document cultural factors important for engineering instructional development.
4. Share this information with others interested in supporting faculty efforts to enhance/modify their teaching (including campus level instructional developers, workshop designers, national reform groups, and even faculty themselves).

We propose to take advantage of these opportunities through a combination of research and website development activities. Specifically, we propose to conduct research on successful instructional development efforts through a combination of debriefing interviews and case study observations. The results of this study will be available to engineering educators and other programs through an innovative user-centered website -
the Engineering Teaching Source. The content of the website will be derived from the insights gained from the debriefing interviews and case study observations. The design of the website will emphasize multiple paths by which faculty / instructional developers can find information.

Our proposed research will provide insight into the needs of faculty as they change their teaching practices and provides the engineering education community with this insight through the design and publication of the Engineering Teaching Source. This work will benefit all who are interested in helping engineering faculty address teaching challenges, including instructional developers in campus-wide centers, those who create workshops for engineering faculty, those funding and running systematic reform efforts, and faculty
themselves. This work will complement the spectrum of efforts to enhance the teaching of engineering by focusing on the people most pivotal to the teaching - the faculty themselves.

The Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE) at the University of Washington is advancing the scholarship of engineering learning and teaching through a partnership with Stanford University, Colorado School of Mines, the University of Minnesota, and Howard University. CAEE is a multifaceted Higher Education Center for Learning and Teaching clustered around three core elements: Scholarship on Learning Engineering, the Program for Enhancing Engineering Teaching, and Annual Engineering Education Institutes. The Center's Scholarship on Learning Engineering includes cross-institutional longitudinal research studies on learning to engineer focusing on the development of engineers from undergraduate education through entry into the engineering workforce and targeted studies of core competencies and concepts central to engineering. Professional development activities under the Center's Program for Enhancing Engineering Teaching (PEET) include the identification of resources to help engineering faculty address teaching challenges, thematic and research-to-practice workshops for future and current faculty, an engineering teaching portfolio initiative for graduate students, and the development of the Engineering Teaching Source, a web-based tool to enable engineering educators and instructional developers to locate high quality teaching resources. Annual Engineering Education Institutes for engineering faculty and graduate students build and sustain the community of engineering education scholars. The Institutes are advancing the engineering education research infrastructure by increasing the number of people able to conduct rigorous research and to become leaders in engineering education research and change agents in engineering education. This project is jointly funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources and the Division of Engineering and Education Centers in the Directorate for Engineering.

This Small grant for Exploratory Research will conduct an in-depth analysis of verbal protocol data to explore how both undergraduate engineering students and engineering experts go about defining the scope of the problem as they do engineering design. It expect to generate a set of detailed case studies of both effective and ineffective problem scoping and information gathering (and use) behavior for students and experts. These cases can be used as the basis to design both learning experiences to help students incorporate global and societal considerations in their engineering design processes as well as assessment instruments to gauge how well they accomplish this goal. The proposed research addresses a critical issue in engineering education and adheres to the principles outlined in a recent Nation Research Council publication Engineer of 2020. Specifically, the team pose an important question that can be addressed by empirical research. The work draws on relevant theories from the education and design communities and will use well documented research methods in empirical work that will enable the PI to link results back to the theories. It will use data from a diverse set of students, providing the groundwork to generalize our results to broader populations and settings.

This project addresses broader impacts in two ways; first, by be analyzing design process data that was collected from a diverse set of students to represent a broad range of problem solving processes. Second, the ultimate goal of the proposed work is to increase the number of engineering graduates who consider the broader impacts of the engineering design problems as they graduate and join the engineering workforce. Broadening the context within which learning engineering takes place not only prepares graduates to be more socially and culturally responsive in their professional lives, but it also helps to create an educational climate that is more responsive and attractive to women and currently underrepresented minority students.

Engineering - Other (59)
In this fast-changing world, it is virtually impossible to prepare engineering students for all of the problems they might encounter in their future careers. Recognizing this, ABET and other agencies have advocated that engineering programs instill in their students a recognition of the need for lifelong learning. Many institutions struggle to include lifelong learning courses and assessments in their programs. This project is developing a seminar course aimed at first-year engineering students that will instill in them a commitment to lifelong learning. Lifelong learning skills such as self-directedness, metacognition, and critical reflection are topics being included in the course. The courses are organized around a portfolio project through which students develop a vision of engineering as a profession and make a conceptual connection between mathematics and science and this vision. Students are exploring theories of learning and education and are reflecting on their own learning. Faculty development workshops to assist faculty in delivering the seminar course are also being accomplished through this project. The seminar course and workshops are being rigorously evaluated resulting in model assessment practices for lifelong learning outcomes.

This research will address the question of whether integration and reflection activities via developing a professional portfolio have an impact on students? lifelong learning competencies, their development of professional identity, and the ability to integrate their knowledge. It will advance the scholarship on undergraduate engineering student learning using a three-pronged quasi-experiment in portfolio development. The three experimental treatments are: (1) an academic year-long program in which students develop a comprehensive professional portfolio, (2) a quarter-long program in which students develop a focused professional portfolio, and (3) a competition that invites students to develop professional portfolios on their own and submit them for consideration for an award. These treatments require different levels of commitment from students who participate in them, as well as institutions that host them. In addition to investigating the impact of these three treatments, the resources associated with offering each treatment will be documented in order to better understand the scalability of each.

To effectively prepare for engineering in the 21st century, students must acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes relevant to engineering; the type of integrated understanding of these competencies that is a hallmark of expertise; and the life-long learning skills and professional engineering identity that enable students to apply their understandings in rapidly changing contexts and circumstances. Engineering education researchers are only beginning to understand how to effectively and feasibly support the development of life-long learning skills, professional engineering identities, and integrated knowledge. In order to accomplish these complex and interrelated goals, students need a variety of learning experiences. They also need opportunities to understand and articulate what they have learned from their educational experiences and how what they have learned relates to their futures as engineers?opportunities for both foundational and critical reflection. This project has the potential to transform undergraduate engineering education, not by changing the curriculum of existing programs, but by enabling engineering students to achieve the outcomes espoused by those programs and to develop into lifelong learners. If successful, the ideas proposed in this project will be scalable to fit the needs of almost any college of engineering.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)

This engineering education research award to the University of Washington will employ researchers to develop a number of assessment techniques for use by both instructors and students to assess students' consideration of context in engineering design. Success in addressing grand challenge problems of the future will require that engineers be able to place engineering problems and design alternatives in the larger complex context of societal and organizational constraints. The assessments will be tested in four different engineering classes. This research is transformative in rigorously investigating the effectiveness of methods used to develop students' consideration of context in design. In addition the assessments developed will be easily used in a classroom setting rather than being limited to a research laboratory with labor intensive evaluation methods. Understanding of how to incorporate context into engineering education will be advanced by widespread use of this assessment tool and will lead to engineering programs which better prepare engineering students to fill future engineering jobs.

This engineering education research addresses how to best prepare students for the grand, complex challenges of 21st century engineering projects. The hypothesis of the project is that such grand challenges require "broad thinking". This research project attempts to understand when and how broad thinking develops in engineering students in order to create better learning experiences. To gain such insights the PI?s will examine data collected in the Academic Pathways Study, a multi-institution dataset on the paths students take when navigating an engineering degree program. More specifically, the project focuses on three separate questions: 1) What degree of broad thinking do students demonstrate during the course of four years of undergraduate engineering education? 2) What is the relationship between broad thinking and intention to pursue engineering beyond the undergraduate years? 3) How do educational experiences help engineering students develop broad thinking?

The broader significance and importance of this project is to learn how to better design college learning experiences for engineers so they are broad thinkers. Since many of the grand challenges and opportunities for engineering in the 21st century are broad in scope, complexity, and impact, engineers with a narrow focus may not be successful at addressing these challenges. The study may also learn if those who think broadly earn engineering degrees at the same rate as more narrow thinkers, and if not why this is.

This project is a two-year engineering pathways study that is extending research findings from the NSF funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education's (CAEE's) Academic Pathways Study (APS). The APS conducted a series of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of undergraduate engineering students' learning experiences and their transition to the workplace. In this project, the experiences of early career professionals (ECPs) are being studied in order to better understand what educational institutions and employers can do to facilitate the transition from engineering student to practicing engineering professional. More specifically, the project is conducting a mixed-method study of two research questions: (1) What factors or combinations of factors facilitate the transition of ECPs into a professional culture, and their conceptions of and preparation for their specific professional careers? (2) How, and to what extent do the factors that influence the professional development of ECPs contribute to their future careers? The proposed research is grounded in social cognitive career theory that has been shown to be a useful framework for exploring engineering career persistence. The project includes a rigorous evaluation plan coordinated by an independent evaluator to monitor the progress of the project and to study evaluation research questions about the integration of the APS results and the impact of collaboration.

This engineering education research project seeks to shed light on past change efforts in engineering education in order to facilitate continuing improvement in the programs that educate the future engineering workforce. The project will study the development of prospective change agents by bringing together graduate students and successful leaders and change agents, then collect, analyze, and publish interviews. The analysis will be used to inform how innovations in teaching and learning can be better integrated into existing engineering curricula.

The broader significance and importance of this project is that it both sheds light on how change happens in engineering program, and engages future leaders in collecting and understanding how change has occurred in the past. The stories of the change agents will be made available through efforts at wide dissemination. This project overlaps with NSF's strategic goals of transforming the frontiers by enhancing research infrastructure and data access to broaden research capabilities. 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.

Reflection, as a form of thinking, involves stepping out of a situation and creating knowledge. In an educational context, reflection plays a critical role in professional practice, learning from experience, and successful implementation of teaching methods such as active learning. In supporting student learning, educators can potentially improve and transform student learning through reflection activities. Reflection activities can be modest in terms of the amount of time required and thus can be added to existing instructional efforts to help magnify the impact of many types of educational activities and help individuals go beyond simply doing better. Reflection activities may be a significant tool in efforts to critically improve engineering education, address issues such as diversity and retention, and support learning goals such as innovation and global competencies. Yet, within engineering education, reflection and reflection activities are understudied. The proposed work will establish and refine instruments that will help educators and scholars better understand student engagement in reflection activities, specifically their reactions to engaging in reflection activities and their self-reported knowledge gains. These instruments will be critical for helping engineering educators bring reflection activities into their teaching through informed choices and creating opportunities for deeper and more nuanced scholarship on reflection activities.

The intent of this study is to explore undergraduate engineering students' knowledge gains using a common approach so that reflection activities can be compared more readily. Another intent is to better understand student reactions to the reflection activities in a way that may serve many purposes such as interpreting study results and identifying ways to refine activities. A multi-week study with undergraduate engineering students culminating in interviews will capture students' perspectives when talking about reflection. These perspectives will be used to refine the conceptual models related to knowledge from and reactions to engaging in reflection activities. Usability studies of survey items and a principal component analysis will also be used to systematically develop and validate survey instruments. Finally, a study focusing on a selected reflection activity (e.g. exam wrappers) will be used for further survey validation. The proposed work features a systematic, rigorous process using best practices in survey instrument development, and in supporting educators in operationalizing learning goals through reflection activities. To this latter end, our proposed work includes both scholarly and practical dissemination.