This study examines over 300 letters of recommendation for medical faculty at a large American medical school in the mid-1990s, using methods from corpus and discourse analysis, with the theoretical perspective of gender schema from cognitive psychology. Letters written for female applicants were found to differ systematically from those written for male applicants in the extremes of length, in the percentages lacking in basic features, in the percentages with doubt raisers (an extended category of negative language, often associated with apparent commendation), and in frequency of mention of status terms. Further, the most common semantically grouped possessive phrases referring to female and male applicants (`her teaching,' `his research') reinforce gender schema that tend to portray women as teachers and students, and men as researchers and professionals.

Existing tools for educating undergraduate students about sustainable engineering methods are notably lacking. In particular, these tools are unable to support the assessment of competing objectives in the evaluation of economic, environmental, and social performance across the lifecycle during product design. In an effort to address this deficiency, an interactive, web-based learning environment, a distributed cyberlearning environment, Constructionism in Learning: Sustainable Life Cycle Engineering (CooL:SLiCE) has been created. CooL:SLiCE aims to facilitate the consideration of different human controlled/initiated impacts on the natural environment through personalized individual and team-based design activities. Thus, CooL:SLiCE enables constructionist (physical, hands-on) learning in engineering via a virtual platform that allows students to visualize/analyze the effect of changes to product designs, manufacturing processes, and supply chain configurations on sustainability performance. The overall conceptual framework of the CooL:SLiCE platform is discussed. Additionally, the application of constructionism as a pedagogical approach for sustainable engineering education is presented. The framework is designed to facilitate attainment of deeper conceptual understanding in environmentally responsible product design and manufacturing by supplying a set of tools that support a constructivist learning environment. This tool set is based on disparate methodologies from the design, industrial, and manufacturing engineering domains. A team project was undertaken to pilot the CooL:SLiCE platform to aid design and assessment during the sustainable product development process. The pilot project demonstrated the capacity of the CooL:SLiCE platform in the understanding of sustainable product design concepts. This research advances the current educational tools for sustainable product design by integrating three learning modules into a web-based environment developed in the CooL:SLiCE project to provide a platform for learning not currently accessible to engineering educators and students. Future work will mainly focus on using the platform in the classroom settings to investigate its effect on improving student understanding of sustainable life cycle engineering.

Constructionism is at once a learning epistemology, a theory of learning, and a pedagogical approach that literally places education in the hands of learners. Constructionism situates students and mentors together in student-directed, project-oriented environments, often enabled with state-of-the-art computational technologies, to foster playful exploration and experimentation. Over time, shared learning experiences in constructionist environments may lead to the formation of learning cultures. To orient the design of constructionist environments for designers of engineering design education, this paper provides a historical context for Seymour Papert's development of constructionism and distinguishes it from Jean Piaget's philosophy of constructivism. Constructionism is introduced as an effort targeted at the reform of traditional education. Examples of constructionist environments for learning are then provided. The applicability of constructionism for the design of learning environments for engineering design is also discussed and observations are given for designing the tools, strategies, and activities that comprise constructionist learning environments for engineering design education.

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Wayne State University, Penn State University, and Oregon State University are developing a distributed cyberlearning environment to facilitate the consideration of different human controlled/initiated impacts on the natural environment through team-based and personalized design activities. This interactive learning environment, Constructionism in Learning: Sustainable Life Cycle Engineering (CooL:SLiCE), supports a constructionist line of inquiry within design practice to enable students to attain a deeper conceptual understanding. This paper focuses on assessing sustainable product design activities and on applying the findings to educational design to support the constructionist learning method. This preliminary study, conducted in classes at multiple participating universities, shows an intermediate analysis about learner engagement, different level of scaffolding, competency, and the depth of conceptual understandings. The eventual goal is to use assessment items developed from this study to test the appropriateness of the CooL:SLiCE framework (e.g., for the effectiveness of constructed knowledge in deep learning, the impacts of different autonomy levels on student learning, and learners' engagement).