Engineering Education Research

Dr. Jessica Deters

MECHANICAL & MATERIALS ENGINEERING

Intercultural Competencies ‘In the Wild’: Exploring Situated Intercultural Competency Development in Graduate Engineering Research Environments 

In an increasingly global and diverse society, engineering programs are called to produce engineers at all levels who have intercultural competency (also known as global competencies), representing the ability to work with stakeholders across the world and from a variety of cultural backgrounds. This project focuses on an understudied group in the intercultural competency literature – engineering graduate students – and asks, how do graduate engineering students develop intercultural competencies ‘in the wild’ in authentic academic research laboratory environments. Given that over 58% of engineering doctoral students across U.S. institutions are international, the research laboratory becomes a place that, if harnessed, could facilitate intercultural competency development for both U.S. and international students as future thought-leaders. 

Student Participation: The REU participant(s) will learn to conduct inductive qualitative coding and/or conduct statistical analyses on quantitative survey data. The participant(s) will work with data collected through the first year of the project (qualitative and quantitative), which aims to establish a baseline of intercultural competency development amongst graduate students in faculty-run laboratories.

Preferred Qualifications/Experience: Interest in intercultural / global competencies; experience with Excel.

Dr. Jessica Deters

MECHANICAL & MATERIALS ENGINEERING

Disentangling “Rigor”: Connecting Engineering Culture with Student Well-Being

Research on engineering culture to date has explored its values, beliefs, mindsets, and underlying ideologies (e.g., meritocracy, rigor, depoliticization, technical/social dualism), showing us the ways in which this culture is exclusive of students from underrepresented minority groups and is highly resistant to change. More recently, researchers have approached investigations of student mental health and well-being through a lens of engineering culture, making visible the connections between a culture of stress and student mental health outcomes. Prior work by Deters identified two sources of difficulty in undergraduate engineering education: intrinsic and constructed. This project utilizes a data set of 21 interviews conducted with undergraduate engineering students about their mental health and aims to identify how different types of difficulty impact students’ mental health and overall well-being.

Student Participation: The REU participant will learn to conduct deductive and inductive qualitative coding on set of 21 interviews. The participant will work with existing data to identify sources of difficulty, classify those sources as intrinsic or construed, and correlate participants’ descriptions of difficulty with their descriptions of their mental health.

Preferred Qualifications/Experience: Interest in student well-being and/or the culture of undergraduate engineering education.

Dr. Heidi Diefes-Dux, Dr. Grace Panther, Dr. Logan Perry

BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, CIVIL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

Student Reflection for Lifelong Learning

During an undergraduate engineering degree, students are meant to acquire lifelong learning skills via the transition from highly structured, teacher-led instruction (pedagogy) to partially or minimally structured, instructor-guided project work (towards andragogy). Students need to develop “an ability to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed, using appropriate learning strategies” (ABET, 2021) alongside technical knowledge, abilities, and skills. Embedded in the “ability to acquire and apply new knowledge” is the ability to think critically - to identify gaps in one’s understanding or skill set, to examine and monitor one’s thinking processes and progress towards a goal, and to plan appropriate actions (Ku & Ho, 2010). Students can develop this self-directed learning capacity through self-reflection (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001). This research work focuses on discovering the impact of formal and continuous reflection instruction on students’ development of skills for thinking about their learning over time as well as instructors’ thinking about the use of reflection in their course instruction. 

The REU participant(s) may investigate (1) changes in students’ strategies for making sense of and managing their learning, (2) students’ use of resources to learn to reflect or (3) students’ knowledge gains or changes in their self-directed learning behaviors.  Data will have been gathered prior to the REU program from two engineering departments and multiple academic years. REU participants will work with an appropriate subset of the data to answer their specific research question(s).

Dr. Heidi Diefes-Dux, Dr. Grace Panther

BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, CIVIL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

Evidencing Epidemic Change in Engineering Education 

The use of a wide array of teaching practices and strategies (WATPS) in higher STEM education has been shown to improve students’ conceptual understanding, appeal to a diverse set of students, and increase persistence in engineering, especially among underrepresented groups (Freeman et al., 2014; Kuh et al., 2006; President's Council, 2012; Seymour & Hewitt, 1997). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many engineering instructors continued to use traditional teaching methods, hindering the formation of engineers. When universities switched to emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020), instructors experienced crisis-induced motivation to adopt teaching practices/strategies they had not used before. The overarching research question is: To what extent did instructors sustain, enhance, or extend their use of these practices and strategies? The research objective for this project is to investigate and document the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on instructors’ teaching practices and sustained use of a WATPS relative to instructors’ adaptability (“the effectiveness of an individual’s response to new demands resulting from the novel and often ill-defined problems created by uncertainty, complexity, and rapid changes in the work situation” (Chan, 2000, p. 3)) and course complexity (a measure of an instructors’ use of WATPS in a course and the challenge of implementing the teaching practices and strategies used a course). 

Student Participation: The REU participant(s) will learn to apply a Course Complexity Typology to classify the complexity of engineering courses using course artifacts (e.g., syllabi and learning management feature use data) and investigate changes in course complexity over time. Data will have been gathered prior to the REU program from multiple engineering departments and academic years. REU participants will work with an appropriate subset of the data to answer their specific research question(s). REU participant does not need any prior experience or have any preferred qualifications.

Dr. Heidi Diefes-Dux, Dr. Erica Ryherd

BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, ARCHITECTURAL ENGINEERING

Analyzing Assessments for Virtual/Augmented-Reality-Based Discipline Exploration Rotations (VADERs) 

The path to proficiency in engineering is long and difficult, often lacking displays of what it would be like to be an engineer and the positive societal impacts of engineering, weakening students’ interest (engagement) and confidence (self-efficacy) and perpetuating issues of retention and capacity building (National Academies, 2016). Virtual/Augmented-Reality-Based Discipline Exploration Rotations (VADERs) provide students with a platform to explore Architectural Engineering and its subdisciplines through virtual, mock-up healthcare spaces and interactions. VADERs are open-ended, human-computer interactions informed by the Model of Domain Learning (MDL, Kulilowich & Hepler, 2018) framework to help students visualize themselves in their chosen careers and enhance resiliency against the challenges of an engineering degree program. VADERs are embedded into courses through assignments to allow students to better link concepts learned in the classroom to realistic work examples. The overarching research question guiding this work is: Do VADERs positively impact student interest and self-efficacy in engineering? Data will be available from two architectural engineering departments and multiple courses over a three-year period. 

Student Participation: The REU participant(s) will analyze a series of structured assessments and self-reflections aligned to Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT, Lent et al., 1994) to gauge the impact of VADERs on (1) students’ interest, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations with attention to general statistical trends, (2) differences across subject demographics, and (3) emerging themes across multiple exposures to VADER modules. REU participant does not need any prior experience or have any preferred qualifications.

Dr. Logan Perry, Dr. Jessica Deters

CIVIL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING, MECHANICAL & MATERIALS ENGINEERING

Developing Complete Engineers: Nebraska Engineering Inclusive Excellence Center (NEIEC)

To maintain global competitiveness, we must cultivate a diverse engineering workforce by educating individuals from various backgrounds, equipping them with technical, professional, and personal skills necessary to tackle complex challenges, and fostering their engineering identity. As Nebraska’s only engineering college, our mission is to ensure engineering education is accessible to all Nebraskans, including women, students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (UREGs) and students from rural areas. The Nebraska Engineering Inclusive Excellence Center (NEIEC) builds upon our signature Complete Engineer® program that prioritizes student success across six core non-technical competency areas—the first being Inclusive Excellence. 

Student Participation: The REU participant(s) will analyze data collected through the first year of the project (qualitative and/or quantitative) to assess the success of the center in its inaugural year.

Preferred Qualifications/Experience: Interest in student retention and/or development of professional skills.

Dr. Bonita Sharif

SCHOOL OF COMPUTING

Eye Movement Modeling Examples for Program Comprehension and Debugging (2 students)

The goal of this project is to collect eye movement modeling examples from experts doing a) program comprehension tasks and b) debugging tasks on code examples commonly found in undergraduate computing curricula.  Educators are typically aware of several major problems in comprehension and debugging that hinder student progress.  The purpose is to expose the thought process of an expert through eye movement modeling examples specific to a context. The project proposes the creation of a repository of eye movement modeling video examples recorded by an expert for program comprehension and debugging tasks.  The experts can be advanced graduate students fluent in the language of choice. This project helps novices learn by watching eye movements of experts as they work on comprehending programs (e.g., how to spot a code beacon) and while debugging. The videos will have a voice-over of the expert vocalizing their thought process. These videos can be used as teaching aids to help novices learn where to look, how to read code, and how to avoid areas that are not important to the task. 

Student Participation: The REU participant(s) will devise a set of common problems in comprehension and debugging in alignment with computing curriculum at UNL. These will be translated into programs and tasks. The student will then learn how to design and conduct the eye tracking recordings for program comprehension and debugging tasks. The screen will also be recorded during the process and in a post processing step, the gaze data will be visualized on top of the recorded screen. The student will be using iTrace to record and post process this data. The raw gaze can also be used for further analysis as needed. The contributions of this project are a) helping novices learn the thought processes of experts as they work by watching the eye movement modeling examples and b) an audio/video repository of eye movement examples for educators. 

Preferred Qualifications/Experience: REU participant does not need any prior experience or have any preferred qualifications.