Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Contextualizing Engineering Science Courses by Teaching History and Judgement

长期以来，工程专业一直在努力平衡课程设置，既要严格到足以让毕业生成为有能力的实践者，又要有足够吸引本科生的教育经历。数据显示，略多于一半的学生在第一年或第二年之后离开了一个项目，其中许多学生变得不喜欢工程或对这个职业失去了兴趣。这些发现表明，新生对工程实践的理解与他们在前两年课程中得到的信息不匹配。与其他与工程学有共同原则的主要职业（如医学和法律）不同，工程学在美国大众文化中很少有例子，现实的例子更少。有限的研究考虑了通过专业历史使学生适应环境的影响，或者明确地将工程科学与设计联系起来的影响，特别是关于学生对工程实践的看法。这项工作旨在了解工程实践的背景如何能够提高学生坚持一门学科的意愿，特别是那些被认为是代表性不足的少数民族和女性。这项工作将有助于学生理解实践工程意味着什么，以及这种理解如何随着不同类型的背景化（例如，历史或技术）而变化。它还将提供关于本科生如何将工程科学和工程判断与专业实践联系起来的新知识。有了这样的认识，就可以对本科工程教育做出改变，以更好地留住这些代表性不足的学生，扩大工程劳动力的多样性。工程科学课程占据了一个项目的中间两年，通常采用传统的以讲座为基础的教学法和简化的封闭式教科书问题，这通常不允许学生参与对发展工程判断至关重要的决策。学生们认识到这些问题并不是工程实践的真实表现，即使是刚毕业的毕业生也对工程实践的本质知之甚少。这项工作提出了一种新的教学法，旨在为学生提供工程科学概念如何在真实的工程实践中实施以及工程判断在实施中如何至关重要的背景。此外，这项工作将旨在采用另一种教学法，通过向学生介绍该专业的历史，为工程实践提供更全面的背景化。这项工作将通过回答学生对工程实践的看法如何随着课程的进展而发展的研究问题，以及这些教学法如何塑造进步和/或重新构建学生对工程的信念，从而推进工程教育研究领域。拟议的研究将采用混合方法，特别是三角测量方法，优先考虑定性数据收集。主要调查结果将来自对学生的采访，这些学生在一所大型研究型公立大学的工程项目中度过了中间两年。基于学生的叙述，一系列的案例研究将从访谈中发展出来，关于学生对工程实践的看法是如何纵向变化的，以及上述教育活动是否影响了这一轨迹。此外，更大的学生群体将被邀请参加调查，这将能够从更广泛的样本中得出关于坚持的意图以及对一般工程熟悉程度的基线水平的推论。期望激发本科工程课程变化的结果包括描述学生对工程实践的看法如何发展，建议的教学法如何影响这些看法，以及情境化如何有助于学生坚持专业进入劳动力市场的意图。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Engineering programs have long struggled with balancing curricula that are rigorous enough to prepare graduates to be capable practitioners and educational experiences that are engaging enough to retain undergraduate students. Data suggests that a little more than half of students leave a program after their first or second year and that many of those students came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession. These findings suggest a mismatch between what incoming students think engineering practice is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. Unlike the other major professions with which engineering shares a common set of principles (e.g., medicine and law), there are very few examples of engineering in popular American culture, and fewer still that are realistic. Limited studies consider the impacts of enculturating students via the history of the profession or the impacts of explicitly connecting engineering science with design, especially with respect to students’ perceptions of engineering practice. This work will aim to understand how contextualizing engineering practice can improve students’ intentions to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women. This work will contribute new knowledge about students’ understanding of what it means to practice engineering and how that understanding changes with exposure to different types of contextualization (e.g., historical or technical). It will also contribute new knowledge about how undergraduate students relate engineering science and engineering judgement with practice as professionals. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain these underrepresented students and broaden the diversity of the engineering workforce. Engineering science courses that occupy the middle two years of a program most often utilize traditional lecture-based pedagogy and simplified close-ended textbook problems, which do not typically allow students to engage in the kind of decision-making that is essential to developing engineering judgement. Students recognize these problems are not authentic representations of engineering practice, and even new graduates leaving a program have a tenuous grasp on the nature of engineering practice. This work proposes a new pedagogy intended to provide students with context for how engineering science concepts are implemented in authentic engineering practice and how engineering judgement is essential in that implementation. Moreover, this work will aim to employ another pedagogy to provide a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. This work will advance the field of engineering education research by answering the research question of how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program, and how these pedagogies shape that progress and/or reframe students’ beliefs about engineering. The proposed research will employ a mixed-methods approach, specifically a triangulation methodology that prioritizes qualitative data collections. Primary findings will come from interviews with students as they progress through their middle two years in an engineering program at a large research-intensive public university. Based on students’ accounts, a set of case studies will be developed from the interviews about how students’ perceptions of engineering practice change longitudinally and whether the aforementioned educational activities influence that trajectory. In addition, a larger group of students will be invited to participate in surveys, which will enable drawing inferences from a broader sample about intention to persist as well as baseline levels of familiarity with engineering in general. Outcomes expected to inspire changes in undergraduate engineering curricula include descriptions of how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop, how the proposed pedagogies influence those perceptions, and how contextualization can contribute to students’ intentions to persist in the major into the workforce.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.