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The Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES) was deployed for a second time in Spring 2008 to undergraduate engineering students at 21 American universities. The goal of APPLES was to corroborate and extend findings from the Academic Pathways Study and the first deployment of APPLES (Spring 2007) on factors that correlate with persistence in engineering on a national scale. This set of deployments, which surveyed over 4,500 students, was among the largest and broadest cross-sectional surveys focusing on undergraduate engineering ever undertaken.Because there was no readily-available list of undergraduate students attending American institutions studying and intending to study engineering, we sampled by institution using institutional characteristics such as Carnegie 2000 classification. In seeking participation by a broad range of institutions, we recognized the need to vary the target student strata for recruitment by institution. In this process paper, we present an overview of our institutional sampling, discuss our student sampling and recruitment, and report response results. We extend our lessons learned from deploying the online survey at four institutions to 21 institutions, including coordination with local campus coordinators, IRB requirements, subject recruitment and deployment to build on the model for conducting survey design and research for engineering education researchers.Index Terms -Cross-sectional study, Engineering persistence, Recruitment, Survey methodology. OVERVIEW & BACKGROUNDThe goal of the second set of Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES or APPLE survey) deployments is to corroborate and extend the data from the Academic Pathway Study (APS) on a national level. The APS seeks to explore key questions around skills, identity development, and factors that relate to student persistence in engineering. The APS data include two survey instruments developed to study questions around persistence: the Persistence in Engineering (PIE) survey (deployed seven times over four years with a longitudinal cohort of 160 students at four institutions starting in 2003), and APPLES [1-4].APPLES was first deployed ("APPLES1") in Spring 2007 and surveyed the broader undergraduate engineering population at the four core APS institutions [5]. The second APPLES administration ("APPLES2"), the focus of this paper, surveyed undergraduate students at 21 universities in the United States 1 . The APPLES instrument is derived from the PIE survey instrument. The APPLES2 instrument is nearly identical to the APPLES1 instrument; the major changes being the addition of items for two new and several existing variables, and basic improvements for readability (see [1] for more details).Due to our focus on persistence in engineering education, we recruited three groups of undergraduate students to take APPLES: (1) engineering students: those who declared an engineering major or had already committed to engineering programs; (2) pre-engineering students: those who intended ...

Engineering students engaged in product-based learning typically see what they have produced, but do not as easily see what they have learned. In a joint course between the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and Stanford University, U.S., graduate students from each university worked in high performance designdevelopment teams on globally distributed scenarios for an industrial client. One of the difficulties of distributed teamwork is establishing team cohesion, trust, and credibility early in the project. Recognizing these challenges, an intervention engaging local "culture coaches" was implemented. Each coach served as a facilitator and interpreter of each team's similarities and differences with regards to local class culture as well as the social culture. In the study, the work of the culture coaches contributed to a more unified team identity and increased student awareness of learning in the design process and product.