Background: Globalization and socially complex problems will greatly affect the way engineers work in the future. Therefore, efforts to transform engineering education must focus on professional skills and engagement of faculty as key change agents. Purpose/Hypotheses: For engineering programs to address the needs of society, graduates must have…

Background: Developing teamwork skills is a central objective of engineering education. Psychological safety and conflict management are pivotal components of teamwork, yet despite their significance, research in engineering project-based learning (PBL) contexts is scant. Understanding students' experiences with psychological safety and its…

Background: Many instructors made an emergency shift to online teaching during the Spring 2020 semester. There is reason to expect that instructors would have dramatically changed their pedagogy and teaching philosophies. At the same time, there are reasons that engineering instructors might be hesitant to introduce some changes to their courses.…

Background: Recent advances in technology and computer simulation have expanded the use of virtual manipulatives in engineering education. However, especially in disciplines in which tactile concepts (e.g., force) are included, it has been claimed that learning could be compromised by substituting physical materials with computer simulations.…

Background: Calls to improve learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and particularly engineering, present significant challenges for school systems. Partnerships among engineering industry, universities, and school systems to support learning appear promising, but current work is limited in its conclusions because it…

Background: Although most engineering colleges offer a variety of co-curricular and extracurricular activities to enrich students' sense of belonging to the college, existing literature has not fully captured whether and how the various activities serve to support students' sense of belonging and predict student outcomes. Purpose: We investigated…

Background: There is clear consensus among influential education reports that an expansive range of intrapersonal (e.g., self-regulation) and interpersonal competencies (e.g., empathy) highly influence educational and career success. Research on teaching and learning these competencies is limited in engineering education. Purpose/Hypothesis: This…

Background: Engineering culture research to date has described the culture as rigid, chilly, and posing many barriers to entry. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an important opportunity to explore how engineering culture responds to a major disruption. Purpose: The purposes of this study are to understand how elements of engineering culture…

Background: Families and community networks serve as sources of cultural capital and provide resources that aid the development of Black male engineers. Community cultural wealth (CCW) has been leveraged by engineering education scholars to understand and highlight student and community assets available in communities of color. Little is known…

Background: The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for the integration of engineering content and practices in elementary science curricula, yet little is known about elementary teachers' preparedness to do so or their views on teaching engineering. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of the current study was to explore K-5 teachers'…

Background: Although participation rates vary by field, Latiné and women engineers continue to be underrepresented across most segments of the engineering workforce. Research has examined engagement and persistence of Latiné and White women in engineering; however, few studies have investigated how race, ethnicity, gender, and institutional…

Background: Mindsets are based on two basic assumptions: some people think that their intellectual abilities can be developed through hard work and instruction (i.e., a growth mindset), whereas others believe that nothing can change their level of intellectual ability (i.e., a fixed mindset). The association between mindsets and academic…

Background: Chi and colleagues have argued that some of the most challenging engineering concepts exhibit properties of emergent systems. However, students often lack a mental framework, or schema, for understanding emergence. Slotta and Chi posited that helping students develop a schema for emergent systems, referred to as schema training, would…