In a small course on technology and society, students participated in an extended role-play simulation for two weeks. Each student played a different adult character in a fictional community, which faces technological decisions in three scenarios set in the near future. The three scenarios involved stem cell research, nanotechnology, and privacy.…

The ability to visualize in three dimensions is a cognitive skill that has been shown to be important for success in engineering and other technological fields. For engineering, the ability to mentally rotate 3-D objects is especially important. Unfortunately, of all the cognitive skills, 3-D rotation abilities exhibit robust gender differences,…

Over the past several decades there has been a call to raise student technological literacy. To take such an abstract concept and produce a program that will increase student science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) literacy was not an easy task. However, it was accomplished. During the past two years many United States school…

Concurrent engineering or overlapping activities is a business strategy for schedule compression on large development projects. Design parameters and tasks from every aspect of a product's development process and their interdependencies are overlapped and worked on in parallel. Concurrent engineering suffers from negative effects such as excessive…

This dissertation is a mixed-method study conducted using qualitative grounded theory and quantitative survey and correlation approaches. This study aims to explore the motivation and adaptability of females in the engineering profession and to develop a theoretical framework for both motivation and adaptability issues. As a result, this study…

Graduate students in the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, represent an important link in current reforms emphasizing inquiry-based learning and teaching, as they represent the future of the STEM professoriate. Although graduate students commonly hold teaching assistantships, they rarely receive training on how to…

In this article, Brendan Cantwell and Jenny J. Lee examine the experiences of international postdocs and their varying career paths in the current political economy of academic capitalism through the lens of neoracism. Using in-depth interviews with science and engineering faculty and international postdocs in the United States and the United…

This paper investigates the effect of bringing real world case studies on college students' self efficacy, their confidence, and their motivation toward an engineering field. It was found that working with real cases increases student's motivation and maximizes their learning by becoming personally committed to course and program goals. As a…

A values-centered and team-based behavioral safety process was implemented in a petroleum oil refinery. Employee teams defined the refinery's safety values and related practices, which were used to guide the process design and implementation. The process included (a) a safety assessment; (b) the clarification of safety-related values and related…

Despite the progress made in studying the dynamics of attracting and retaining STEM students, limited research have focused on understanding the values and impact faculty could have on the learning outcomes of students. This exploratory study presents the voices of six successful engineering students through a case study interview approach. Common…

This study examines the Noyce Program, which provides scholarships for STEM majors in return for teaching in high need schools. The perceptions of 555 scholarship recipients were investigated using hierarchical cluster analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and Rasch analysis to determine how the scholarship influenced their commitments to…

Ethics education for professionals has become popular in Japan over the last two decades. Many professional schools now require students to take an applied ethics or professional ethics course. In contrast, very few courses of professional ethics for teaching exist or have been taught in Japan. In order to obtain suggestions for teacher education,…

This study examined relationships between important aspects of a university education and the assessment and development of generic skills. A sample of 323 students enrolled in single or double arts, engineering and/or science degrees from a research-intensive university in Australia were administered the Graduate Skills Assessment to measure four…

This article focuses on how technology educators can challenge students to "think" about technical problems. A key aspect of success in quality problem solving is understanding learning preferences and problem-solving approaches. The Learning Style Inventory (LSI) can be used to assess an individual's ideal way to learn, in essence, a…

In a first-year engineering course with an enrollment of approximately 1900 students per year, seventy-eight undergraduate engineering students' perceptions of their graduate teaching assistants were obtained using a modified Adjective Generation Technique. Based upon student feedback, researchers identified three themes of highest concern to the…