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

合作研究：研究启动：通过教授历史和判断将工程科学课程情境化

• 批准号: 2306053
• 负责人: Aaron Johnson
• 金额: $ 4.78万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2025-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2306053&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Initiation; Contextualizing; Engineering

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.

长期以来，工程项目一直在平衡足够严格的课程以培养毕业生成为有能力的实践者和足够有吸引力的教育经验以留住本科生。数据显示，略多于一半的学生在第一年或第二年之后离开了项目。这些发现表明，与其他专业不同，即将入学的学生所认为的工程实践与他们在项目的头两年中收到的信息之间存在不匹配。哪些工程有一套共同的原则（例如医学和法律），在美国流行文化中，工程的例子很少，而且现实的例子也更少，有限的研究考虑了通过专业历史培养学生的影响，或者将工程科学与工程科学明确联系起来的影响。设计，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提高学生坚持这一学科的意愿，而这一学科历史上一直在努力保留他们，特别是那些被认为代表性不足的少数族裔和女性工作。将贡献有关学生的新知识了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（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专业人士实践联系起来的新知识。基于这种理解，可以对本科工程教育进行改变，以更好地留住这些代表性不足的学生，并扩大工程人员的多样性，这些课程占据了项目中间两年的时间，这些课程通常采用传统的基于讲座的教学法和简化的封闭式教学。结束了教科书上没有的问题通常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反映，即使是刚刚离开该项目的毕业生对工程实践的本质也了解甚少。这项工作提出了一种新的教学法，旨在为学生提供如何在真实的工程实践中实施工程科学概念以及工程判断在该实施中如何至关重要的背景。此外，这项工作旨在采用另一种教学法来提供更全面的背景化。通过向学生介绍工程实践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：学生在学习过程中对工程实践的看法如何发展，以及这些教学法如何塑造这种进步和/或重新构建学生的认知。拟议的研究将采用混合方法，特别是优先考虑定性数据收集的三角测量方法，主要发现将来自对学生在大型研究项目中两年学习过程中的采访。密集型公立大学。根据学生的叙述，将通过访谈开发一系列案例研究，了解学生对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与。调查，这将有助于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，预计将激发本科工程课程的变化，包括描述学生对工程实践的看法如何发展，如何发展。拟议的教学法影响那些该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。