During the 2023-2024 accreditation cycle, the Engineering Accreditation Commission of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology asked programs to voluntarily submit optional supplemental pilot reports to show how the program complies with the proposed additional language for ABET's Criterion 5 (Curriculum) and Criterion 6 (Faculty). The Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering program at Seattle University agreed to participate in the optional ABET program pilot report based on the department's ongoing work related to diversity, equity, and inclusion accomplished under a National Science Foundation Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments grant. This grant was awarded in 2017 to support the development of a culture that fosters students' engineering identities within the Mechanical Engineering Department at Seattle University. Over the course of the recently concluded grant project, an "engineering with engineers" culture was built by strengthening the connection to local industry partners and through intentional changes in the shared vision of the department, faculty work practices, program curriculum, and student support activities. Fostering an inclusive and welcoming environment for a diverse group of future engineers, particularly women and underrepresented minorities, was at the heart of the department's RED project. Due to the department's specific focus on these critical DEI issues over the last several years, the decision was made to participate in the optional DEI pilot criteria as a part of the ABET Self Study Report submitted in the spring of 2023 as well as part of the dissemination plan associated with the grant project. This paper briefly documents the mechanisms through which DEI became integral to the vision, practices, and policies of the department through the RED project, with a specific focus on how the program approached the pilot DEI criteria as proposed by the ABET.

The Mechanical Engineering Department at a private, mid-sized university was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) grant in July 2017. The grant supports the development of a program that fosters students' engineering identities through a culture of doing engineering with engineers. The department is cultivating this culture of "engineering with engineers" with a strong connection to industry and through changes in the four essential areas of a shared department vision, reflective faculty, relevant curriculum, and supportive policies. ● Shared department vision: The department revised its mission statement, creating a shared vision among faculty and staff. This shared vision guided the department's decisions in building a culture that promotes inclusive, professional, and experiential practices. Building a shared vision was the most important action to take. ● Reflective faculty: Reflective faculty consider how their actions in and out of the classroom affect students and each other. A caring, student-centered mindset prompts faculty to innovate their teaching to enhance students' learning and pushes faculty to continue to learn and improve their own skills. Working on issues together fosters a collaborative spirit. ● Relevant curriculum: Our new curriculum emphasizes hands-on, doing engineering and experiential learning. The curriculum helped build a strong community through shared learning experiences in classes, such as the vertically integrated design projects sequence and the integrated data acquisition and electrical engineering sequence. The COVID pandemic impacted course delivery but what was learned through remote teaching improved our in-person classes. ● Supportive policies: Supportive policies are crucial to sustaining change. Recently, the university approved new university tenure and promotion guidelines that broaden the scope of what it means to be a professor. The university also updated their strategic directions to provide more focus on inclusive excellence. The department's effort to build an inclusive culture is aligned with and supported by the updated university policies. As we conclude this project, we are completing an audit to review our work in the four areas above. We are considering strategies we used, processes we developed, instruments we devised and deployed, data we gathered, and curricular interventions we explored. For each of these items, we are assessing what was particularly impactful for us, the relative levels of ease and difficulty as seen in retrospect, how educative each endeavor was, and the potential for others to make use of not only what we developed, but also the assessment activity itself. In this paper, we will summarize the results of this audit and explain how the audit has helped to prioritize our dissemination efforts. We believe that both the product of this approach, and the approach itself, will be useful for others in the engineering education community. This project was funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) IUSE/PFE: RED grant through NSF.

The Mechanical Engineering Department at a private, mid-sized university was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) grant in July 2017 to supports the development of a program that fosters students' engineering identities in a culture of doing engineering with industry engineers. With a theme of strong connection to industry, through changes in four essential areas, a shared department vision, faculty, curriculum, and supportive policies, this culture of "engineering with engineers" is being cultivated. Many actions have taken to develop this culture. This paper reports our continued efforts in changes of these four areas: Shared department vision: The department worked together to revise the department mission to reflect the goal of fostering engineering identity. From this shared vision, the department updated the advising procedure and began addressing the challenge of diversity and inclusion faced in engineering. A diversity and inclusion statement was discussed by all faculty and included in all syllabi offered by the department to emphasize the importance of an inclusive culture. Faculty: The pandemic prompted faculty to think differently on how they deliver their courses and interact with students. Many faculty members adapted inverted classroom pedagogy and implemented remote laboratories to continue the emphasis of "doing engineering". The industry adviser holds weekly virtual office hours to continue to provide industry contacts for students. Although faculty summer immersion this past year was postponed due to pandemic, interactions with industry were continued in various courses. Curriculum: A new mechanical engineering curriculum rolled out in the 2019-20 academic year. Although changes have to be made due to the pandemic but the focus of "engineering with engineers" remained. An example would be the Vertical Integrated Design Projects (VIDP) courses offered in Spring 2020. Utilizing virtual communication tools such as Microsoft Teams, student teams in the VIDP courses could still interact with industry advisors on a regular basis and learned from their experiences. Supportive policies: The department has worked closely with other departments, the college and the university to develop supportive policies. Recently, the college recommended the diversity and inclusion statement developed by the department to all senior design courses offered in the college. The university was aware of the goal of this project in fostering students' engineering identities, which in term can promote the retention of URMs. The department's effort is aligned with the new initiative the university launched to build an inclusive environment. More details of the action items in each area of change that the department has taken to build this culture of engineering with engineers will be shared in the full-length paper. This project was funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) IUSE/PFE: RED grant through NSF.

This is a Lessons-Learned paper. During the past years the Mechanical Engineering program at XXXX has made numerous curricular changes that focus on cultivating a culture of "engineering with engineers" and developing strong engineering identities in their students. The four major changes in the curriculum include implementing an integrated electrical engineering and data acquisition (DAQ) course sequence, adding a vertically integrated design projects (VIDP) course sequence, modifying an existing design sequence, and adding real engineering into existing courses. Many of these changes rely on hands-on labs and on creating connections between students and industry. In the spring of 2020, the pandemic forced the program to offer all of its courses online and challenged the department to rethink how it could continue its strong hands-on, industry-focused program. Most courses were quickly flipped and online class time via Zoom focused on community building and small group discussions. New checks and activities helped to keep students engaged and provided regular feedback to instructors on student progress. Lab assignments were modified so that all lab work could be done remotely. This paper details these changes, describes successes and failures, and discusses lessons learned. A summary of the paper will be presented as a lightning-talk during the 2021 ASEE Annual Conference.

This Innovative Professional Practice paper reflects a work in progress. Many in engineering education are interested in the dual issues of how to support engineering education change and how to disseminate and share ideas that others can use on their quest to change. Toolkits are quickly emerging as a genre for sharing that addresses dissemination goals while also respecting the agency of those involved in change efforts. This paper describes a toolkit formation process that utilizes co-design. The toolkit is intended as a means of disseminating transferable activities in a major educational grant funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper includes traces of our efforts in deciding toolkit and co-design workshop contents, the challenges we experienced, and the decisions we made and remade. We anticipate this paper provides a case from which those interested in creating toolkits can gain inspiration. We also anticipate that our case can be used to seed a conversation about toolkit creation that centers on the goals, the steps, and the outcomes.

Contribution: This article presents an innovative course sequence to integrate Electrical Engineering (EE) Fundamentals into the Mechanical Engineering (ME) Instrumentation and Data Acquisition (DAQ) course and reports students' experience relevant to the sequence's intended outcomes of helping students learn and connect EE concepts with ME applications and develop their engineering identities. Background: The ME Department at Seattle University was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant to revolutionize its undergraduate program. This project focuses on doing engineering to foster stronger engineering identities. This course sequence is part of the curriculum change for this project and includes open-ended, real-world labs incorporating both EE and DAQ. Research Questions: 1) Engineering Learning: What evidence is there that students learned EE and DAQ concepts and integrated them with ME? 2) Identity Development: How did the students connect the experience to their evolving identity as engineers? 3) Over-Time Experience: How did students experience the course? Methodology: A mix of quantitative and qualitative data was used: quantitative data (a standardized test) and qualitative data source (mini reflections that students provided over the course sequence) were analyzed to address the research questions that connect the educational design aspects and the intended outcomes. Findings: The new course sequence created an opportunity to do engineering in a rich way and provided fertile ground for developing engineering identities. Students understood and retained EE and DAQ concepts at a level equal to when the material was taught via separate courses.

Will the change last? In higher education, many of us put considerable efforts into program, curriculum, and educational reforms that lead to reasonable improvement. With each reform comes the challenge of sustaining the change. How do we assess how, or even if, to make the change last? To the authors’ best knowledge, no validated model to guide such assessment exists. The authors propose one. Based on systemic study of our current and previous work on educational reform and the literature, we present a framework that assesses the sustainability of a program, curricular, or pedagogical change. In this special session, we will not only present this framework and demonstrate its usability in two different cases, but we also will guide attendees in applying this framework to assess the sustainability of their own changes. We will involve attendees in the design process of testing and further improving the framework to determine, "Will the change last?"

WIP: The Mechanical Engineering (ME) Department at Seattle University was awarded a 2017 NSF RED (Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments) grant. This award provided the opportunity to create a program where students and faculty are immersed in a culture of doing engineering with practicing engineers that in turn fosters an identity of being an engineer. Of the many strategies implemented to support this goal, one significant curricular change was the creation of a new multi-year design course sequence. This set of three courses, the integrated design project (IDP) sequence, creates an annual curricular-driven opportunity for students to interact with each other and professional engineers in the context of an open-ended design project. These three courses are offered to all departmental first-, second-, and third-year students simultaneously during the spring quarter each year. Each course consists of design-focused classroom instruction tailored to that class year, and a term design project that is completed by teams of students drawn from all three class years. This structure provides students with regular design education, while also creating a curricular space for students across the department to interact with and learn from one of another in a meaningful way. This structure not only prepares students for their senior design experience, but also builds a sense of community and belonging in the department. Furthermore, to support the “engineering with engineers” vision, volunteer engineers from industry participate as consultants in the design project activities, giving students the opportunity to learn from professionals regularly throughout their entire four years in the program. This course sequence was offered for the first time in 2020, and while the global pandemic impacted the experience, the initial offering was by all accounts a success. This paper provides an overview of the motivation for the three IDP courses, their format, objectives, and specific implementation details, and a discussion of some of the lessons learned. These particulars provide other engineering departments with a roadmap for how to implement this type of a curricular experience in their own programs.

The Mechanical Engineering Department at a private, mid-sized university was awarded a National Science Foundation RED (Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments) grant in 2017 to study how student identities change when a department makes “revolutionizing” changes.These changes are in four areas research shows are important to culture change: shared vision, reflective faculty, relevant curriculum and pedagogy, and supportive policies. The goal of the changes is to immerse students in a new culture of “Engineering with Engineers.” Cultivating a culture of doing engineering can result in graduates who not only are prepared technically and professionally with a practical, realistic understanding of what it is to be an engineer, but also who identify with and are committed to the engineering profession. The expectation is that immersion in this program will affect students’ identities as they move through the program. This paper focuses on implicit identity data collected via implicit association tests (IATs) during the first full year of the grant. It shows that engineering students implicitly identify with engineering, and that they consider engineering to be a male field. These data serve as a baseline for the ongoing identity research supported by the grant and point to the need for programmatic changes that help females and non-Whites develop stronger identities with engineering. This project was funded by a grant from NSF’s Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) through IUSE/PFE: RED.

The Anonymous University Mechanical Engineering department was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to revolutionize its undergraduate program. The goal of the grant is to implement department wide changes that create a focus on doing engineering with engineers and fosters stronger engineering identities in students and faculty. One area of change is the program's curriculum. This paper describes how the Electrical Engineering Fundamentals course was integrated into the Mechanical Engineering Instrumentation and Data Acquisition (DAQ) course with the goal of creating connections between electrical engineering concepts and applications in mechanical engineering. Design and implementation of this course sequence are presented. Assessment and evaluation methods are also discussed.

Identity influences who people think they are, what they think they can do and be, and where and with whom they think they belong. In education, identity is a determining factor in one pursuing, persisting, and persevering in a field. In engineering, it has been shown to be an important factor in attracting and retaining underrepresented minorities. Identity development is a social process realized through culture -- through the interactions of students, faculty, and industry, through participation in engineering-related activities, and through reinforcement of shared similarities. This goal of this project is to develop a mechanical engineering program where students and faculty are immersed in a culture of doing engineering with industry engineers that in turn fosters an identity of being an engineer. Cultivating a culture of doing engineering can result in graduates who not only are prepared technically and professionally with a practical, realistic understanding of what it is to be an engineer, but also who identify with and are committed to the engineering profession. This culture of “engineering with engineers” is created through changes in four areas: a shared department vision, faculty, curriculum, and supportive policies. In each, a variety of actions create the cultural change, address barriers to change, and ensure sustainability. A cross-cutting theme unifying these changes is a significant connection to industry. Some of the changes include faculty immersion in industry, makeathons that connect industry professionals with students, and changes in how the department prioritizes teaching, student research, industry connections, and faculty mentoring. During this project, changes to the program and to student and faculty identities are monitored through interviews, surveys, and many other tools. Results of the study will lead to a clearer understanding of the changes that promote engineering identities, particularly in women, and how such identities affect students’ sense of belonging in a program and their persistence in the major. The study will also lead to a better understanding of the factors that influence faculty identity, and how these richer identities affect how they view their roles and their students. More importantly, understanding how identities affect students' engagement, performance, and persistence could transform how we teach STEM in K-16. Such knowledge will allow educators to target activities that produce the strongest effect on identity and be mindful of those that negatively impact identity. Finally, a focus on identity encourages reflection and a larger discussion about how students see themselves, their education, and their profession, and how these views uniquely affect underrepresented or marginalized students. This conversation can lead to a better understanding of how best to create an inclusive educational system. This project was funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) IUSE/PFE: RED grant through NSF.

Engineering design has been a requirement in the curriculum for engineering accreditation since the mid-90 s. This emphasis on engineering design has introduced significant changes to engineering curricula in freshmen and senior years with many engineering programs offering capstone (senior) and/or cornerstone (freshmen) design courses. Yet design-related content and experiences in the second and third years of the engineering curricula remain less common due to the heavy emphasis on fundamental engineering science courses in the middle years. This study investigated the possibility of developing design ability (thinking, process, and skills) in one of these courses. The method used was to incorporate real world, open-ended problem solving, specifically authentic engineering problem centered learning (AEPCL), into a junior-level heat transfer course. AEPCL uses authentic engineering problems (AEPs) as the backdrop to develop students' design abilities through solving open-ended, ill-structured problems. Results indicate that students who experienced AEPCL showed better design abilities than comparable students who did not experience AEPCL. Through AEPCL, students learn how to collect better information, make more reasonable assumptions, engage in better processes, and arrive at a more plausible, error-free, and high-quality solution in engineering design.

Problem-solving is a critical skill for engineers, and thus a critical skill for engineering programs to teach. Although various approaches to address problem-solving exist, none uses nonlinear, unscaffolded, unstructured, open-ended problems provided by practicing engineers. To address this shortcoming, such authentic engineering problems (AEPs) were incorporated into a heat transfer course. AEPs are authentic problems developed by practicing engineering and are representative of the unstructured, open-ended problems encountered in industry. To make space for students (N = 35) to work on AEPs in class, the course was inverted, meaning that the standard course lecture content was moved online. This AEP Centered Learning (AEPCL) format was assessed by three measures-talk-alouds, student self-evaluations, and solution evaluations. Across all assessments AEPCL led to improved problem solving. Comparisons to the same course taught in a traditional format (N = 32) showed that these improvements came with no cost to students' understanding of the content or loss of ability to solve standard textbook problems.

This paper presents a novel approach to educating engineers by using an inverted classroom (IC) to facilitate learning through in-class solving of multi-faceted problems designed by engineering professionals. The objective of this approach is to develop an instructional framework that promotes self-directed learning and enhances problem-solving skills in undergraduate engineering students without sacrificing knowledge of fundamental engineering principles. In this framework, material traditionally covered in a lecture format is moved outside of class time, developed for an on-line format, and made available in an online learning management system. In-class time is used to solve engineering problems in teams and under guidance of an instructor. The problems are co-developed with practicing engineers from aerospace, medical device, HVAC and process industries. The framework was implemented in a Heat Transfer course. Students taught using the new framework showed improvement in self-directed learning and problem-solving skills over students taught in a traditional setting without losing basic skills.

Facilitating Problem-Based Learning with an Inverted ClassroomThis poster will contain materials associated with NSF grant "Facilitating Problem-BasedLearning with an Inverted Classroom" awarded to --------- on October 1, 2013 for a two-yearperiod. The objective of this project is to develop an instructional framework that promotes self-directed learning and enhances problem-solving skills in undergraduate engineering studentswithout sacrificing knowledge of fundamental engineering principles. The instructionalframework will use an Inverted Classroom (IC) to facilitate Problem-Based Learning (PBL).The instructional framework will be created through collaboration between faculty in mechanicalengineering and psychology, and evaluated by academic partners from other institutions. Tofacilitate an IC, material traditionally covered in a lecture format will be moved outside of classtime, developed for an on-line format, and made available in an online repository of learningresources. PBL will use authentic engineering problems co-developed with industrial partnersfrom medical device, HVAC and process industries; problems will be evaluated by the academicpartners. A variety of resources will be available to address the varied learning styles of thestudents.The framework will be implemented in a Heat Transfer course that will be offered in traditionalclassroom (control) and IC-PBL (treatment) settings. Student self-directed learning andproblem-solving skills in the two settings will be compared for their performance on designproblems, exams, heat and energy concept inventory, and several rubrics.This poster will describe the process in detail and will include accomplishments from the firstyear of the grant, including: Description of two unique design projects and assessment methods applied in the traditional setting at mid and end of term. List and timeline for administering assessment tools for students' understanding of content, i.e., quizzes, tests, and the Heat and Energy Concept Inventory (HECI). Description of new assessment tools for students' understanding, interest, commitment, liking, identification, confidence and efficacy, applied end-of-term:  New tool to discern students' understanding of real-world engineering activities.  New tool to measure students' interest in, commitment to, liking in, and identification with engineering programs and careers.  New tool to measure students' confidence and efficacy in their engineering skills. Description of authentic PBL problems for IC.

Creating literature reviews encompasses skills that are central to psychology students' academic and professional lives, yet writing them consistently challenges students. Research shows that instruction leads to improvement in students' literature reviews within courses (Boscolo, Arfé, & Quarisa, 2007; Granello, 2001), but little work examines how such instruction carries over to other courses. Our study addresses this by comparing literature reviews from two required courses. Students are taught to write reviews in a psychology writing course (PSYC 205), and without additional instruction, students again write reviews in a Statistics and Research Methods course (PSYC 305). Do the skills transfer? A sample of PSYC 305 reviews ( n = 17) was drawn and their PSYC 205 literature reviews obtained. All reviews were graded using the same rubric. A within-subjects comparison showed that students' PSYC 305 reviews were significantly improved. For a second between-subjects comparison, these PSYC 305 reviews were compared to the 305 reviews of students who did not have PSYC 205. The reviews of those who had PSYC 205 were significantly better than the reviews of those who did not. These combined results suggest that we can teach transferable literature review skills, and, given their importance, we suggest that psychology programmes should.

The educational benefits of learner-centered instruction, including active, collaborative, and problem-based learning, are widely recognized. However, educators are often reluctant to implement learner-centered activities because they perceive doing so will reduce class content coverage. An inverted classroom is a method that can free classroom time for learner-centered activities. In an inverted classroom (IC), course content is disseminated outside the classroom through mediums such as video lectures and web-based tutorials, in addition to traditional methods such as assigned reading, assigned homework problems, interactive exercises, and power-point presentations. Students are responsible for learning basic course material outside of class time. Unlike an online class, an IC includes face-to-face time with the instructor in classroom or laboratory setting where the material learned outside of class is discussed and applied. The IC allows an educator to present course material in several different formats, and so engages the different learning styles and preferences of students. The IC format encourages students to become self-learners and help prepare them for how they will need to learn as practicing engineers. Our experience shows that the IC format can free class time for learner-centered activities without sacrificing course content. This paper describes the implementation of an IC in a senior-level Control Systems course. Two offerings of these courses with 20-25 students each have been entirely taught as inverted.This paper describes best practices in offering these courses, including suggestions for instructors on preparing video lectures and structuring the course to provide a safe environment for students to learn in this unique format. Three years of assessment data are presented in this paper, including student exam performance, and instructor and student observations and perceptions of the inverted classroom format collected through surveys and interviews. Key results from assessments are: 1) although there was some initial resistance from the students to the new format, students adjusted to the format after a few weeks - the format should be implemented for an entire term in order to obtain full benefits of this approach; 2) students showed an increased awareness of the importance of self-learning and the benefit of taking responsibility for their own learning; 3) the format frees time for students to individually or collaboratively solve more problems than in a lecture setting and opens the opportunity to implement problem-based learning without sacrificing content coverage; 4) student performance on exams and homework was not diminished through the uses of an IC; 5) aside from the initial time investment by the instructor to create on-line content, the work load on the instructors and the students was not much different than in the traditional classroom; 6) the video-lectures don't need to be production quality, rather content-focused and succinct; 7) an IC should be offered with an adequate course structure, including a guide to the on-line content.

An inverted, or flipped, classroom, where content delivery includes video lectures watched outside of the classroom, is a method that can free classroom time for learner-centered activities such as active and problem-based learning. This study compared the effectiveness of an inverted classroom to a traditional classroom in three areas: 1) content coverage; 2) student performance on traditional quizzes and exam problems; and 3) student observations and perception of the inverted classroom format. A control-treatment experiment comparing an inverted classroom to a traditional lecture-style format was used. The results show that: 1) the inverted classroom allowed the instructor to cover more material; 2) students participating in the inverted classroom performed as well or better on comparable quiz and exam questions and on open-ended design problems; and 3) while students initially struggled with the new format, they adapted quickly and found the inverted classroom format to be satisfactory and effective.