Background: Latinx students from migratory farmworking families face unique challenges when navigating educational and professional engineering contexts. Yet, they are rich with funds of knowledge that can be applied to support their engineering journey. Purpose/Hypothesis: This qualitative study identified how they developed and utilized their funds of knowledge in different engineering contexts. Design/Method: This study used interview data to examine the funds of knowledge developed by individuals of migratory families and their use in engineering. Our goal was to uncover and document how these individuals developed and used their funds of knowledge in two engineering contexts, i.e., degree programs and industry. Results: Our results demonstrate how our participants (both migratory engineering students and working professionals) bridged empathetic habits of mind, teamwork, organizational skills, work ethic, translational skills, and resourcefulness from their home lives into engineering practice. Conclusion: By understanding and integrating the funds of knowledge that migratory individuals bring to the classroom, we can improve how we teach and practice engineering.
Background: As they work to shift to student-centered instructional approaches, an increasing number of undergraduate engineering programs have adopted the Learning Assistant model, originally developed by the physics education community and now widespread across disciplines. Learning Assistants (LAs) are near-peer instructional assistants focused on facilitating student interaction, sensemaking, and belonging during class and lab sessions. While empirical research has shown that courses with LAs have higher student outcomes than those without, little is known within the engineering education community about the mechanisms behind these outcomes, including mechanisms through which LAs engage in pedagogical learning. Purpose: In this study, we use a communities of practice framework to investigate how engineering LAs come to develop their pedagogical competencies. Specifically, we characterize the mechanisms through which LAs’ pedagogical learning occurs in the weekly pedagogy seminar, a key component of the LA model. Method: This interpretive case study focuses on a multi-year group of LAs (n = 18) supporting a range of mechanical engineering courses. Data sources semi-structured interviews with LAs and field notes from the mechanical engineering department’s LA pedagogy seminar. Results: We identified eleven mechanisms of LA pedagogical learning and depicted these on a data-based concept map of the LA community of practice. The engineering LAs jointly constructed pedagogical knowledge by engaging in collective and mutually supportive reflection on their classroom experiences as LAs. Experienced LAs made important contributions by transmitting program culture, normalizing the challenges of supporting students in engineering courses, and offering existing knowledge for troubleshooting challenges. Conclusions: This study expands the research base on transforming undergraduate engineering courses toward student-centered instruction. It suggests that near-peer instructional assistants develop pedagogical competencies through repeated collective reflection in a supportive cohort of both novice and experienced fellow assistants.
Background: Introductory engineering classes require students to adapt to new disciplinary concepts and learning environments. As a result, many students who struggle at this stage are at risk of losing interest in and dropping out of their engineering majors. Examining students’ self-efficacy beliefs, which are linked to critical academic outcomes, helps us understand how students navigate their experiences in these courses. Purpose: We examined the relationship between students’ learning experiences, motivation (e.g., self-efficacy judgements), and performance in a chemical engineering materials and energy balances (MEB) course using the following research questions: How do social interactions within the MEB course impact students? How do beliefs (e.g., self-efficacy judgements) influence students’ goals in the MEB course? How do students regulate their academic performance in the MEB course? Method: We conducted five interviews with students enrolled in the MEB course, using the social cognitive career theory (SCCT) as our conceptual framework and thematic analysis to analyze the data. Four of the five participants took the MEB course during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: First, we found that peer networks and student-faculty interactions, particularly timely feedback and support, bolstered students’ confidence and encouraged persistence. Conversely, negative social experiences, such as unhelpful resources or unfavorable social comparisons, diminished their self-efficacy beliefs and hindered their academic development. Second, we observed that students in the MEB course continually reevaluated their goals and adjusted their academic performance in response to their learning experiences. Discussion/Conclusion: We propose a social cognitive model of task performance, contextualized to the MEB course context, relating students’ proximal social interactions within the MEB learning environment to their self-efficacy beliefs, academic goals, and behavior. These findings contribute to the vast SCCT literature and support prior studies on students’ educational development in introductory engineering courses. As most participants took the online version of the course during the COVID-19 pandemic, our results also contribute to knowledge of the pandemic’s impact on student learning. These results have implications for designing resilient and equitable engineering courses at a critical stage in students’ academic careers, thereby positively impacting their self-efficacy beliefs and providing timely feedback to help them develop into independent and confident problem solvers.
Background: Engineering education has long prioritized technical mastery while marginalizing emotional awareness, ethical reflection, and social responsibility. This technocratic and meritocratic culture often limits engineers’ capacity to address human dimensions of sociotechnical problems. Emerging frameworks such as compassion in engineering propose integrating emotional intelligence, moral imagination, and social concern into professional formation. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study examines how engineering students express compassion through an interdisciplinary course integrating the arts and engineering. We analyze how students conveyed compassion in written and artistic work and how they linked it to engineering practice. Design/Method: Using qualitative thematic analysis, we examined artifacts from an eight-week undergraduate course titled Compassionate Engineering. Results: Students’ ethical awareness was interpreted through a cognitive–affective empathy heuristic. Artistic expression served as medium and method, enabling students to externalize emotion, critique systemic harms, and communicate ethical insights to public audiences. The process reframed design’s Define–Develop phase as a space for ethical imagination and revealed tensions between compassion and competition in engineering culture. Conclusions: Integrating arts-based pedagogies can foster compassionate engineers who approach design as an ethical, creative, and socially responsive practice. Such integration broadens engineering education beyond technical competence toward care, justice, and human-centered responsibility.
Background: Research on the ways that students’ interactions in collaborative, project-based learning has described how important learning opportunities, such as opportunities to contribute, implement, and refine ideas, must be negotiated amongst students in the learning environment. Such opportunities are subject to both overt and covert power dynamics that govern students’ behaviors and interactions during team-based, project-based learning. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this research was to examine the nature and function of questions in student design teams and their implications for students’ access to learning opportunity structures in team-based learning activities. Drawing on Status Characteristics Theory, this work examines how questions can reflect and reinforce power dynamics in student teams, thereby shaping students’ participation in team-based learning. Design/Method: This ethnographic study drew on data from (a) ongoing observations of three focal student engineering design teams and (b) semi-structured interviews with members of each focal design team. In this paper, I analyzed fieldnotes and interview transcripts documenting the types of questions students asked, as well as their apparent influence on the interactional and communication dynamics in teams. Results: Questions function beyond their commonly understood information-gathering functions, and students’ status in their teams shapes the meaning students make of questions in situated contexts. For example, when low-status students ask negative interrogatives, the questions were interpreted as requests for approval or hedging. However, when high-status students uttered negative interrogatives, they sentences were often interpreted as demands. Such differences have implications for students’ participation and, by extension, their learning. Conclusions: Though some patterns of communication and interaction might be perceived as good engineering teamwork, instructors must be mindful of the ways that seemingly normal interactions may still reflect prohibitive power dynamics in student teams.
Background: Understanding instructors’ perspectives that shape their decision making related to integrating societal content in their courses is key to informing efforts to ensure engineering training prepares students with the skills and knowledge necessary to account for both technical and social dimensions of complex engineering problems. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study examines the varied ways instructors think about the relevance of societal content to engineering courses and how, if at all, it can or should be integrated in their courses. Design/Method: Drawing on interviews with 21 instructors across 11 engineering departments, we leveraged a composite narrative analysis approach to present nuanced descriptions of the narratives articulated by instructors about their decisions related to the integration of societal content in their courses. Results: Our findings describe five composite narratives that highlight a range of perspectives informing instructors’ decisions about the integration of societal content, ranging from a belief that societal content has no place in engineering coursework to a belief that societal content is inherent in and a necessary consideration for all engineering work. Conclusions: Instructors’ narratives made evident the ways in which technocentric values about engineering work shape decisions about what is taught in engineering courses and how societal content is often weighed against, rather than connected to, technical engineering science content. While many instructors discussed the relevance of societal considerations in engineering, they also described a need for greater support in efforts to implement societal content in their courses.
Background: Engineering education research (EER) is relatively new in Canada, and there is a sense it is “lagging behind” EER in the United States (U.S.). This relative newness, coupled with the epistemological and normative differences between its parent disciplines (engineering and education), presents many challenges to developing the EER community, including establishing physical and disciplinary homes, dedicated funding, and identity. These challenges impact how the field matures. Given the different phases of development between the two nations and their geographical and cultural proximity, EER scholars in Canada should be able to learn from the development of EER in the U.S. to address these challenges and advance the field in Canada. Purpose: This article offers a comparative look at EER in Canada and the U.S., so Canadian scholars and scholars living in areas where EER is emerging can learn from the development of EER in the U.S. and address the challenges in advancing the field in their region. Scope: We share our understandings of the contextual elements of EER in Canada compared to the U.S. based on the literature and on the scholarship and lived experiences of the authors. We theorize Canada’s challenges in developing the EER field using McAlpine’s (2012) Identity-Trajectory framework. Discussion/Conclusions: EER in Canada is challenged by a lack of home, funding, and identity. These tensions create a circular logic, preventing the growth of EER as a legitimate field in Canada, and must be addressed. The development of EER in Canada lags, yet follows similar patterns to EER in the U.S. As such, Canada should be able to advance EER in the Canadian context by learning from the national and international infrastructure that the U.S. has helped establish and following pathways that better suit the Canadian context.
Background: Engineering education has been slow to incorporate student-centered pedagogy into teaching practices despite demonstrated benefits to students through educational research. This study analyzed data from the Instructional Incubator (I2)-module sequence, a two-semester course initiative in a biomedical engineering (BME) department that engaged teams of students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty in effective instructional practices and theory while guiding the teams in developing one-credit modules for early-career BME students. Student-instructor teams also had the opportunity to teach their modules with guidance from an engineering education faculty the following semester. The I2-module sequence aimed to develop teaching practices characterized by responsive, student-centered instruction through incorporating principles of situated learning. Purpose: This study sought to explore the extent to which designing an intervention based on Community of Practice (CoP) concepts influenced the teaching practices its participants applied in their own teaching. Design: We collected reflection data from non-faculty participants through a post-I2-module experience survey and analyzed the data for evidence of how participants demonstrated responsive, student-centered instruction in their modules. We applied codes about curricular elements and their influences that categorized changes as implemented or proposed and coded reasons for change when participants provided them. Results: Our findings demonstrated that the CoP-inspired I2-module sequence supported engineering educators in employing instructional practices that were student-centered and responsive—examples of which appear in the results. Conclusions: This study also discusses elements of the I2-module sequence that could be beneficial for engineering educators seeking to create instructional training to prepare instructors to adopt and successfully apply responsive, student-centered pedagogical practices in their own classrooms.
Background: Large language models (LLMs) have arrived, recently popularized by the tool ChatGPT, and engineering education researchers have begun experimenting with LLM tools in their work. Considering LLM’s ability to produce competent-sounding text and process data, the use cases seem numerous. As we incorporate these models into our research methodologies, there are concerns that we must address related to research quality. Purpose: Although the concerns with LLMs are well-documented at this point, there is still little work focused on examining the implications of this emerging technology tied to specific quality frameworks to anchor these concerns and, ultimately, develop tangible guiding questions or processes for mitigating the negative consequences associated with this technology. Scope: We discuss the limitations and opportunities of LLMs within the context of the Qualifying Qualitative Research Quality (Q3) Framework (Walther et al. 2013; Walther & Sochacka 2014). Discussion/Conclusions: We provide steps for engineering education researchers curious about experimenting with LLMs in their work. This paper highlights that the issues presented by tools like ChatGPT are by no means new. Still, new methods of reflexivity to actively employ positionality are likely necessary for the ethical adoption of such tools in the field.
Background: Despite the increase in studies examining STEM doctoral student persistence and attrition, there is still an incomplete understanding of the factors contributing to a student’s successful transition into and through graduate education. As STEM programs seek to become more diverse and inclusive, understanding how to support students best as they consider graduate education is imperative. One of the most successful federal programs in preparing and graduating PhD students in STEM disciplines has been the McNair Scholars Program; however, while its quantitative success has been documented, relatively little qualitative research has been done to understand the benefits conferred to students who went through the program. As such, the McNair Program constitutes the ideal proxy to examine how intentional schema development can impact graduate student socialization. Purpose/Hypothesis: This article aims to characterize STEM graduate student socialization using the McNair Scholars Program, a federally funded TRIO program, as the context of the study. Schema Theory and Bourdieu’s theory of social capital provided conceptual models to understand how and why these students developed strategies for success. Design/Method: Data was collected in a qualitative research design through semi-structured interviews with N = 13 participants. A thematic analysis was conducted on the data using an emergent coding schema informed by schema theory and social capital theory. Results: Our findings uncovered five themes related to how the presence, absence, or development of five different forms of capital: technical, cultural, economic, social, and intrapersonal impacted the experiences of the graduate students interviewed. Conclusions: Development of the five forms of capital and the cultivation of individual habitus is critical for the preparation of students for graduate education particularly for first-generation low-income and underrepresented students.
Background: While engineers are pivotal to technological innovation and societal problem-solving, traditional engineering education often inadequately prepares them for societal engagement. Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a pedagogical model that promotes engagement with authentic, sociotechnical, and societal challenges, promising to produce a more socially responsible engineer. Given that CBL is advanced as central to reforming engineering education, it is crucial to understand how the relation between engineering and society is conceptualized in these initiatives. Purpose: In this paper we analyze CBL as a reform discourse in order to scrutinize what assumptions about engineering are reproduced when CBL is promoted, focusing on the relationship between reformed engineering education and engineers’ societal responsibility. Method: We investigate recruitment material from a reform initiative that aligns with the tenets of CBL. We utilize discourse analysis to analyze the rationales and interpretative repertoires the reform initiative draws on, as well as the ideological consequences of these discourses. Results: We find that the reform initiative promises students the opportunity to be, simultaneously, societally important, professionally successful, and technically proficient. Students are not promised much opportunity for critically interrogating established engineering practices. In the process, engineering is mostly separated from sociopolitical concerns and society is equated with industry. Conclusions: The investigated CBL initiative appears to reproduce rather than renegotiate dominant ways of thinking about engineering. As such, we argue that challenge-based learning as a reform discourse does not necessarily live up to its overarching promise of creating a new and more societally beneficial engineering profession.
The following editorial shares a perspective on a contemporary issue that we are aware can be considered controversial. As active members of the engineering education research community we welcome open dialogue concerning our position; that is why we chose this venue because of its explicit mechanism enabling such discourse. We understand the potential of our urgent tone to be perceived as critical, even perhaps hurtful, though we write assertively in order to describe entities and circumstances we consider having already caused tremendous hurt. Our intent is to provide a sobering perspective to our comrades who have invested significant time and energy in working toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the past few decades, an investment we see ourselves as having made. We seek not to chastise, instead realizing that as knowledge producers we have a responsibility to engage with knowledge already produced, and with the practices that have resulted. The serious flaws that critical DEI scholars have already delineated should not be dismissed because the pain is widespread now. As an engineering education researcher (James) and a historian of engineering (Amy), we each have a demonstrated record of personal and professional efforts to appreciate various forms of diversity, enact equity, and broaden inclusion, including but not limited to: leadership within ASEE’s Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division; co-founding the Equity, Culture, and Social Justice Division; authoring a book characterizing the disenfranchisement of engineering education within Historically Black Colleges/Universities; and facilitating after-school enrichment programs in low-wealth communities, to name a few. Additionally, James is an untenured faculty member, though positioned at a well-resourced and highly regarded institution, whose federal Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant was recently terminated. We are not unscathed, though we suspect the norms of conflict evasion in engineering could cause the tone of the message to be used as a scapegoat for the discomfort it may provoke (Tonn & Hira 2024). At the same time, we know that conditions of institutional employment and occupational security can constrain our conduct. Thus, many within the engineering education community who are decrying recent political actions regarding DEI have caused harm themselves or neglected the harm caused prior to and during the growth of DEI initiatives in recent years (Dietz et al. 2023; Feinstein et al. 2025; Holly & Coley 2023). Therefore, following recent conversations with our friends and colleagues we center the perspectives and reflect the tone of those whose viewpoints remain outside the mainstream discourse.
Background: Undergraduate engineering students experience high stress and exhibit help-seeking behaviors less than non-engineering peers. Developing a deeper, comprehensive understanding of their experiences is a critical step to identifying potential changes to reduce their stress. Research identifying structural components that impact student stress can inform structural changes that decrease student stress and thus support engineering students’ mental health. Purpose/Hypothesis: We examined how narratives of engineering undergraduate experiences with stress highlight the relationship between control and identified hindrances. We then used these relationships to investigate underlying structural elements. Design/Method: We interviewed fourteen undergraduate engineering students at an R2 institution in the northeastern United States. To create narratives, we conducted a tri-fold process that consisted of thematic analysis, identification of key quotes, and arts-based memo analysis. These narratives were mapped onto the Job-Hindrance-Control-Support (JHCS) model to identify structural elements for potential change. Results: The resulting composite narratives of George and Maya presented compelling stories of students’ experiences with stress and social support that highlight underlying structural systems, and their sources of support differed. Identified structural elements impacting their experiences included their physical proximity to campus, financial resources, and support for both time management and social-emotional regulation. Conclusions: Undergraduate engineering students commonly experience high levels of stress, and recognition of identified key structural elements followed by informed, deliberate action may be one way to support student mental health.
Background: In recent years, academic institutions have increasingly integrated makerspaces as extensions of teaching and learning environments for engineering students. However, for Black students, it is unknown whether these spaces serve as mere extensions of what have traditionally been marginalizing environments. Purpose/Hypothesis: This qualitative study addresses two research questions: What do Black male undergraduate engineering students gain from participating in maker spaces? What do the stories of these Black men reveal about the culture of makerspaces as microcosms of the institutions and engineering schools in which they are housed? Design/Method: Using an exploratory case study approach, we examined makerspaces across three different types of institutions: a traditionally White institution (TWI), an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander serving institution (AANAPISI), and a historically Black college and university (HBCU). We focused on the experiences of one Black male student at each institution. Their stories reveal a range of experiences and shed light on the cultural dynamics within these makerspaces as related to the institution types. Results: Our findings suggest makerspaces offer a unique setting where participants are recognized as makers and engineers first. This framing can be particularly empowering for Black male students, providing them with a unique opportunity to foster their engineering identity. However, the collaborative and creative nature of the makerspaces, while conducive for promoting identity, was challenged by extensions of marginalizing norms of engineering culture that resulted in racialized experiences for the Black men makers. Conclusions: Black men benefited from engaging in makerspaces, however such was at a cost to themselves. We acknowledge that makerspaces hold significant potential for fostering and promoting engineering identity among Black male undergraduate students and argue that their culture must be addressed with intentionality for such potential to ever be realized.
