Background: Engineering education seeks to prepare students for engineering practice, but the concept of preparedness is often ill-defined. Moreover, findings from studies of different populations or in different contexts vary regarding how well new graduates are prepared. These variations, coupled with the lack of clarity, suggest the need to…

Background: In the United States, the current 6-year completion rate in engineering is a mere 54% among full-time students who enter a 4-year course. Researchers have identified many reasons why students leave engineering, including academic difficulties and poor teaching. However, the problems experienced by the departing students are also…

Background: The evolving transformations of our society at large, academic institutions, and engineering discipline in the 21st century have profound implications for the nature of experiential learning being offered in engineering education. However, what is experiential learning in the context of engineering education? Purpose: The introduction…

Background: Although open-ended projects are common in the first and final years of US engineering programs, middle-year courses tend to utilize simpler highly constrained problems. Such problems can elicit knowledge and social practices typical of school activity ("School World"), with limited applicability in real engineering work…

Background: Engineering's introduction into K-12 classrooms has been purported to support meaningful and inclusive learning environments. However, teachers must contend with dominant discourses embedded in US schooling that justify inequitable distributions of resources. Purpose: Drawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers…

Background: This paper begins with the premise that ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) overlap in engineering. Yet, the topics of ethics and DEI often inhabit different scholarly spaces in engineering education, thus creating a divide between these topics in engineering education research, teaching, and practice. Purpose: We…

Background: Undergraduate students consistently struggle with mastering concepts related to thermodynamics. Prior work has shown that haptic technology and intensive hands-on workshops help improve learning outcomes relative to traditional lecture-based thermodynamics instruction. The current study takes a more feasible approach to improving…

Background: To prepare engineers who can address complex sociotechnical problems, a deep understanding of engineers' complex problem-solving approaches is needed. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study operationalizes comprehensive systems thinking as an analysis framework that attends to aspects of engineering work and relationships among those aspects.…

Background: The lack of diversity within engineering degree programs and occupations has been an ongoing concern for decades. National engineering programs have placed a high priority on broadening participation in engineering and making the engineering culture more inclusive. Specifically, the cultivation of engineering students' inclusive…

Background: Engineering culture research to date has described the culture as rigid, chilly, and posing many barriers to entry. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an important opportunity to explore how engineering culture responds to a major disruption. Purpose: The purposes of this study are to understand how elements of engineering culture…

Background: The community cultural wealth (CCW) theoretical framework recognizes the assets of oppressed communities. Within the framework, aspirational capital refers to the hope to achieve in the face of systemic barriers, while navigational capital includes tactics engaged to progress within institutions that were not designed for equitable…

Background: Engineering curricula are built around faculty and accreditors' perceptions of what knowledge, skills, and abilities graduates will need in engineering careers. However, the people making these decisions may not be fully aware of what industry employers require for engineering graduates. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study is…

Background: Existing research has demonstrated that student characteristics, such as race/ethnicity, sex, and personal beliefs about engineering knowledge, shape students' experiences in ill-structured problem-solving, such as engineering design, where ideas must be communicated, negotiated, and selected in complex social processes. Purpose: The…

Background: A perceived fit between personal values and what a career offers is critical for college students pursuing and persisting in that career. Purpose/Hypothesis(es): We, therefore, investigated the career values of engineering undergraduates through language in two different studies. Study 1 (N = 35) examined students' written…

Background: In taking up educational technology tools and student-centered instructional practice, there is consensus that instructors consider the unique aspects of their instructional context. However, tool adoption success is often framed narrowly by numerical uptake rates or by conformity with non-negotiable components. Purpose: We pursue an…