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有着浓厚的兴趣。这样的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度专注于高度具体的问题领域，而对广度、创造力和好奇心的重视明显较少。这个项目试图探索这样一种假设，即工程学研究生项目缺乏潜在的变革性和创造性的申请者。将与研究生队伍中所有阶段的个人进行面谈，目的是找出吸引学生从事研究生研究的潜在问题。根据这些调查的结果，将设计和测试新的战略来补救这些问题。该项目有可能开发出克服在工程学研究生学习中留住创造性思考者的障碍的方法。鉴于未来的工程界至少在一定程度上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界及其变革性研究的潜力。值得注意的是，通过广泛的种族、民族和社会经济背景的访谈，也可能提供对参与研究生教育决策的不同影响的洞察，并改进多样性和包容性的策略。本研究将使用以人为中心的设计方法--设计思维--来探索如何增加研究生对变革性工程研究的参与度的问题。设计思维方法的一个中心原则是，在设计或实现解决方案以满足用户的需求或需求之前，必须仔细倾听和理解“用户”。因此，所有研究生阶段的参与者(本科生、毕业生、教师、管理人员)将使用人种志技术框架接受采访，以了解潜在的变革性学生是否选择了录取过程，如果是的话，原因是什么。此外，还将考察研究生招生过程和工程教育是否倾向于鼓励或抑制创造力、求知欲、跨学科视角，以及对大规模重要问题的关注。在这些调查中获得的知识将被用来开发原型，以吸引和留住潜在的变革性思考者，以及重新制定第一年工程学研究生课程，以激发创造力和跨学科思维。这项研究的总体目标是开发方法，通过克服招聘和保留的障碍，阻止在研究生工程学研究中假设的创造性、跨学科思考者的流失。

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.