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，又要有足够的教育经验来留住本科生。数据显示，略多于一半的学生在第一年或第二年后离开了一个项目，其中许多人开始不喜欢工程或对这个职业失去了兴趣。这些发现表明，即将入学的学生对工程实践的看法与他们在项目的头两年收到的信息之间存在不匹配。与其他主要职业不同的是，工程与其他主要职业共享一套共同的原则(例如医学和法律)，在流行的美国文化中，很少有工程的例子，更没有现实的例子。有限的研究考虑了通过专业历史培养学生的影响，或者明确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。这项工作的目的是了解如何结合实际的工程实践可以改善学生的意图，以坚持在历史上努力留住他们的学科，特别是那些被认为是代表不足的少数族裔和妇女。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接触不同类型的情景(例如，历史或技术)而变化。它还将提供有关本科生如何将工程科学和工程判断与作为专业人员的实践联系起来的新知识。有了这样的理解，工科本科教育可以做出改变，以更好地留住这些代表性不足的学生，并扩大工程学劳动力的多样性。占据课程中间两年的工程科学课程通常使用传统的讲授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培养工程判断至关重要的那种决策。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性质缺乏把握。这项工作提出了一种新的教学方法，旨在为学生提供背景，了解如何在真正的工程实践中实施工程科学概念，以及工程判断在实施中是如何必不可少的。此外，这项工作的目的是采用另一种教学方法，通过向学生介绍工程专业的历史，提供更全面的工程实践背景。这项工作将通过回答以下研究问题来推进工程教育研究领域：学生对工程实践的感知是如何随着他们在项目中的进步而发展的，以及这些教学如何塑造这种进步和/或重新构建学生对工程的信念。拟议的研究将采用混合方法，特别是以定性数据收集为优先顺序的三角测量方法。初步结论将来自对学生的采访，这些学生在一所大型研究密集型公立大学的工程项目中完成了两年的学业。根据学生的描述，将从访谈中形成一组案例研究，探讨学生对工程实践的看法是如何纵向变化的，以及前述教育活动是否会影响这一轨迹。此外，将邀请更多的学生参加调查，这将使人们能够从更广泛的样本中得出关于坚持的意愿以及对工程总体熟悉程度的基线水平的推断。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响评审标准进行评估，认为值得支持该奖项。

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.