EAGER: Using Human-Centered Design to Conceptualize and Prototype Ways to Increase Graduate Student Engagement with Transformative Research

工程和工程教育界对培养能够解决大规模“重要”问题的训练有素的工程师非常感兴趣。这种挑战很少遵循传统的界限，但研究生经常被录取和培训，主要目的是教他们深入关注高度具体的问题领域，而不太强调广度，创造力和好奇心。这个项目旨在探讨研究生工程课程缺乏潜在的变革和创造性的申请人的假设。来自研究生管道的各个阶段的个人将接受采访，以确定吸引学生进行研究生研究的潜在问题。根据这些调查的结果，将设计和测试新的策略来解决这些问题。该项目有可能制定方法，以克服在研究生工程研究中保留创造性思想家的障碍。考虑到未来的工程社区是由个人决定是否继续研究生学习而形成的，这项研究可能会从根本上影响工程社区及其变革性研究的潜力。值得注意的是，在广泛的种族，民族和社会经济背景的采访也可以提供不同的影响，参与研究生教育的决定，并改善策略的多样性和包容性。本研究将使用以人为本的设计方法，设计思维，探讨如何提高研究生参与变革性工程研究的问题。设计思维方法的一个核心原则是，在设计或实现满足用户需求的解决方案之前，必须密切倾听和理解“用户”。因此，在研究生管道（本科生，研究生，教师，管理人员）的各个阶段的参与者将使用民族志技术的框架进行采访，以了解是否有潜在的变革学生选择的招生过程，如果是这样，为什么。此外，研究生招生过程和工程教育将检查他们的倾向，鼓励或阻止创造力，求知欲，跨学科的观点，并专注于大规模的重要问题。在这些调查中获得的知识将用于开发原型，以吸引和留住潜在的变革思想家，以及重新构建第一年的研究生工程课程，以激发创造力和跨学科思维。本研究的总体目标是通过克服招聘和保留的障碍，制定方法来阻止研究生工程研究中创造性的跨学科思想家的假设损失。

The engineering and engineering education community is intensely interested in generating trained engineers who can address large scale, "important" problems. Such challenges rarely adhere to traditional boundaries, yet graduate students are frequently admitted and trained with the primary intent of teaching them to be deeply focused on highly specific problem domains, with markedly less emphasis on breadth, creativity and curiosity. This project seeks to explore the hypothesis that graduate engineering programs suffer from a lack of potentially transformative and creative applicants. Individuals from all stages of the graduate student pipeline will be interviewed with the goal of identifying potential problems in attracting students to graduate research. Based on the findings from these investigations, novel strategies to remediate these problems will be designed and tested. This project has the potential to develop approaches to overcome barriers to retention of creative thinkers in graduate engineering studies. Given that the future engineering community is shaped, at least in part, by individual decisions to pursue or not to pursue graduate studies, this study could radically impact the engineering community and its potential for transformative research. Notably, interviews across a wide spectrum of racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds may also provide insights into differential influences on the decision to engage with graduate education, and improve strategies for diversity and inclusion.This study will use a human-centered design approach, Design Thinking, to explore the question of how to increase graduate student engagement in transformative engineering research. A central tenet of the Design Thinking approach is that one must listen closely to and understand "users" before designing or implementing solutions to their needs or wants. Therefore, participants at all stages of the graduate student pipeline (undergraduates, graduates, faculty, administrators) will be interviewed using a framework of ethnographic techniques to understand whether potentially transformative students select out of the admissions process, and if so why. Additionally, the graduate admissions process and engineering education will be examined for their propensity to encourage or discourage creativity, intellectual curiosity, interdisciplinary perspectives, and a focus on large-scale important problems. Knowledge gained in these investigations will be used to develop prototypes to attract and retain potentially transformative thinkers, as well as to reframe first year graduate engineering curricula in order to stimulate creativity and interdisciplinary thinking. The overall goal of this research is to develop approaches to stem the hypothesized loss of creative, interdisciplinary thinkers in graduate engineering studies by overcoming barriers to recruitment and retention.