Engineering Education Research Aids Instruction

The marginalized identities of sense-makers: Reframing engineering student retention

“…The engineering education community is taking powerful and important steps to retain students, particularly among demographically underrepresented groups [1], [11], [12], [14], [16]. But, we need to think more broadly about what, in addition to demographic diversity, we're trying to retain.…”

“…His epistemological views also contribute to his growing sense of contrast between how he thinks engineering courses should be taught and assessed and his experiences of how they are taught and assessed. Such issues fall squarely in the domain of engineering student retention: discussions of how to keep students in engineering [1], [11], [12], how to reshape the plurality of engineering [13][14][15], and the often-complex stories of why some students leave the field [5], [6], [16].…”

“…There are longstanding concerns about how to keep students in science and engineering [16], [13] that continue to connect to engineering education research [1], [11]. The "leaky pipeline" model has been especially useful as an analytic metaphor [20], [14], [21], [15].…”

Development and Application of a Questionnaire to Measure Student Attitudes Toward and Understanding of Engineering

“…To the extent that such perceptions and beliefs form an inaccurate (or "negative") vision of a future engineering career, curricular approaches that aim to form a more "positive" vision may be warranted. These approaches can be pedagogical, such as collaborative and project-based learning [6][7][8], contentbased by aiming (for example) to expose the positive contributions of engineering to society [9][10][11][12], or both. All other things being equal, curricular features than can foster among students a more positive identification with engineering, i.e.…”

The Development of a Freshman Engineering Research Program

“…These experiences allow undergraduate students to take an active role in their education and help to expand students' knowledge base outside of the day-to-day classroom problem sets and exams. Undergraduate research participation and similarly aimed immersive learning opportunities have been linked with increasing student confidence [1] and interest in STEM based careers [2][3][4], as well as self-efficacy [5,6], and ultimately college and program retention rates [4,5,7,8].…”