This evidence-based practice paper documents the faculty experience of implementing specifications grading in different types of engineering courses. Rather than evolving from learning theory or research, current grading practices have primarily arisen from canonical practices created three centuries ago, originally created to rank students against each other. Such ranking or competition derived practices are out of alignment with modern outcomes-based engineering assessment practices. Specifications grading, an alternative, is a framework for assessment grounded in learning theory as well as student agency. The cornerstone of specifications grading is treating each assignment as a pass/fail marker of mastery using clearly defined and transparent criteria. With limited examples in engineering, this paper provides a clear introduction to specifications grading for the engineering education community and presents case studies of the use of specifications grading in engineering classrooms. Our three case studies include insights into transitioning a senior design course co-taught by technical communication faculty from rubric-based grading, transitioning a lower-level statistics class from bell-curve grading, and developing a new first-year engineering course. With these cases, we aspire to create a diverse set of advice and templates for other faculty to adopt in their classes to implement specification grading as well as common pitfalls to avoid when first adopting it.

While we all have our own circumstances and experiences, being able to empathize is critical to recognizing injustice and considering the viewpoints of others in the community. In the human-centric field of biomedical engineering (BME), empathy is imperative to creating inclusive devices or equipment that are equally accessible to all who need them. To learn more about the importance of empathy in the discipline and the learning activities that can be used to promote it, we leveraged qualitative methods and interviewed six BME instructors and course coordinators. We applied Zaki's framework of empathy as the theoretical foundation for our investigation and analysis, which considers cognitive, emotional, and motivational factors. In this study, we sought to address: (1) The need of empathy for BME students; (2) The need of empathy for BME educators; and (3) How specific learning activities can be used to appreciate and imbue empathy. The analysis resulted in six themes, and the findings illustrated that empathy was considered important for students' personal and professional development. It can promote intercultural awareness, leadership, and may drive students to think and care about others and take action. Faculty perceived empathy as necessary for themselves as well and they described developing it over the course of their careers as they interacted with students and learned about the issues they faced. In turn, they mentioned how their own empathy served to strengthen their approach as educators, their interpersonal relationships, and their awareness of students in distress. We identified multiple learning activities which can foster empathy in students. Examples include writing personas to enhance perspective-taking or allowing students to share their own narrative to strengthen communication for the speaker and active listening and compassion from those hearing the stories. Requiring students to shadow physicians or conduct interviews with those that will use their products can serve to build compassion and help students to think about others. However, to impact values and mindsets such activities should not just be inserted at a single time point, but instead, should be considered throughout the BME curriculum. The findings from this work not only encourage professional development of BME students and their ability to solve problems addressing the needs of real people, but they also speak to the value of empathy for individual growth and considering diverse perspectives.

The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech is currently making an intentional effort to vertically integrate entrepreneurial minded learning within the undergraduate curriculum. With funding from the Kern Family Foundation, the goals of this work are not only to better equip students to meet the demands of the modern marketplace but also to empower students to tell the story of their growth into entrepreneurially minded engineers. In order to tell this story, students engage in a portfolio process grounded in evidence and reflection. The structure of this story-centric curricular framework consists of a first-year launcher course where foundational topics such as design thinking, reflection, folio thinking, and entrepreneurial mindset are introduced. At the other end of the framework is a unique course called The Art of Telling Your Story . In this upper level course, students learn to tell their unique stories of their experiences and entrepreneurial mindset growth culminating in an ePortfolio. In between these two curricular bookends, students are involved in their core biomedical engineering classes. Five of these core courses are designated as gateway courses . In gateway courses, students complete signature assignments specifically created to foster entrepreneurial mindset and critical reflection. These signature assignments are also designed to produce meaningful artifacts and experiences that may later be used as part of students' stories and portfolios. In this paper, we describe the details of the structure and implementation of this vertically integrated curricular framework and present evidence of entrepreneurial mindset growth within freshmen and upper level students' ePortfolios.

is the Director of the Studio for Entrepreneurial Engineering Design at Lawrence Technological University where she teaches courses on fundamentals of engineering design projects and entrepreneurial engineering design. In addition to her PhD in Chemical Engineering, she also has an MA in Educational Studies and is a certified teacher in Michigan. She has industrial experience in pharmaceutical product and process development and over 15 years of teaching experience at the secondary and post-secondary levels. Mrs. Heidi Lynn Morano, Lawrence Technological University AbstractFor many years, Lawrence Technological University has been engaged in a campus wide effort to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in our engineering undergraduates. As part of this effort, we have intentionally created opportunities at all levels of our curriculum for students to practice an enterprising attitude. At the sophomore level these opportunities take the form of a team based, multidisciplinary, engineering design experience in our EGE 2123: Entrepreneurial Engineering Design Studio course. In the design studio, students build on the foundation of entrepreneurial mindset development laid in our first-year introductory design course. As such, at the sophomore level, they spend a semester identifying opportunities for design within a theme, engaging real customers beyond the walls of the classroom, and creating a working prototype that creates value for these customers.The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the pedagogy used to foster an entrepreneurial mindset in this sophomore design studio course. Specifically, we will focus on aspects of the course in which students are identifying opportunities for design, interacting with customers, and determining how to create the most value based on the jobs these customers are trying to perform. Building off of lessons learned from the initial offering of this course, we have created a program that allows students to interact with actual customers through a partnership with a non-profit organization that helps people with disabilities in the workplace. We also foster empathetic design by having students engage in an accessibility simulation we developed to help our students understand the everyday experiences of people with disabilities and placing those experiences in an historical context. We also use the principles of outcome driven innovation to help our students gather focused customer feedback and identify where they can create the most value for their customers in the workplace. Assessment of the impact of these studio course activities on empathy and the development of an entrepreneurial mindset will be discussed based on the experiences of multiple sections of course participants.

where she is involved in teaching and engineering education innovation and research. In addition to her PhD in Chemical Engineering, she also has an MA in Educational Studies. She has industrial experience in pharmaceutical product and process development as well as teaching experience at the secondary and post-secondary levels.