Drawing on racial battle fatigue as theoretical framing and critical race methodology, we offer the counterstories of 16 Black men doctoral scientists and engineers who relied on same race peer support to successfully persist in their science and engineering (S&E) doctoral programs. Our analysis of narratives and interviews yielded three…

Resilience is an important life skill that most students need to overcome setbacks caused by academically adverse factors. However, engineering educators mostly only focus on supporting students to develop cognitive or technical skills. This article introduces academic resilience as a theoretical framework to investigate how students respond to…

ePortfolios are considered the eleventh high-impact practice (HIP) by the AAC&U (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities). They have been widely implemented in the humanities but remain underutilized in STEM fields. The benefits of engaged learning, metacognitive awareness, and professional identity development in those…

Teachers transition into the real world of teaching through three stages: survival, mastery, and impact. New teachers are often at the survival stage, where their teaching concerns and plans focus on their own well-being more than the teaching tasks. The mastery stage focuses on how best to deliver instruction, and the impact stage is focused…

Systematic changes to higher education curriculum typically occur within the extended timeframes of formal curriculum review processes. Programmes need to be reviewed periodically for internal and external accountability or to determine whether the curriculum has lost its coherence due to the accumulative effect of continual small-scale changes.…

Professional educators--in the classroom, library, counseling center, or anywhere in between--share one overarching goal: ensuring all students receive the rich, well-rounded education they need to be productive, engaged citizens. In this article, a teacher of color in Baltimore discusses his career trajectory, and explains why teacher diversity…

This is the first in a series of Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) playbooks intended to assist companies, higher education institutions, private philanthropies, membership associations, professional societies, government agencies, and other stakeholders seeking to understand the potential value of investing in coordinated strategic,…

Over the past few years many universities worldwide have introduced a common first year for all engineering disciplines. This is despite the opinion of many academics that large classes have negative effects on the learning outcomes of first year students. The University of South Australia is also faced with low motivation amongst engineering…

This paper presents a retention-oriented approach to the educational value stream within the STEM undergraduate area. Faced with several strategic challenges and opportunities, a Flex Advantage Plan was developed to enhance the undergraduate engineering technology programs and better utilize the curricular flexibilities inherent in the current…

Multiple initiatives have been launched to try to widen the pipeline for women to enter engineering careers, including reviews of gender differences in enrollment in technology and pre-engineering courses from middle school through doctoral degrees. National agencies have also studied some of the social and cultural forces at play with regard to…

In the current postindustrial era, increasing the number of minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is critically important for the United States' economic growth and its position in the global marketplace. Given the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 projection that the population of minorities is expected to increase by…

The underrepresentation of women in technical fields is a widely acknowledged national problem, limiting both the raw size of the talent pool and the diversity of experiences and perspectives of those who will design solutions to key problems facing society. Empowering women to succeed in these fields is clearly one important component of any…

Engineering programs suffer a high attrition rate, which causes the nation to graduate much less engineers. A survey of the literature reveals that the high attrition rate is due mainly to the fact that the first year of an engineering program is all fundamental theory and students don't see the connection to their future engineering careers. To…

We outline the systemic integration and use of evolving technologies by two mathematics departments, the one in a Faculty of Engineering (in Hungary), the other in a Faculty of Mathematics and Science (in Canada). Clearly these two departments play very different roles in their institutions. In one case, the students are at the university to study…

Based on research conducted in a three-year, mixed-method, multi-site National Science Foundation, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP) Project, this book offers a comprehensive look into how engineering department culture and climate impacts the successful retention of female and under-represented…