Prototype to Production: Processes and Conditions for Preparing the Engineer of 2020

该提案项目的目标是评估当前本科工程专业培养2020年工程师的能力。PIs建议对来自30所精心挑选的机构的工程学学生、毕业生、教职员工和管理人员进行一次全国调查，以绘制本科工程教育的版图，并确定当前工程学课程目标与2020年工程师相关属性之间的一致性水平。工程教育的三个阶段的学生将被研究：进入四年制大学课程(即两年制大学)之前、大学期间和本科工程课程完成后的最初几年。这项研究还将扫描工程学研究不足的领域，对两年制大学的学生进行调查，这些大学为学生转到学士课程做准备。研究两年制和四年制学生群体将使研究人员能够专注于处于不同阶段的学生，并探索工程教育的不同方面是否以及如何影响基于性别、种族/民族、年龄和社会经济地位的学生。学生经历和认知的不同可能会影响学生学习工程学的方式，以及是否学习工程学、是否完成学位以及最终是否成为一名工程师的决定。为了开发调查工具，PI将对两所大学及其相关的两年制支线学院的学生、教职员工、管理人员和校友进行广泛的访谈。这些访谈将旨在发现影响学生学习和他们通过高等教育渠道取得进步的因素或力量，特别关注发现目前文献中被忽视或鲜为人知的因素，如学生的课外经历、工程学院的组织结构和政策、工程专业的教师文化、学生如何使他们的课程工作变得有意义，以及他们如何发展对工程师工作的看法。

The objective of this proposal project is to assess the current capacity of undergraduate engineering programs to prepare the Engineer of 2020. The PIs propose a national survey of engineering students, graduates, faculty, and administrators from 30 carefully selected institutions to map the landscape of undergraduate engineering education and determine current levels of alignment between engineering program goals and the attributes associated with the Engineer of 2020. Students at three stages in the engineering education pipeline will be studied: before entrance to four-year college programs (i.e., two-year colleges), during college, and in the early years following completion of an undergraduate engineering program. The study will also scan an understudied sector of the engineering pipeline, surveying students in two-year colleges that prepare students for transfer to bachelor's programs. Studying both two- and four-year student populations will enable researchers to focus on students at different points in the pipeline and to explore if and how different aspects of engineering education influence students based on their gender, race/ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status. Variations in student experiences and perceptions may affect how students learn engineering as well as decisions about whether to study engineering, whether to complete a degree, and whether, ultimately, to become an engineer.To develop survey instruments, the PIs will conduct an extensive set of interviews with students, faculty members, administrators, and alumni at two universities and their associated two-year feeder colleges. These interviews will be designed to discover factors or forces that shape students' learning and their progress through the postsecondary pipeline, with particular attention to discovering factors currently overlooked or little understood in the current literature, such as students' out-of-class experiences, organizational structures and policies of engineering schools, the faculty culture in engineering programs, how students "make meaning" of their coursework, and how they develop perceptions of what engineers do.