Background: It is well known that earning a bachelor's degree in engineering is a demanding task, but ripe with opportunity. For students from historically excluded demographic groups, this task is exacerbated by oppressive circumstances. Although considerable research has documented how student outcomes differ across demographic groups, much less…

Background: High-quality feedback is crucial for academic success, driving student motivation and engagement while research explores effective delivery and student interactions. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly natural language processing (NLP), offer innovative methods for analyzing complex qualitative data such as feedback…

Background: Attrition of engineering students continues to be a concern in higher education. Despite indications that students who opt to leave engineering programs may go on to make meaningful contributions in other fields more aligned to their interests, it remains essential to support those who choose to stay in engineering with the necessary…

Background: Engineers are increasingly being asked to empathically engage with a broad range of stakeholders. Current efforts to educate empathic engineers, however, are hindered by the lack of a conceptually cohesive understanding of, and language for, applying empathy to engineering. Prior studies have suggested that research informed by…

Background: Engineering students inconsistently apply equilibrium when solving problems in statics, but few studies have explored why. Visual cognition studies suggest that features of the visual representations we use to teach students influence what domain knowledge they use to solve problems. However, few studies have explored how visual…

Background: Internships are highly relevant learning experiences for engineering students. However, such practice-based learning settings must be carefully designed to allow their learning potential to unfold. Purpose: Exploring the job demands-control-support (JDCS) model, this study aimed to investigate how job demands, job control, and social…

Background: There is a need to find ways of productively engaging K-12 students with engineering design. I investigate a new class of physical models, referred to as Improvable Models, as scaffolds for helping middle school students productively engage in engineering design practices. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study is to answer two…

Background: There is a need for engineering-specific theories and constructs to advance our understanding of student development. Student integration, widely used in educational research, is a suitable construct; however, it has also received some criticism. These critiques can be addressed by rethinking student integration and its use in the…

Background: Problem solving is considered to be a central activity of engineering practice. While some studies have shown how various beliefs affect students' abilities to solve problems, studies are needed that explicitly examine the beliefs and assumptions students bring to the problem-solving process. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this…

Background: Engineering student support centers (ESSCs) are common providers of assistance for undergraduate students, especially those from underrepresented groups. However, ESSCs are relatively recent, and there are gaps in our knowledge about how they are intentionally designed to function alongside engineering curricula. Purpose/Hypothesis:…

Background: Modeling is a pervasive feature of engineering that is rarely taught explicitly to engineering students. The implicit inclusion of modeling often results in conceptions held by students of models based on the everyday use of the term that neglects important predictive types of models. Purpose: We studied the effectiveness of an…

Background Engineering: Faculty members should adopt effective pedagogical approaches in order to maximize student learning. The beliefs of faculty members about instructional practice are an important construct in determining what and how they teach. Purpose: This study investigates the effect of faculty members' involvement in model-eliciting…