This research-to-practice paper presents a framework that breaks down the complex constructs of learner autonomy and instructor autonomy support into actionable course design and pedagogical decisions. Grounded in self-determination theory for motivation and self-regulated learning theory, the framework encourages instructors to consider various areas of learner autonomy along a spectrum from teacher-controlled to student-controlled. By conceptualizing autonomy as a range of course design options, the framework enables instructors to creatively envision different ways to promote learners' internalized engagement and motivation through autonomy support. In this study, the framework is applied to the design and assessment of two project-based engineering science courses that offer learners structure alongside different forms and levels of autonomy. Findings show that the instructor's intentional design decisions regarding student choice and control prompted a strong sense of autonomy and high perceived instructor autonomy support among students. As predicted by SDT, autonomy and autonomy support showed significant positive correlations with identified regulation and intrinsic motivation, two forms of internalized drive. Results suggest that the autonomy framework may offer utility value to any instructor seeking to promote student choice and internalized control within the practical constraints commonly associated with college courses.

Background Research illustrates that student motivations influence learning engagement, persistence, and achievement in powerful ways and that positive motivations are linked to deeper learning, critical thinking, pro-social behavior, and better performance. Most studies of learner motivation, however, are conducted outside of STEM and are focused at the contextual level, which may describe why students attend college or choose a degree program, but not why they engage in classroom activities. Furthermore, there is little research that meaningfully connects learner motivations with gender identity and course pedagogy. This study addresses these gaps by examining the interconnections among course pedagogy, gender, and situational-level motivations, which reveal why learners engage in different course activities and how engagement may vary over time. This detailed perspective on learner motivations is essential for instructors to gain insights into how their pedagogical and course design choices influence students’ motivational responses and to more effectively develop interventions that support positive forms of motivation among all students. Results Participants in the study are undergraduate students enrolled in 72 introductory-level STEM courses across 11 institutions, and the dataset includes over 5000 unique responses to the Situational Motivation Scale, a Self-Determination Theory-based instrument that was administered weekly in each course. Analysis reveals seven typical motivational response types, ranging from a highly control-oriented to a highly autonomous response. Most students express multiple types of motivation during an academic term in a course, illustrating the dynamic nature of motivations. Cluster distributions by gender and pedagogy indicate significant differences in lecture-based learning courses, with women reporting less self-determined motivations compared to men. Motivational response profiles of women and men are both more similar, and more positive overall, in courses that employ active learning. Conclusions These findings have important implications for practitioners. The concept of motivational co-expression encourages instructors to move toward a more nuanced appraisal of learner motivation. The stability analyses challenge embedded beliefs about the fixed nature of learner motivation. The gender analyses raise questions about how instructors may more effectively promote the positive motivations of all students through their course design decisions.

A capacity for self-directed, life-long learning is often cited as a critical skill for tomorrow's engineers.The student response to high levels of self-directed learning, however, is not always positive, particularly in introductory level courses.Some students enthusiastically embrace the control over their learning in open-ended situations.Other students, however, become frustrated and disheartened, and ask to be returned to a comfortable state of structure, guidance, and traditional learning.The self-directed knowledge acquisition in technical disciplines has historically been a controversial approach that deserves our close examination, as some students cite self-direction as a positive contributor to learning, while others report decreases in learning due to student control.In this paper, we explore the issues surrounding student directed learning in a project-based introductory materials science course.We present preliminary data on the student responses to open-ended projects and self-guided learning, with particular emphasis on the development of and changes in attitudes and self-perceptions of learning throughout the semester.Possible causes of student responses to self-directed learning are considered, and particular attention is focused on student comfort in self-directed environments and its relation to learning processes.

Success for tomorrow's engineers necessitates the design of curricula that promote awareness of the broader impacts of engineering, enhances systems thinking, reflects sustainable engineering practices, and helps prepare students to make an impact in the global community.Project-based learning approaches that emphasize student learning rather than instructor teaching may be a key to successful development of "global engineers."Evaluations of project-based courses show increases in student motivation, problem-solving ability, communication and teaming skills, knowledge retention, and capacity for self-directed learning.Despite these reported benefits, curriculum-wide implementations of project-based learning are rare, probably partly due to the traditional emphasis on technical content acquisition in upper-level courses and a lack of clear methods for ensuring that core competencies are not lost through the project-based mode of learning.To better equip students to be successful global engineers, we recently initiated a largescale transformation of our undergraduate materials engineering curriculum.The redesign includes a major change in the junior year from traditional subject-based courses to project-based courses facilitated by faculty teams.In the new approach, the learning of fundamental materials engineering content is driven by a series of authentic, hands-on projects.In this paper, we describe a collaborative faculty process for the systematic design of project-based courses for disciplinary core competencies.It involves developing a shared understanding of the vision and goals, identifying user needs and values, articulating and grouping the disciplinary core competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitudes), and designing the project-based experience through an iterative process of embedding core competencies and mapping the experience back to the user needs.We will draw upon our experience in converting the entire junior-year sequence in materials engineering at Cal Poly (12 separate courses) to a project-based learning mode.We briefly discuss the challenges we faced during the transition to the new approach, and provide an overview of the initial student responses to the new learning environment and an assessment of their performance. Cal Poly Materials Engineering Mission & VisionThe primary mission of the Department of Materials Engineering at Cal Poly is to prepare students to be successful as global engineers.Our vision is to equip engineers to solve technical challenges in the context of a complex global society.Our strategy is to redesign our entire Materials Engineering undergraduate curriculum and promote self-directed learning (SDL), systems-level thinking and sustainable engineering practices.Moreover, we plan to develop a pedagogy that challenges students to balance economic, societal and environmental issues when striving to achieve design solutions based on the fundamental principles of material processing, structure and properties.We refer to this as the Triple Bottom Line Awareness in Design or TriAD.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework for the study of collaborative educational change efforts, based on principles and measurement tools from educational philosophy and organizational change. Our approach draws on Schein's framework for cultural analysis, and utilizes measurement tools from several research domains to investigate the goals, values, beliefs, and identities of individuals engaged in educational change. Our preliminary findings suggest that there are significant perceived misalignments experienced by changemakers in relation to their institutions, and these differences impact their change efforts. Future work includes additional data collection and action-research projects to test various models of change.

This work-in-progress study examines connections among classroom climate, psychological needs satisfaction, and motivations in a college course setting. According to self-determination theory (SDT), positive forms of motivation arise when people experience a sense of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. In learning settings, these three basic psychological needs are satisfied when students feel a sense of efficacy and mastery; a supportive connection to others; and choice and control. Research illustrates that instructors play an important role in creating environments that support these three needs through their pedagogical choices, interactive style, and classroom culture and climate setting. In this study, we explore relationships among students' needs satisfaction, perceptions of the learning climate, and situational motivations. Participants in the study are first-year undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a technical course that uses non-traditional pedagogies to integrate math, science, and engineering. Student responses to the Situational Motivation Scale, Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction scale, and Learning Climate Questionnaire are analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-tests, and bivariate correlations. Consistent with SDT predictions, our findings show that students' needs satisfaction and positive evaluations of the learning climate correlate positively to autonomous motivations. We also observe that students' positive motivations are not entirely temporally stable. Over a one-week period in a course project, students report a significant drop in positive motivations followed by a quick recovery. Using information on the course context and assignments, we offer possible explanations for the temporal shifts in motivations. Our preliminary findings highlight important connections between motivations and course variables that instructors may influence through their choice of learning activities and pedagogies.

How is project-based learning (PjBL) defined and what is its purpose? What makes a "good" PjBL experience? How authentic should projects be? Who chooses the project topic or challenge? Should students work on teams, present their work to experts, or write a self-assessment? Over the years, instructional designers and educational theorists have proposed different answers to these questions, and crafted expert recommendations on what projects should do or be, and how PjBL ought to look. Our on-the-ground experience has illustrated, not surprisingly, that PjBL is quite different in theory and practice. We find that PjBL is a flexible pedagogical approach that can help instructors in a myriad of ways; but a single project cannot do everything, and instructors must grapple with difficult trade-offs to shape a compelling PjBL learning experience. In this paper, we present a goals framework that enables instructors seeking to engage with PjBL to intentionally design PjBL experiences that encourage broad competency development, and to consider the fundamental question: What are you trying to support or achieve with a project? The framework describes broad competencies that transcend disciplines, emphasizes learning multiple domains (cognitive, affective, social, and psychomotor), and encourages flexible and non-prescriptive usage. The goals framework offers value to instructors as a communication tool, an analytical tool, and a design tool.

This Work-in-Progress Research paper presents preliminary findings from a larger study on how and why individuals engage in educational change initiatives within institutional and multi-institutional settings. In this paper, we quantitatively explore the learning beliefs, professional identities, and educational values of individuals involved in change efforts, and we examine how these beliefs, identities, and values align or misalign with those of their colleagues or institutions. Our pilot data reveal significant differences between participants' self-evaluation and institutional evaluation of beliefs, identities, and values around education. For example, educators rate their own conceptions of learning as more student-centered, and their educational goals as broader, than what they perceive among colleagues at their institution. Within faculty groups from the same school, we see examples of both strong alignment and strong misalignment in educational beliefs, values, and identities. While our investigation is ongoing, we believe this research has the potential to help changemakers develop greater awareness of their own points-of-view, and to more effectively converse with potential collaborators about specific areas of alignment and misalignment that could affect change processes and outcomes.

Because engineering faculty seldom use research-based instructional strategies, the engineering education community hasbecome increasingly concerned with how to help faculty sustainably integrate education research into their teachingpractices. We developed the Intrinsic-Motivation (IM) Course Design Method to make motivation theory accessible tofaculty and to help faculty think more concretely about the costs that demotivate them and make their course designsuntenable. Our course design method complements existing course design methods by providing an approach to designingfor motivational outcomes. In this paper, we describe the IM Course Design Method and then illustrate how this methodwas used to refine the design of a sophomore-level engineering course that enrolled over 200 students. We then presentevaluation evidencefrom this course to suggestthat applicationof the method canincrease students’intrinsic motivationinengineering courses.

Your school reached its target percentage for women in engineering. So what? And now what? With all the discussion and reporting of percentages of women in engineering, educators may be tempted to assume that attaining a target number, or 'critical mass,' alone solves the problems related to engagement of a gender diverse student body. We argue that while critical mass may be necessary, it is insufficient. We submit that a thriving and diverse learning ecosystem must recognize the importance of interactions, associations, values, and identities in shaping a culture of inclusiveness. To that end, in this study we characterized the motivations, professional identities, basic needs satisfaction, and self-efficacy of undergraduate students in an engineering school with a relatively high percentage of enrolled women. In this environment that passes common critical mass thresholds, we observed gendered responses that call into question the use of simple percentages as proxies for inclusiveness in engineering. Specifically, we found that women and men held some common values, and similarly endorsed certain identity traits such as problem solving and practicality. Compared to men, however, women reported lower self-efficacy, lower endorsement of technological leadership, higher emphasis on social consciousness, and less freedom to express their ideas and opinions. These findings raise important questions about inclusive design of engineering cultures, and they help illustrate where women and men may find personal and professional alignment versus misalignment in their programs.

Work-in-Progress. Students' contextual motivation in introductory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses has been a focus of many recent studies; this work provides a new lens to this work by investigating students' situational motivations. Grounded theory is used to analyze survey responses from ten students in an introductory STEM course at a small private technical school that features project-based learning environments. Analysis resulted in an emerging relationship between assessment and a behavior we call externalization. We observe a co-occurrence between externalization and problem-set-related assessment; the co occurrence indicates that some students may not feel as though they have control over their progress and performance on problem sets and it is this lack of control that the students report to be frustrating and amotivating. Additionally, we observe that blame is presented either as externalization or non externalization while credit is almost always non-externalized. The two presentations of blame suggest that students might externalize to cope with negative affective experiences. The results of this study may have implication for design of STEM courses with motivations as both means and ends in students' learning processes.

Work-in-Progress. “I felt so dumb, and it's not fair that I cannot grasp this information to save my life, and other people can with no problem.” Why do some students feel empowered in the classroom, and feel they have control over their own learning, while others do not? Our qualitative investigation is a part of a larger mixed-methods study about students' situational motivations in introductory STEM courses. We used grounded theory to analyze students' responses to surveys about emotion, course relevance, and motivation. We investigated two emergent phenomena we called “internalization” and “externalization.” Our definitions of these are based on a student's perception of who or what influences the outcomes of their activities: the students themselves, or external factors such as the instructor, peers, or the educational system as a whole. Our findings indicate that (1) internalization correlates with cognitive autonomy, students' perception of course content having high personal relevance, and group projects in project-based learning environments; and (2) externalization correlates with lecture-based environments and students' perceptions of lack of personal relevance in the course content. Our analyses suggest that project-based learning environments may serve to empower students, but only when course content is found to be relevant.

Work in Progress. Introductory, or "weed out" chemistry courses are well-known for deterring undergraduate students from pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Specifically, students' motivations resulting from experiences in these courses can influence STEM retention. Using grounded theory, our preliminary analysis of qualitative data collected in an undergraduate chemistry course has identified "faculty care" as an emergent construct of importance to student motivations. Our emergent definition of care is students' perception that their instructors recognize and communicate actionable steps towards self-improvement or illustrate concern, encouragement, or relational interest for the students in academic and non-academic settings, or in an unexpected, personal way. We found that students hold gendered interpretations of faculty care, and these interpretations may give rise to gendered motivational attitudes. This work raises questions about the ways specific classroom activities or faculty-student interactions allow faculty to communicate a sense of care for their students and thereby affect students' motivational attitudes in their classrooms. More broadly, this work may have implications for our understanding of the ways faculty can address gendered patterns in STEM participation.

Instructors often cite student motivation as a critical component of successful learning experiences, or a key barrier to student engagement in the classroom. Given motivation's influence on identity and well-being, and the important relationships between motivation and learning outcomes such as creativity, critical thinking, self-regulation, and performance, it is reasonable to assign student motivation a place of relative prominence within the complex learning system. In this workshop, we explore our individual and collective mental models for student motivation in the classroom. Specifically, we explore two distinct perspectives on the value of motivation: motivation as a means to other learning outcomes, and motivation as a developmental end point. In addition, we consider how instructors' beliefs about and expectations for student motivations inform the design and implementation of learning experiences, and how different motivational orientations may create productive or destructive dissonance in the classroom, or threaten certain educational goals or outcomes.

In this Work-in-Progress paper we examine students' situational motivation in introductory STEM courses through analysis of survey responses about students' experiences in a required course at each of two large public institutions. The students in each course convey different perceptions of course relevance: learning-performance relevance and temporal relevance. Learning-performance relevance, exclusive to Course A, refers to students' perceptions of course content and activities as relevant to their performance, which in turn serve as necessary prerequisites for achieving future academic and professional goals. Temporal relevance, described primarily by students in Course B, pertains to students' non-performance based perceptions of course content as applicable to their long-term academic and professional careers, as well as their personal intellectual growth. We posit that understanding the ways in which students perceive the relevance of course assessments, content, and activities to their near-and long-term future aspirations may allow for improved instructor support of intrinsic motivational attitudes in STEM classrooms.

Today's engineering graduates face an evolution of global priorities that places a greater emphasis upon sustainability, community, and well being. Overcoming the complex challenges of this shift will require engineers to display agility, resilience, intrinsic drive, and an ability to continually grow and develop-capacities that are currently underemphasized in engineering degree programs. Despite a growing recognition of the importance of socially responsible technological development, many engineering programs continue to prioritize decontextualized technical content learning over broad competency development. As a result, students may have difficulty identifying either personal or societal value in their engineering activities. Wesuggest that the integration of engineering and humanities perspectives can help students situate their technical studies within the larger human system while simultaneously offering measurable improvements in students' motivations and lifelong learning skills. In this paper, we report findings from an investigation of the effects of disciplinary integration on student motivation and learning engagement in introductory materials science courses. The quantitative results show that integrating materials science with humanities through a project-based course effectively supports increased student motivation and engagement in self-regulated learning strategies. Compared to students in non-integrated project-based courses, students in integrated project-based courses show higher intrinsic motivation and task value. Students in the integrated materials science-history course also report significantly higher use of critical thinking strategies in their project work, indicating that an emphasis on societal context may help students cognitively engage in their engineering studies. Findings also indicate that disciplinary integration offers particular benefits to women engineering students. Compared with the non-integrated course, women in the integrated course report more significant motivational and self-regulated learning gains. This research suggests that putting human contexts at the center of engineering learning can help all engineering students, and especially women engineering students, build a sense of societal relatedness that promotes better learning.

A capacity for self-directed learning (SDL) and lifelong learning is widely recognized as an important outcome for today's engineering graduates. Key to SDL is the development of self-reflection abilities, which enable students to critically evaluate learning tasks and contexts, to adjust and adapt their self-regulatory processes to new environments, and to maintain motivation and persistence in the face of difficulties. The purpose of this study is to explore how undergraduate engineering students engage with self-directed learning during their first two years of college. Grounded theory is used to analyze responses of 10 students to 12 surveys administered across two institutions over two years. Data reveal that student reflection on self-directed learning experiences is prompted by different factors. Moreover, we find that one of the more important factors in eliciting various levels of reflective practice is a set of challenges students face in learning environments. Specifically, the three types of challenges emerging from the data are those associated with (1) lack of cognitive freedom in course content, (2) perceived poor performance on traditional assessment, and (3) specific learning environments. Further analysis reveals that students reflect at different cognitive and metacognitive levels in different learning contexts. We argue that with proper pedagogical support, reflective practice can be encouraged in all educational contexts facilitating students' cognitive development.

This paper reports our current progress towards introducing hands-on machining, analysis and design experiences in freshman, sophomore, and capstone design courses in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The selection, assembly, and deployment of two low-cost, desktop computer-numerical-control (CNC) platforms is described along with our current plans for deploying desktop CNCs throughout a sequence of undergraduate engineering design courses. Finally, we present our proposed approach to evaluate the impact of curricular enhancement on our mechanical engineering students' cognition, motivation and attitudes toward the profession.

The learning goals of students are not only essential for personal guidance, but they also provide educators insight into individual approaches to learning and student self-perceptions. In this study, the learning goals of students in an introductory project-based materials science course were analyzed to determine differences by gender. Student goals were coded according to their inference of different learning domains-cognitive, social, affective, and psychomotor - as well as their level of complexity within these domains. Cognitive goals were similar for women and men, while differences by gender appeared in the social, affective, and psychomotor domains. In the social domain, women were more concerned with teamwork and peer learning, while men were focused on confidence in presentations. In the affective and psychomotor domains, the issue of low self-efficacy for some women arose, while men were more eager to express their enthusiasm for the course projects.

Understanding student motivation is an essential aspect of effective course design. Since motivations are related to learning outcomes ranging from critical thinking to creativity to lifelong learning, helping students develop positive motivations toward learning is critical for the engagement and success of tomorrow's STEM graduates. In this workshop, we explore the specific roles that instructors may play in influencing students' activity-level, or situational, motivation. The workshop offers an opportunity for instructors to directly apply motivation theory and empirical research findings to practical course design, and to identify specific ways in which they may positively influence their students' motivational responses in the classroom.