Implicit Bias? Disparity in Opportunities to Select Technical versus Non-Technical Courses in Undergraduate Engineering Programs

Forbes, Marissa H.; Bielefeldt, Angela R.; Sullivan, Jacquelyn F.

doi:10.18260/p.25598

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Results: The total credits required to earn ABET EAC-accredited non-specialty engineering degrees ranged from 120 credits to 147 credits, with a median of 128 and a mean of 127.6; results are summarized in Table 4. The total credits in these non-specialty degrees is similar to the median of 128 credit hours required in the 103 degree programs in mechanical, electrical, chemical, and civil engineering that was previously reported [43]. Overall the average number of credits was the lowest among engineering programs, followed by general engineering, and highest among interdisciplinary / integrated / multidisciplinary; these differences were not statistically significant.…”

Section: Total Curriculum Creditssupporting

confidence: 78%

“…The ABET EAC program criteria add additional curricular constraints on specialty degrees, with the majority of the identified aspects relating to technical issues; programs accredited under the general criteria do not face these additional restrictions [42]. Previous research quantified the amount of required technical coursework in mechanical, electrical, civil, and chemical engineering degrees [43]; across the 103 engineering programs a median of 73% of the total credits to graduate were required in technical courses (engineering, computing, math, and natural science), significantly higher than other STEM fields such as physics (55%), chemistry (54%), and math (46%). This analysis did not account for courses that have an engineering course number and integrate social, economic, communication, and other 'non-technical' topics within the course alongside technical subjects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What’s in a Name? General, Interdisciplinary, and Integrated Engineering Programs

Bielefeldt

2023 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) and Director of the Integrated Design Engineering program (formerly Engineering Plus). She has served as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education in the CEAE Department, as well as the ABET assessment coordinator. Professor Bielefeldt was also the faculty director of the Sustainable By Design Residential Academic Program, a living-learning community where students learned about and practice sustainability. Bielefeldt is also a licensed P.E. Professor Bielefeldt's research interests in engineering education include service-learning, sustainable engineering, social responsibility, ethics, and diversity.

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Section: Total Curriculum Creditssupporting

confidence: 78%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s in a Name? General, Interdisciplinary, and Integrated Engineering Programs

Bielefeldt

2023 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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“…Scientometric research frequently relies on U.S. News as a way to establish a dataset of the best authors or schools (Forbes et al, 2016;Holosko et al, 2016). Whether the authority of U.S. News is contested or taken for granted, it cannot be denied that these rankings influence how the discussion on higher education is framed.…”

Section: Scientometric Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative Analysis of U.S. News & World Report University Rankings

Fangmeyer¹,

Galeano²

2017

Research Analytics

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This is the story of a first mover and how it continues to move higher education. U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) first published America's Best Colleges, which ranked colleges and universities in the United States, in 1983. This was the first major higher education ranking in the world, and it became extremely popular. Thirty years later, U.S. News was not, however, the first organization to produce an international ranking comparing universities across different countries. U.S. News finally entered the world ranking stage with its inaugural Best Global Universities (BGU) in 2014. Globalization, advances in Data Analytics and Scientometrics, and rising demand for higher education have produced a proliferation of rankings and

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“…The explicit curricula of undergraduate engineering education certainly convey the powerful narrative that engineering is rational. Students engage with mostly well‐structured problems during their coursework, or problems that contain all the necessary information to solve the problem and lead to a single right answer (Dym et al, 2005; Forbes et al, 2017; Jonassen, 1997). Further, Bucciarelli (1994) showed that a mathematical approach to problem solving, which includes denying the social complexity in which those problems are embedded, is central to undergraduate engineering education.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undergraduate students' espoused beliefs about different approaches to engineering design decisions

Guanes

Leonard

Dringenberg

2023

J of Engineering Edu

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BackgroundEngineers are socialized to value rational approaches to problem solving. A lack of awareness of how engineers use different decision‐making approaches is problematic because it perpetuates the ongoing development of inequitable engineering designs and contributes to a lack of inclusion in the field. Although researchers have explored how engineering students are socialized, further work is needed to understand students' beliefs about different decision‐making approaches.Purpose/HypothesisWe explored the espoused beliefs of undergraduate students about technical, empathic, experience‐based, and guess‐based approaches to engineering design decisions.Design/MethodWe conducted semistructured one‐on‐one interviews with 20 senior engineering students at the conclusion of their capstone design experience. We used a combination of deductive and inductive data condensation approaches to generate categories of beliefs.ResultsWe identified a total of nine categories of beliefs, organized by approach. Although students' espoused beliefs did reflect the emphasis on technical approaches present in their socialization, they also described technical approaches as limited and overvalued.ConclusionThe landscape of beliefs presented make explicit both the challenges and the opportunities that students' beliefs play as the backdrop for any efforts of engineering educators to develop engineers as effective and equitable engineering designers.

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Implicit Bias? Disparity in Opportunities to Select Technical versus Non-Technical Courses in Undergraduate Engineering Programs

Cited by 5 publications

References 6 publications

What’s in a Name? General, Interdisciplinary, and Integrated Engineering Programs

What’s in a Name? General, Interdisciplinary, and Integrated Engineering Programs

Quantitative Analysis of U.S. News & World Report University Rankings

Undergraduate students' espoused beliefs about different approaches to engineering design decisions

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