Fourteen engineering faculty in a Christian University in the southwest were interviewed to explore how faculty understood their role in student retention and how they were motivated to participate in student retention strategies. The qualitative paradigm, qualitative descriptive design, and inductive, thematic analysis with constant comparison…

Over the last decade the Bay Area region has witnessed a lack of diversity in Silicon Valley technology professions, a subject of current political and popular discourse. The California State University (CSU) system provides accessible higher education; the CSU system approach to accessible higher education affirms the distinctness of regions,…

Accessibility of course content plays a critical role in student success. Among all college students, students with disabilities (SWD) face numerous additional challenges when digital content is inaccessible or difficult to use. The main contributions of this paper are firstly we examined different course delivery modalities to identify components…

As cornerstones of biomedical engineering and bioengineering undergraduate programs, hands-on laboratory experiences promote key skill development and student engagement. Lab courses often involve team-based activities and close communication with instructors, allowing students to build connection and community. Necessitated by the pandemic,…

BME HealthReach is an educational outreach program where undergraduate BME students participate in an out-of-class design thinking course to create and teach interactive STEM activities to K-12 students, where children with chronic illnesses are the primary clients. We detail research that seeks to answer the following: (1) what impact does this…

This work-in-progress research paper examines the relationship between two aspects of students' engagement and academic performance. With the boom of technology-mediated learning environments, many educational applications are integrated into STEM courses. However, the effectiveness of these applications in the learning environments is contingent…

The paper explores the effectiveness of hands-on learning (HOL) as a student-centered model to train first year chemical engineering undergraduates. The pedagogical design of the course uses laboratory sessions, lectures, reflection sessions, projects, and assessments to achieve the course learning outcomes. The adopted assessment methodology…

As national STEM initiatives focus on engineering design as a STEM integrator, a more important concern for K-12 educators should be teaching design fundamentals and using these experiences to help students obtain STEM content knowledge. There appears however, to be little instruction and emphasis on building students' design-sketching skills in…

The Laplace transform is an important tool in many branches of engineering, for example, electric and control engineering, but is also regarded as a difficult topic for students to master. We have interviewed 22 university teachers from five universities in three countries (Mexico, Spain and Sweden) about their views on relationships among…

Engineering design places unique demands on teachers, as students are coming up with new, unanticipated ideas to problems along often unpredictable trajectories. These demands motivate a responsive approach to teaching, in which teachers attend their students' thinking and flexibly adapt their instructional plans and objectives. A great deal of…

The first steps in the engineering design process are to identify and define the problem (Eide, Jenison, Mashaw, & Northup, 2001). The primary purpose of this article is to highlight the problem that has existed for the past three decades (a disconnect between industrial educators and proponents of technological literacy) and to make a…

There is little doubt that student motivation is essential in providing a beneficial learning experience. One way to produce such motivation is to stimulate it through suitable assessment methods. This paper shares the experience acquired by the authors, who are university lecturers in Civil Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,…

This concluding commentary takes the perspective of research on practicing scientists and engineers to consider what open areas and future directions on relational thinking and learning should be considered beyond the impressive research presented in the special issue. Areas for more work include (a) a need to examine educational applications of…

This paper describes a web-based suite of simulation games that have the purpose to enhance the chemical engineering curriculum with business-oriented decisions. Two simulation cases are discussed whose teaching topics include closing material and energy balances, importance of recycle streams, price-volume relationship in a dynamic market, impact…

Curriculum reform is a key topic in the engineering education literature, but much of this discussion proceeds with little engagement with the impact of the local context in which the programme resides. This article thus seeks to understand the influence of local contextual dynamics on curriculum reform in engineering education. The empirical…