In spite of the vast amount of literature that focuses on the need for significantly more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates, the importance of a student finding a good career fit, and what makes a student employable, little research exists on undergraduate engineering students’ understanding of the process of how to find, qualify for, and secure a preferred first position after graduation (FPAG). Likewise, it is important for research to consider nuanced distinctions within STEM fields to assist research to practice transitions. Competition in securing jobs upon graduation is expected to continue, including for engineering positions. In fact, even in a market of high demand for STEM graduates, employers need candidates that display the skills, interests, and readiness to be successful employees.
Category: Hard Questions: Education
Hard Questions: Education
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Board 164: Engineering Interventions in My Science Classroom: What’s My Role?
This work in progress paper draws on data from year one of a multi-year project aimed at integrating engineering into middle-school science classes. The expectation that middle school teachers integrate engineering into their science curriculum may be challenging as engineering related content has not historically been part of teacher preparation. Particularly in rural areas, in service teacher training related to engineering may be absent or difficult to access due to proximity or financial or time costs. Therefore, it is important to develop effective professional development (PD) that works within the actual teaching context and makes few demands on teachers beyond their regular workload. In partnership with teachers and local industry workers in rural and Appalachian areas, the Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools (VT-PEERS) project developed extended classroom engineering activities for students that also served as teacher PD related to teaching engineering in locally relevant ways. As part of this work, a qualitative analysis was conducted to understand how teachers, from their perspectives, envisioned their role during the interventions. Data were collected prior to and after interventions (within an academic year) to further understand if, and if so, how, teacher perspectives of their role changed. Results reveal three initial roles; classroom manager, learner, helper, and unsure. The post intervention data revealed all teachers indicated being a “learner”.
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Board 192: Identifying and addressing the barriers to advancement for women in the engineering professoriate: A systematic review of literature
This work-in-progress paper shares ongoing findings from a mixed-methods systematic literature review that seeks to examine the retention of women in the engineering professoriate. We identified literature from EBSCOHost and Engineering Village that discussed women in the engineering professoriate in relation to either retention or persistence or both, as explicitly stated in their abstract. Following an initial review of 191 titles, 48 papers passed our inclusion criteria; further qualitative analysis of abstracts yielded 31 papers, which underwent a full paper review. Our ongoing findings suggest the following: a) research on the retention of women in engineering professoriate is being supported by grants and funding opportunities; b) the reviewed literature documented six barriers faced by women in the engineering professoriate: isolation of women faculty, work/life balance, inequitable distribution of service, underrepresentation of women faculty, implicit bias, and departmental resources; and c) although journal scholarship on this topic is not limited to popular engineering education publishing venues, conference scholarship are mainly from those popular in the field, such as the ASEE Annual Conference and the Frontiers in Education Conference. Future work will share the extent to which the reviewed literature discussed interventions to recruit or retain women in the engineering professoriate, and whether these interventions vary by the type of institution.
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Using Science to Support and Develop Employees in the Tech Workforce—An Opportunity for Multidisciplinary Pursuits in Engineering Education
The majority of students who choose to major in engineering do so to become a part of the community of practice of professional engineers (Johri & Olds, 2011), meaning that they want to have adequate exposure to what a career as a professional engineer could potentially be as part of their college experience. However, according to Jonassen (2014), engineering graduates are not well trained to contribute to the workplace due to the complexities associated with engineering work. Stevens, Johri, and O’Connor (2014) described engineering work as that which involves complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions. Since developing the skills for innovation involves analysis of complex, ambiguous, ill-defined, real-world problems (Daly, Mosyjowski, & Seifert, 2014; Newell, 2010), students must have an opportunity to, at the very least, be exposed to multidisciplinary teams. This emphasis on the need for exposure to multi-disciplinary problem solving holds true not only for undergraduate engineers in training, but also for graduate students focused on engineering education.
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Work in progress: Coloring Outside the Lines-Exploring the Potential for Integrating Creative Evaluation in Engineering Education
Extant cultures within academic institutions that educate and train the next generations of STEM professionals tend to privilege long-held majority perspectives of knowing, thinking, and doing in science and engineering. To more intentionally recruit and include diverse groups of students into our educational programs, it is imperative that we develop and adopt unique pedagogical and assessment approaches that move beyond didactics, leverage experiential learning, and embrace a variety of student backgrounds and identities. In this paper, we demonstrate how visual methods-based assessments can serve as an impactful alternative to more traditional forms. We start by introducing three examples currently used in STEM curricula, and then by describing how these assessments promote autonomy and creativity as students make meaning of STEM and of themselves as STEM professionals. We conclude the description of each assessment example by identifying key considerations for STEM instructors when attempting to implement such assessments in their own contexts.
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From the classroom to the newsroom: A critical route to introduce AI in journalism education
From a computer vision application to monitor elections transparency in Argentina to automated real estate texts in Norway, and everything in between, Artificial Intelligence powered tools are changing journalism. Scholars have taken note, and the academic production of AI in journalism has gained considerable ground in the last five years. However, research on how journalism education deals with AI influence in the industry is scarce. Based on a self-training method using available online free courses for journalists and a review of university teaching initiatives, this article proposes key elements to trace teaching trajectories to introduce AI into journalism curriculum. Included are recommendations for drawing a path to teaching journalism students to think critically about AI and, at the same time, to understand the available tools for reporting and investigating in a complex context where journalism lives in a profound state of crisis.