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 COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, exacerbated, and caused many challenges within engineering education. At the same time, the pandemic provided opportunities for engineering educators to learn from forced change to promote strategic efforts to improve classroom engagement and connection to better support engineering students.…

Background: COVID-19 has spurred a global crisis that has disrupted everyday lives and impacted the traditional methods, experiences, and abilities of higher education institutions' students, faculty, and staff, especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Purpose/Hypothesis: Given the pressing need demonstrated by the…

Background: Despite many initiatives to improve graduate student and faculty diversity in engineering, there has been little or no change in the percentage of people from racially minoritized backgrounds in either of these groups. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this paper is to counter the scarcity fallacy, in which institutions blame the…

Background: Globalization and socially complex problems will greatly affect the way engineers work in the future. Therefore, efforts to transform engineering education must focus on professional skills and engagement of faculty as key change agents. Purpose/Hypotheses: For engineering programs to address the needs of society, graduates must have…

Background: Pre-college engineering education reform documents aim to help students develop engineering literacy. Helping students develop sophisticated epistemological views about engineering makes a significant contribution toward developing engineering-literate citizenry. Despite these widely recognized benefits, research on students' and…

Background: To avoid the spread of COVID-19, most engineering programs rapidly shifted to emergency online education, and prior research has associated online education with academic overload. Before the pandemic, engineering curricula were already packed with content and course assignments, so more studies should explore how the unprecedented…

Background: While attrition from the PhD has been attributed to many high-level causal factors, such as funding, advisor relationship, and "fit" into a department, few studies have closely examined the mechanisms of attrition or why and how graduate engineering students begin to consider attrition from their doctoral programs.…

Background: Many instructors made an emergency shift to online teaching during the Spring 2020 semester. There is reason to expect that instructors would have dramatically changed their pedagogy and teaching philosophies. At the same time, there are reasons that engineering instructors might be hesitant to introduce some changes to their courses.…