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This work-in-progress paper investigates what elements of project teams assist students in developing professional skills. We define professional skills as the non-discipline-specific skills that support students' work (i.e. communication, time management, etc.) and student project teams as co-curricular, student-run activities that complete an engineering task, whether for a national competition or for accomplishing their self-set goals. Project teams are often cited as activities where students can learn technical and professional skills; however, it's unclear which structures or mechanisms on project teams assist or prompt students' professional skill development. To address this topic, two focus groups were conducted with a total of eight students from different project teams. The focus group structure was inspired by Group Level Assessment and follows the stages of generating, appreciating, reflecting, and understanding. During the generating, appreciating, and reflecting stages the students created a graphical representation of their project teams based on activity systems from Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Activity systems are used to represent a system, such as project teams holistically and are composed of six categories: the members, the tools used, the rules, the surrounding community, the way work is divided, and the goal of the activity. Then students completed another iteration with their diagrams by adding the skills that they have learned from their project team experience based on the Student Involvement Framework. The Student Involvement Framework contains a list of professional skills associated with project teams that were available to students to reference during the focus group. For the understanding stage, the students were asked to discuss their experiences on project teams and how they learned professional skills as members. The diagrams were analyzed using activity system categories as a priori codes to investigate if professional skills are connected with specific activity system categories. All skills listed in the Student Involvement Framework were written on at least one diagram. While there were not clear connections between activity systems and the majority of the professional skills, some skills were repeatedly connected to specific project team elements or requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress study aims to qualitatively examine undergraduate students' understanding of ethical dilemmas in aerospace engineering. Macroethics is particularly relevant within the aerospace industry as engineers are often asked to grapple with multi-faceted issues such as sustainable aviation, space colonization, or the military industrial complex. Macroethical education, the teaching of collective social responsibility within the engineering profession and societal decisions about technology, is traditionally left out of undergraduate engineering curricula. This lack of macroethics material leaves students underprepared to address the broader impacts of their discipline on society. Including macroethical content in the classroom helps novice engineers better understand the real implications of their work on humanity. Previous literature has explored how specific pedagogical interventions impact students' decision-making, but few studies delve into undergraduate students' awareness and perceptions of the issues themselves. Thus, it is essential to examine how students' perceptions of macroethical dilemmas are evolving in order for instructors to effectively meet the needs of their students. This study addresses the need to better understand student awareness of macroethical issues by extending upon previous research to qualitatively analyze responses from an iteration of a macroethical perceptions survey (n = 81) administered to undergraduate aerospace engineers at a large, Midwestern, predominantly white, research-intensive, public university. Our prior work has been used to develop and iterate upon a mixed-methods survey that seeks to understand students' perceptions of ethical issues within the aerospace discipline. In the most recent version of our survey instrument, thirty-one Likert-scale questions asked about students' feelings towards the current state of aerospace engineering and their ideal state of the aerospace field. Within this survey, eight Likert-scale prompts are followed by open-ended questions asking students to explain their answers in-depth. For instance, if students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement 'It is important to me to use my career as an aerospace engineer to make a positive difference in the world.', a follow-up item asked students to explain what positive differences they would like to make in the world. Student responses were analyzed using a combination of a deductive and inductive thematic analyses. Researchers first applied an a priori coding scheme onto responses that was initially developed using constructivist grounded theory, then used inductive analysis to account for new themes that naturally emerged within the data. The analysis delved deeper into students' moral engagement towards ethical issues, their perceptions of who is affected by these dilemmas, and how they have seen these dilemmas addressed in both academic and professional settings. Preliminary results from the study identified that students have a wide spectrum of awareness of relevant issues and express varying levels of acceptance about the state of aerospace engineering. While some students exhibited signs of inattentiveness, or limited ability to consider viewpoints beyond their own, others demonstrated abilities to see multiple perspectives and critically analyze systems of power that influence how macroethical issues are addressed. Similarly, students also demonstrated varying degrees of acceptance, some demonstrating signs of apathy or moral disengagement regarding the field of aerospace engineering, others indicating signs of conflict, or a heightened state of stress about opposing ideals and values, and a final group of students indicating a desire to challenge or reform the existing culture of the discipline. These emergent themes will be used to inform teaching practices concerning engineering ethics education, refine future iterations of macroethics lesson content and survey instruments, and further incentivize the integration of macroethical content throughout aerospace engineering curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper presents the development of a survey designed to understand undergraduate aerospace engineering students' views on macroethics in the field. Macroethics describes the real world ethical implications of engineering technology and the collective social responsibility of the aerospace engineering profession. As macroethics education is currently lacking in most undergraduate aerospace curricula in the United States, we are developing a survey intended to measure students' current perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs about macroethics in the field. Insight into our students' current beliefs and perceptions is imperative to develop new curricula and more generally alter the culture and direction of the aerospace engineering field from striving for apoliticalization to embracing the sociotechnical. A mixed-methods survey was taken by 158 undergraduate aerospace engineering students at two large, research-intensive universities in the United States. This paper presents confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses of Likert-scale data to further the development of the survey. The survey items were initially designed to address two proposed research questions: RQ1. To what degree are students aware of the importance of macroethical issues in the field of aerospace engineering? RQ2. Do aerospace engineering students feel that their undergraduate education is preparing them to address macroethical issues? While confirmatory factor analysis does not confirm these two survey constructs for which the survey items were designed, an exploratory factor analysis results in five factors, each highlighting a different aspect of students' perceptions of macroethical aerospace engineering education: 1. The criticality of the relationship between aerospace engineering and society 2. The ease or difficulty of being an ethical aerospace engineer 3. Technical determinism and aerospace career pathways 4. Macroethics discussions within aerospace coursework 5. The ability of faculty to facilitate conversations on the macroethics of aerospace These five factors provide a new basis upon which we will generate additional survey items in the future. Through this process, we will develop a survey that can effectively measure students' beliefs and experiences in regards to the macroethical implications of the field of aerospace engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aerospace structures courses often appear in the third year of aerospace engineering programs, and are a cornerstone course providing required technical content for the fourth year capstone design course. As cornerstones, these courses should also help develop engineering students' understanding of design and professional skills. A novel approach taken at Clarkson University involves collaborating with over a dozen aviation museums across the United States and Canada to implement authentic assessments. The collaboration was created in 2020 in response to COVID-driven online learning, and has continued to the present, impacting over 150 students in Clarkson University's aerospace engineering program. Each museum selects an aircraft from their collection for a team of four to five students to examine. The students interact with the curatorial, restoration, and archive staff at the museum via email and Zoom calls to retrieve the necessary technical data to complete analyses ranging from beam bending and web-stringer to plates and shells. Further, each aircraft has an associated pilot or engineer that the students must study to determine the use case of the aircraft that drives their subsequent structural analyses. For the museums, the teams produce non-technical abstracts and CAD models that supplement the museums' displays. By design, this course project is open-ended and requires the students to make a series of assumptions, depending on the data available, to complete their technical analyses. Further, the students must deliver their analyses through technical memoranda, reports, and presentations. This course structure follows Wiggins' framework for authentic assessments [1, 2]. The objectives of the present work-in-progress study are to assess the impact that interacting with museums has on the technical and professional development of the students. Two cohorts of students are studied, the first cohort is currently (2022-2023 academic year) taking the aerospace structures courses at Clarkson University, while the second cohort took the courses during the 2021-2022 academic year. Two cohorts are studied to assess the short term and longer-term development of the students. The research questions considered are 1. What are the students' initial responses to encountering an open-ended analysis project? 2. Do the students' technical skills develop linearly during the courses or is the development recursive? 3. How do students' conceptualizations of an open-ended problem develop throughout the project? 4. Does an open-ended project in a cornerstone course provide improved preparation for senior capstone? These research questions are assessed via a sequence of surveys and interviews of students from both cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress study explores student perceptions of ethics in undergraduate aerospace engineering. Macroethics education is a topic that has been traditionally left out of aerospace engineering undergraduate programs, often leaving students ill-equipped to assess and address the positive and negative impacts of their future career field on humanity. Defined as the teaching of collective social responsibility within the engineering profession and societal decisions about technology, macroethics helps novice engineers better understand the real implications of their work in society (Hekert, 2005). Aerospace engineering has been historically dominated by white cis-gendered male students, and the privilege that this majority holds affects the lens through which students perceive macroethical concepts in the field. Thus, there is a vital need for macroethical concepts to be included in undergraduate aerospace engineering curricula. This study extends previous iterations of our research, in which one-day macroethics lessons were implemented into undergraduate aerospace engineering courses (Benham et al., 2021). These data were used to inform the development of a survey that was distributed to students in a senior-level aerospace engineering course at a different large, historically white, research-intensive, public university (Benham et al., 2022, Ennis et al. 2023). This work seeks to investigate undergraduate students' perceptions and awareness of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering from a purely qualitative lens using a grounded theory methodological framework. Qualitative data from the survey explored students' perspectives of what it means to be an ethical engineer, unethical practices in engineering, and other related questions and were inductively analyzed to identify common themes. Preliminary findings from the data analysis-the initial coding phase of a longer constructivist grounded theory analysis-identified that students demonstrate varied levels of awareness regarding macroethics in aerospace. Students expressed levels of acceptance, claiming to see "both sides" of the ethical arguments and that the role of aerospace in the defense industry is a "necessary evil", or displayed resistance, desiring changes be made to the industry and more accountability as a consequence for their actions. In addition, students had a diverse understanding of who ultimately benefits from the aerospace industry, with students focusing on specific stakeholders, nations, or society at large. Other emergent themes explored students' understanding of the role of government/economy in the aerospace industry, ethics in professional practice, and students' feelings of conflict or apathy about the role of aerospace engineering in the defense industry. These initial themes will be used to develop broader theories about how students construct meaning around macroethics in engineering disciplines. The overarching theories will be used to inform teaching practices concerning ethics in engineering education, refine future iterations of the macroethics lesson, and increase motivation to integrate macroethical education into existing aerospace engineering curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In graduate student-oriented online spaces, students often portray themselves as miserable, depicting these negative themes through combinations of text and images called memes. Memes in this context are a symbolic language that is used to convey cultural ideas through established templates that draw from pop-culture media and various youth subcultures. Through this medium, graduate student share and process their experiences communally, using memes as a coping mechanism. Collectively, students tend to acknowledge that the culture around graduate school is bad, identifying excessive workloads, under pay, difficult advisor relationships, and an unhealthy glorification of "grind culture". However, less is known about how students navigate and respond to this culture. In this work, we performed a mixed method study triangulating survey and structured interview data collected through an extracurricular student project. We investigated three key aspects of graduate school, particularly experiences with 1) work-life-balance, 2) imposter syndrome, and 3) burnout. To develop the survey and interview instruments, we developed a pool of memes and graduate student oriented advice columns then used thematic analysis to identify 9 thematic questions about the graduate student experience. For this work, the data set was abbreviated to consider only the 3 most salient topics. We found that students generally disagreed with the negative themes identified and that memes tended to exaggerate these features of graduate student experience. However, emergent themes of self-efficacy in our analysis demonstrated how student self-beliefs influenced their experience with mental health during graduate school. We also found that graduate students' perception of their experience is influenced by students' gender, nationality, and could influence student career trajectories. The results from our work highlight the ongoing concerns with graduate school culture, and how it can disadvantage certain groups. Further, this work can help identify student support mechanisms that can be instituted at the individual, program, and college level to promote student retention and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents the first year of work on a project addressing the productive beginnings of engineering judgment in undergraduate engineering students. In particular, we discuss a new research question about how open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs), which engage students in engineering judgment, foster the growth of conceptual knowledge. Because OEMPs are open-ended with multiple answers, they are different from the typical well-defined "textbook" problems given in engineering science courses where students learn canonical mathematical models and apply relevant formulas to find a single correct answer. By looking at the conceptual gains that result from assigning an OEMP, we aim to convince other instructors to create and assign open-ended questions. More practice using engineering judgment will give students experience with engineering judgment before receiving their engineering degree. Ideally, this will increase the number of graduates prepared for real-world engineering application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aerospace structures courses often appear in the third year of aerospace engineering programs, and are a cornerstone course providing required technical content for the fourth year capstone design course. As cornerstones, these courses should also help develop engineering students' understanding of design and professional skills. A novel approach taken at Clarkson University involves collaborating with over a dozen aviation museums across the United States and Canada to implement authentic assessments. The collaboration was created in 2020 in response to COVID-driven online learning, and has continued to the present, impacting over 150 students in Clarkson University's aerospace engineering program. Each museum selects an aircraft from their collection for a team of four to five students to examine. The students interact with the curatorial, restoration, and archive staff at the museum via email and Zoom calls to retrieve the necessary technical data to complete analyses ranging from beam bending and web-stringer to plates and shells. Further, each aircraft has an associated pilot or engineer that the students must study to determine the use case of the aircraft that drives their subsequent structural analyses. For the museums, the teams produce non-technical abstracts and CAD models that supplement the museums' displays. By design, this course project is open-ended and requires the students to make a series of assumptions, depending on the data available, to complete their technical analyses. Further, the students must deliver their analyses through technical memoranda, reports, and presentations. This course structure follows Wiggins' framework for authentic assessments [1, 2]. The objectives of the present work-in-progress study are to assess the impact that interacting with museums has on the technical and professional development of the students. Two cohorts of students are studied, the first cohort is currently (2022-2023 academic year) taking the aerospace structures courses at Clarkson University, while the second cohort took the courses during the 2021-2022 academic year. Two cohorts are studied to assess the short term and longer-term development of the students. The research questions considered are 1. What are the students' initial responses to encountering an open-ended analysis project? 2. Do the students' technical skills develop linearly during the courses or is the development recursive? 3. How do students' conceptualizations of an open-ended problem develop throughout the project? 4. Does an open-ended project in a cornerstone course provide improved preparation for senior capstone? These research questions are assessed via a sequence of surveys and interviews of students from both cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress study explores student perceptions of ethics in undergraduate aerospace engineering. Macroethics education is a topic that has been traditionally left out of aerospace engineering undergraduate programs, often leaving students ill-equipped to assess and address the positive and negative impacts of their future career field on humanity. Defined as the teaching of collective social responsibility within the engineering profession and societal decisions about technology, macroethics helps novice engineers better understand the real implications of their work in society (Hekert, 2005). Aerospace engineering has been historically dominated by white cis-gendered male students, and the privilege that this majority holds affects the lens through which students perceive macroethical concepts in the field. Thus, there is a vital need for macroethical concepts to be included in undergraduate aerospace engineering curricula. This study extends previous iterations of our research, in which one-day macroethics lessons were implemented into undergraduate aerospace engineering courses (Benham et al., 2021). These data were used to inform the development of a survey that was distributed to students in a senior-level aerospace engineering course at a different large, historically white, research-intensive, public university (Benham et al., 2022, Ennis et al. 2023). This work seeks to investigate undergraduate students' perceptions and awareness of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering from a purely qualitative lens using a grounded theory methodological framework. Qualitative data from the survey explored students' perspectives of what it means to be an ethical engineer, unethical practices in engineering, and other related questions and were inductively analyzed to identify common themes. Preliminary findings from the data analysis-the initial coding phase of a longer constructivist grounded theory analysis-identified that students demonstrate varied levels of awareness regarding macroethics in aerospace. Students expressed levels of acceptance, claiming to see "both sides" of the ethical arguments and that the role of aerospace in the defense industry is a "necessary evil", or displayed resistance, desiring changes be made to the industry and more accountability as a consequence for their actions. In addition, students had a diverse understanding of who ultimately benefits from the aerospace industry, with students focusing on specific stakeholders, nations, or society at large. Other emergent themes explored students' understanding of the role of government/economy in the aerospace industry, ethics in professional practice, and students' feelings of conflict or apathy about the role of aerospace engineering in the defense industry. These initial themes will be used to develop broader theories about how students construct meaning around macroethics in engineering disciplines. The overarching theories will be used to inform teaching practices concerning ethics in engineering education, refine future iterations of the macroethics lesson, and increase motivation to integrate macroethical education into existing aerospace engineering curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In graduate student-oriented online spaces, students often portray themselves as miserable, depicting these negative themes through combinations of text and images called memes. Memes in this context are a symbolic language that is used to convey cultural ideas through established templates that draw from pop-culture media and various youth subcultures. Through this medium, graduate student share and process their experiences communally, using memes as a coping mechanism. Collectively, students tend to acknowledge that the culture around graduate school is bad, identifying excessive workloads, under pay, difficult advisor relationships, and an unhealthy glorification of "grind culture". However, less is known about how students navigate and respond to this culture. In this work, we performed a mixed method study triangulating survey and structured interview data collected through an extracurricular student project. We investigated three key aspects of graduate school, particularly experiences with 1) work-life-balance, 2) imposter syndrome, and 3) burnout. To develop the survey and interview instruments, we developed a pool of memes and graduate student oriented advice columns then used thematic analysis to identify 9 thematic questions about the graduate student experience. For this work, the data set was abbreviated to consider only the 3 most salient topics. We found that students generally disagreed with the negative themes identified and that memes tended to exaggerate these features of graduate student experience. However, emergent themes of self-efficacy in our analysis demonstrated how student self-beliefs influenced their experience with mental health during graduate school. We also found that graduate students' perception of their experience is influenced by students' gender, nationality, and could influence student career trajectories. The results from our work highlight the ongoing concerns with graduate school culture, and how it can disadvantage certain groups. Further, this work can help identify student support mechanisms that can be instituted at the individual, program, and college level to promote student retention and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper aims to document the process of incorporating open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs) into introductory undergraduate dynamics courses. Content in engineering science courses is historically challenging for students to understand and transfer to new, unfamiliar contexts. These challenges likely arise in part from pervasive traditional teaching methods that emphasize solving "textbook problems" which are not truly representative of the complex, ill-defined problems professional engineers usually engage. Subsequently and unsurprisingly, engineering education researchers and industry stakeholders alike have long lamented engineering graduates' inability to independently and creatively solve new problems. Practicing engineers exercise what Gainsburg (2007) identifies as engineering judgment to make assumptions, discretize elements, decide how to model qualitative factors, and evaluate the reasonableness of the end result stemming from these decisions. In most engineering classes, instructors (or the textbook) usually simplify systems so much that these activities are circumvented entirely. However, our research team has previously demonstrated how OEMPs, which ask students to apply mathematical models learned in class (e.g., rigid body acceleration analysis) to real-world systems, can inspire the productive beginnings of engineering judgment in undergraduate students. Our research team has primarily implemented and studied OEMPs in undergraduate introductory statics and mechanics of materials courses. For this current work, we formed a multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary faculty learning community with two engineering education researchers and four faculty members teaching dynamics. This paper documents the process of expanding on lessons learned from implementation of OEMPs in statics courses--as well as one instructor's experiences with OEMPs in a dynamics courses--to more fully investigate the transferability of OEMPs into undergraduate introductory dynamics courses at multiple institutions. This paper first describes our process for collaboratively creating new dynamics OEMPs based on formalizing guidelines and sharing lessons learned from statics OEMPs development. We discuss reflections from the faculty members about the value and challenges of designing a dynamics OEMP. We then describe how initial observational feedback was collected from undergraduates at multiple institutions who assessed the new OEMPs from a student perspective. Next, we present the OEMP assignments we created. The paper concludes by describing our plan for qualitatively analyzing interviews with students to understand how students engaged in the productive beginnings of engineering judgment while completing the dynamics OEMPs. Implications include insights on how students approach and solve complex, ill-defined problems, develop engineering judgment, and build mathematical models. This investigation also provides the future opportunity to compare how students engage in these activities across multiple engineering science courses, institutions (including Carnegie classifications), and engineering subdisciplines. Lastly, this work will help to advance our development of general guidelines for creating and scaffolding an OEMP in any discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examines students' productive beginnings of engineering judgement while solving open-ended problems in a second-year dynamics course. Undergraduate students are typically assigned well-structured textbook problems for homework, in which the systems have already been simplified and there are few, if any, open-ended decisions to be made. Therefore, students have few opportunities in class to practice their engineering judgment until capstone design courses. We have developed a framework of the productive beginnings of engineering judgment with data from open-ended modeling problems in statics courses. In this paper we investigate how the framework transfers to open-ended modeling problems in dynamics courses. This analysis suggests our framework is transferable to dynamics courses, with all fourteen types of judgement found in the dynamics data set and no additional ways of engaging in judgement were found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper describes a case study of the ways that engineering students demonstrate emerging engineering judgment as they make assumptions needed to model and solve an openended, ill-structured engineering science homework problem. Engineering judgment is the set of practices that engineers employ to develop mathematical models to solve the ill-structured problems encountered by professional engineers. Engineering science homework presents an underutilized opportunity for students to develop and rehearse mathematical modeling and engineering judgment by engaging with ill-structured problems. This study unpacks students' emerging engineering judgment as they identify, make, and revise assumptions to develop mathematical models to solve an ill-structured engineering science homework problem. This study asks: How do these students select, evaluate, and revise assumptions while they develop mathematical models? What do these students take into consideration as they make assumptions to develop mathematical models? We took a case study approach to look closely at the ways students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. This case took place in the context of a Statics course required of second-year engineering students at a large public university. Over fifteen weeks, the focal team of four students worked to model a swimming pool lift capable of assisting a swimmer to enter and exit the water. We identified moments in which students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. In this paper, we describe and present examples of the ways that these students selected, evaluated, and revised assumptions while solving this problem. Our analysis suggests that to make assumptions, these students considered ways to simplify the problem, the instructor's grading practices, materials availability, and system function. We conjecture that the open-ended nature of the focal problem scaffolded students to make assumptions, and that their assumption-making processes were shaped by their perceptions of the problem as both a "real-world" problem and a "school assignment." This study contributes to understanding the development of engineering judgment and points to the potential for illstructured engineering science problems to support students to develop and rehearse engineering judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]