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.

工程课程长期以来一直在平衡课程方面挣扎，这些课程足够严格，可以使毕业生成为有能力的从业者和教育经验，这些经验足以保留本科生。数据表明，在第一年或第二年之后，一半以上的学生离开了计划，其中许多学生开始不喜欢工程或对该行业失去兴趣。这些发现表明，即将到来的学生认为工程实践与他们在计划的头两年中收到的信息之间的不匹配。与工程具有共同原则（例如医学和法律）的其他主要职业不同，在美国流行文化中，工程学的例子很少，而且仍然很少现实。有限的研究考虑了通过专业的历史来培养学生的影响，或者将工程科学与设计明确连接起来的影响，尤其是在学生对工程实践的看法方面。这项工作将旨在了解情境化的工程实践如何改善学生在历史上努力保留它们的纪律意图，尤其是那些识别为代表性不足的少数群体和妇女的学科。这项工作将有助于有关学生对练习工程意义的理解以及如何随着暴露于不同类型的情境化（例如历史或技术）的变化而有所了解的新知识。它还将为本科生如何将工程科学和工程判断与专业人士联系起来，为新知识提供新的知识。有了这种理解，可以对本科工程教育进行更改，以更好地保留这些代表性不足的学生并扩大工程劳动力的多样性。占据最常见的课程中两年中的工程科学课程最常利用传统的基于讲座的教学法和简化的封闭式教科书问题，这些问题通常不允许学生从事那种对发展工程判断至关重要的决策。学生认识到这些问题不是工程实践的真实表现，即使是新毕业生也会对工程实践的性质进行微不足道的掌握。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，这项工作将旨在通过向学生介绍专业的历史来雇用另一种教学法，以对工程实践进行更全面的情境化。这项工作将通过回答学生对工程实践的看法如何通过计划发展以及这些教学法如何塑造进步和/或参考学生对工程学的塑造如何发展的研究问题来推动工程教育研究领域。拟议的研究将采用一种混合方法方法，特别是三角测量方法，优先考虑定性数据收集。主要发现将来自与学生在一所大型研究密集型公立大学的工程计划中进行的两年中的访谈。根据学生的帐户，将从有关学生对工程实践的看法如何纵向改变以及优先的教育活动是否影响该轨迹的访谈中开发一系列案例研究。此外，将邀请更多的学生参加调查，这将从更广泛的示例中得出有关坚持意图的更广泛样本以及一般对工程学的基线水平。预期的结果会激发本科工程课程的变化，包括描述学生对工程实践发展的看法，拟议的教育程度如何影响这些看法以及情境化如何促进学生在劳动力中坚持不懈的意图的意图。这些奖项的奖励反映了NSF的法定委员会的支持，这是由良好的依据来评估。