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Despite decades of calls for both broadening participation in engineering and for STEM faculty to adopt evidence-based teaching practices, change is notoriously slow. In response to an NSF call for projects that could accomplish such efforts, our chemical engineering department proposed FACETS (Formation of Accomplished Chemical Engineers for Transforming Society) with a vision of supporting our diverse students to be prepared to address the grand challenges of the 21st century. Our longitudinal analysis suggests that our approach has fostered persistence, especially among first-generation Latinx students. Now, at the end of our project, we report on evidence of sustained change and offer insights and implications for others interested in making change. Specifically, we synthesize the following guidelines: (1) Planned change theory, like Kotter's change model, is an accessible place to start, but don't expect the change process to be linear. (2) Embed a community of practice in existing structures and norms, such as faculty meetings. Be creative in bringing discussions of teaching into such spaces. (3) Develop multidimensional measures of student assets, growth, and development. Staying only with measures of progress on conceptual learning misses much about students' development as chemical engineers. With regard to supporting students, we also share two key strategies: (4) When teaching technical communication, offer limited but specific feedback and require revision and reflection. (5) If developing design challenges, create low-bar entry experiences that are relevant, but that have high-ceilinged, open-ended solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose. While many engineering programs require technical writing courses, students tend to view writing as unrelated to their technical work in engineering. Faculty commonly complain about a lack of progress in student writing of technical reports in laboratories. Faculty also have few opportunities to learn about effective writing instruction. This paper presents a study that integrated a writing-in-the-disciplines approach into chemical engineering undergraduate laboratory courses. Specifically, we investigated whether students would transfer what they learned from one short technical report to another. Our approach involved component submission, providing feedback, and requiring revision on a first short technical report, followed by a second short technical report that involved only component submission. Methodology. Unlike many programs that offer one or two 3-credit laboratory courses, our program--at a Hispanic-serving research university in the Southwestern United States--offers four 1-credit laboratory courses, spanning the junior and senior years. We revised the writing process in three of the lab courses. Students complete two short technical reports one component at a time; on the first, they received feedback and revised their work. To assess the impact of these changes, we compared the total scores from the first and second reports that instructors provided using rubrics. The rubrics evaluated both conceptual knowledge and writing quality resulting in composite scores that reflect overall report quality. We conducted t-tests to evaluate whether students transferred their understanding from the first short report, on which they received intensive feedback, to the second, on which they did not. To understand faculty perceptions related to writing and the feasibility of our approach, we interviewed faculty about their experiences. Results and conclusions. We found that the overall quality of reports improved from the first to second report, t(48) = 3.19, p = .003 in the Spring junior lab and t(54) = 3.76, p = .0004 in the Fall senior lab. Interviews with faculty highlight that while students initially disliked the emphasis on writing, across semesters they came to view it as beneficial. We see this as tied to using variants of a consistent feedback-and-revision approach across multiple semesters. Implications. This study reinforces past research showing the benefits of writing in the disciplines approaches. We share faculty insights about managing the feedback workload through differentiated rubrics and providing oral feedback, component submission and peer review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this evidence-based, teaching-practice paper, we discuss the assessment methods we have applied to the broad curricular changes implemented within our department. Our department is fundamentally changing the chemical engineering curriculum by threading Community-, Industry-, Research-, and/or Entrepreneurship-based design challenges through the core curriculum, engaging students in writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC), offering faculty professional development workshops, and implementing a digital badging system to help students take ownership of their competencies. Such dramatic changes to department structure and course requirements mandate carefully selected and consistent assessment practices throughout the program. This project has thus far tracked a variety of qualitative and quantitative measures across one year of baseline data and two years of project implementation with numerous student cohorts. The methods used for tracking and comparing student sentiment, confidence, beliefs, skill development, and technical skill performance include: (1) demographics, (2) assessments of conceptual knowledge (i.e., two concept inventories and three faculty-developed proficiency exams), (3) a survey that assesses design self-efficacy and other course-specific assessments, (4) written design skills tests that measure design problem framing ability, and (5) student observations and interviews. These assessment methods are distributed and administered throughout the four-year degree program. This paper outlines and describes these assessment tools and methods and how they are used to measure outcomes. The analysis of some of these methods is also discussed here. As a "Research Universities (Highest Research Activity)" university, the students in our program are atypically diverse compared to those found at other schools of this type: 43% are women; 33% speak a language other than English at home; 28% are first-generation college attendees; and 52% of students' mothers and 48% of their fathers have not earned a college degree. On average, 52% of students work more than 10 hours per week while in college, 27% are from lower income families, 45% are Latinx, and 5% are Native American. We found that students' performance on conceptual measures neither significantly improved nor declined as a result of curricular changes. This suggests that even as more class time focused on projects and writing, students still learned core content. Overall, based on post-course survey results, students in redesigned courses reported significantly higher design self-efficacy, compared to students in the original courses (t (248) = 2.18, p < .03). Compared to baseline results, students who completed design challenges developed a more accurate understanding of the iterative nature of the design process. The breadth of qualitative and quantitative assessment tools used throughout this program are instrumental in helping us determine the outcome of these faculty and curricular changes, the results of which are used to continuously shape the direction of future programmatic pedagogical changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early chemical engineering coursework provides an important foundation in topics such as energy and material balances. A common pedagogical approach to these topics includes providing engineering analysis problems with basic context and a single correct answer. While this approach can help students develop mastery of content, it does not help students develop an understanding of authentic engineering practices, especially design problem framing and solving. Without this aspect, we risk losing students from underrepresented groups in engineering as they are less likely to have engineering relatives and friends who can help them see the real-world relevance of what they are doing in their early coursework. We describe how we threaded a community-based, entrepreneurial design challenge focused on algal biofuel production through a core chemical engineering course. Participants included students (N=61) enrolled in a sophomore-level Chemical Process Calculations course at a large minority-serving research university in the American Southwest. Students worked in pairs on homework assignments to support peer learning. We replaced one question from each of the six homework assignments with design challenge deliverables. Students worked in subteams on one of the three algal production phases (i.e., growth, harvest, extraction). They also developed individual accountability through jigsaw sessions in which they explained their subteam's work to students from other production phases. They built whole-class consensus through "parley" sessions that involved decision matrices. We describe the design challenge and our study, in which we investigated how a design challenge threaded through a sophomore course might provide students with a picture of authentic engineering design practices and content. More specifically, we wondered about students' perceptions of the jigsaw session, and to what extent the three different topics (algal growth, algal harvesting, and biofuel extraction) led students to learn substantially different information. We developed coding schemes to analyze student work in the parley and jigsaw sessions. We found that the parley sessions provided opportunities for students to learn from one another. They argued from evidence and backed their ideas with research citations, sometimes leading their peers to amend their initial design decision. Even though they were assigned to a particular production phase, they investigated aspects of the other phases. We observed high student engagement throughout the design challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Complete Research paper describes how we identified diverse student assets and redesigned a first year course to develop professional engineering identity. Despite many efforts to diversify engineering, first-generation college attendees, non-traditional students, and students from groups typically underrepresented in engineering are still less likely to persist. We see introductory-level engineering courses as having the potential to play a critical role at universities like ours that serve a large percentage of such students. With this purpose in mind, we redesigned an introductory chemical engineering course at a research university that is minority-serving. Participants included students enrolled in two sections of the original course (n=117) and one section of the redesigned course (n=53). Data include pre/post surveys of student beliefs about design and interviews. We coded student responses and interviews to understand how they perceived the original and redesigned course. We conducted a repeated measures ANOVA to examine the effect of redesigning the course on student understanding of design as an iterative process. Students in the original course reported a neutral/unsure stance when asked if design is a linear process, and by the end of the course tended to agree that it is a linear process. In contrast, students in the redesigned course tended to begin the course reporting that design is a linear process, but shifted to a more neutral stance by the end of the course. Students in the redesigned course reported significantly more positive and also more specific reflections about the design challenges in the redesigned course. They more commonly described active roles, positioning themselves as doing engineering. We argue the design challenges provided an opportunity for students to begin developing professional engineering identities without sacrificing their existing identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]