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，这些课程足够严格，可以让毕业生成为有能力的从业者，而教育经验则足以吸引本科生。数据显示，超过一半的学生在第一年或第二年后离开了一个项目，其中许多学生开始不喜欢工程或对这个专业失去了兴趣。这些发现表明，新生认为工程实践与他们在项目的前两年收到的信息之间存在不匹配。与其他主要职业不同，工程学与其他主要职业有一套共同的原则（例如，医学和法律），在美国流行文化中很少有工程学的例子，现实的更少。有限的研究认为，通过专业的历史或明确连接工程科学与设计，特别是相对于学生的工程实践的看法的影响，文化的学生。这项工作的目的是了解背景化工程实践如何提高学生的意图，坚持在历史上努力保留他们的学科，特别是那些确定为代表性不足的少数民族和妇女。这项工作将有助于学生理解实践工程的意义以及这种理解如何随着接触不同类型的情境化（例如，历史或技术）。它还将有助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。有了这种理解，可以对本科工程教育进行改革，以更好地留住这些代表性不足的学生，并扩大工程劳动力的多样性。占据课程中间两年的工程科学课程通常使用传统的基于讲座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开发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，即使是刚毕业的学生也对工程实践的本质有着模糊的理解。这项工作提出了一种新的教学方法，旨在为学生提供工程科学的概念是如何在真实的工程实践中实施，以及如何工程判断是必不可少的，在实施的背景。此外，这项工作的目的是采用另一种教学法，通过向学生介绍该专业的历史，提供更全面的工程实践背景。这项工作将通过回答学生对工程实践的看法如何随着他们在项目中的进步而发展的研究问题，以及这些知识如何塑造这种进步和/或重新构建学生对工程的信念，来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。主要研究结果将来自对学生的采访，因为他们在一所大型研究密集型公立大学的工程项目中度过了中间两年。基于学生的帐户，一组案例研究将开发从采访中关于学生的工程实践的看法如何纵向变化，以及上述教育活动是否影响这一轨迹。此外，将邀请更多的学生参加调查，这将使他们能够从更广泛的样本中推断出坚持的意图以及对工程的熟悉程度。预计将激发本科工程课程改革的成果包括描述学生对工程实践的看法如何发展，拟议的工程学如何影响这些看法，以及情境化如何有助于学生的意图，坚持在主要进入劳动力。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得支持，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.