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International graduate students contribute significantly to the United States (U.S.) engineering academic and professional workforce. These students bring to the U.S. extensive knowledge from their home countries, strengthen diversity, classroom internationalization, and multicultural education (among the student body, faculty members, and staff in the U.S. universities), acquire world-class knowledge, and benefit the global economy by way of engineering contributions. However, graduate students from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are generally understudied within the broader population of international engineering students. This is noteworthy because individuals from SSA have among the highest rates of degree attainment, specifically in engineering and other STEM fields. Students from some West African countries like Nigeria have among the highest levels of educational training of SSA students and Black populations more broadly. Expanding research on Black students from West Africa (WAFR) (a region within SSA) is particularly important since not all Black students are the same. This work responds to a growing call for more intra-study research within diverse groups that have historically been treated as homogeneous. As such, this study intends to illuminate their educational experiences before and after transitioning to the U.S. in engineering disciplines using a narrative inquiry approach. This work-in-progress begins this larger study by focusing on one student's ("Apex," pseudonym) experiences in two contexts: (Nigeria, his country of origin and undergraduate study, and the U.S., where he transitioned for his Doctor of Philosophy [PhD]). Apex's educational experiences in engineering and the strategies he employed to navigate his transitioning will be documented through his narrative. Data will be derived from Apex's life and educational experiences in engineering before, during, and after he transitions to the U.S. from Nigeria. Results from this study will advance the literature by providing education researchers and practitioners with a novel and innovative understanding of Nigerian engineering students' (NES) experiences. It will advance knowledge of Nigerian undergraduate engineering programs and their benefits to international engineering graduate students. Ultimately, the findings will help inform practices within engineering programs to better support potential graduate students in making similar transitions and broaden the participation of African diasporic engineering students in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive disruption to the global education system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has garnered educational research communities' attention by illuminating the need to investigate the pandemic's immediate and long-term effect on education. However, less is known about its impact on engineering education in developing countries such as Liberia. Guided by the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis and Bagozzi, 1989), our research is the first step in understanding Liberian engineering students' perception of the impact of COVID-19 on their learning experiences. This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary results from 3 of the 18 participants of this study. This study focuses on the impact of the abrupt transition from face-to-face to online learning due to COVID-19 and particularly on undergraduate engineering students' learning experiences at a public university in Liberia. The research design employed to achieve this goal is a qualitative phenomenological research approach using semi-structured interview methods. Findings from our study reveal a potential two-fold challenge that needs to be addressed: Psychosocial challenges and technical challenges. Our future work will unpack these and other challenges across the other 15 participants in the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars within computing and engineering education have broadly explored how students understand computing-related disciplines. Existing studies have led to publications on promising practices for teaching computing, such as evidence-based strategies for teaching computer science principles and programming languages like C++ and Java. However, other education research on computer-based technologies that students in engineering disciplines often use, such as MATLAB, Mathematica, Mathcad, Excel, and Aspen Plus, is limited. Initial analysis reveals that most of the published work on numerical and computational methods (NCM) in engineering education is in the form of textbooks used to introduce these software packages. However, a gap in the literature exists between understanding the technical content that these textbooks provide, and the degree to which effective pedagogy is used to teach this content. In other words, while textbooks exist to introduce these concepts, few studies have been done to measure the effectiveness of teaching these concepts. Understanding how to effectively teach these computing resources is important because it provides a foundation to allow engineering students to tackle their day-to-day calculations and be prepared with essential tools in the 21st century to tackle modern projects. Literature indicates that very little has been done to understand the impact of these computational technologies both on students as well as the perspective of faculty who teach these courses. As part of this literature review, we will review published scholarship to understand ways in which scholars have investigated the way that computational and numerical methods have been taught so far. This is a work in progress that will serve as a foundation for a broader study to understand effective pedagogies in computational and numerical methods in computing and engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), half of Blacks who received a bachelor's degrees in an engineering or science discipline attended a community college at some point during their academic career. However, while research highlights the importance of supporting underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities (URMs) in STEM disciplines, there is a dearth of literature focusing on URMs in community colleges who pursue engineering and other science/math-based majors. Further, Black undergraduates in community colleges are often homogenized by area of study, with few efforts to disaggregate the data by major/discipline. Similarly, while engineering education research has begun to focus on the population of community college students, less attention has been paid to unpacking the experiences of racial subgroups of community college attendees. The engineering student transfer process has specific aspects related to it being a selective and challenging discipline (e.g., limited enrollment policies, engineering culture shock) that warrants a closer investigation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of a distinct population of students who have recently transferred from several community colleges to one four-year engineering school. Specifically, we will present preliminary findings from interviews with three Black students who started their academic careers at several community colleges in a Mid-Atlantic state before transferring to the flagship institution of that same state. Interview transcripts were analyzed and coded by different members of the research team to document rich themes. This research is part of a larger-scale, three-year, NSF-funded qualitative study, which examines the academic trajectories of two distinct groups of Black engineering majors: 1) Blacks born and educated in the United States and 2) Those born and educated in other countries. By looking at these two communities, we will build upon past literature that disaggregates the experiences of Black STEM students who represent multiple identities across the African diaspora. Through this lens, we hope to highlight the impact that cultural background may have on the transfer experience. The theoretical framework guiding this study is drawn from the STEM Transfer model and posits that the persistence of Black transfer students in engineering is a longitudinal process influenced by the intersection of both individual and institutional factors. We draw from the STEM transfer model, noting that the transfer process commences during a student's community college education and continues through his/her transfer and enrollment in an engineering program at a four-year institution. The following factors contribute to our conceptualization of this process: pre-college background, community college prior to transfer, initial transfer to the four-year university, nearing 4-year degree completion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]