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The professionalization of disciplines often leads to formalization of disciplinary training. As professionalization occurs, informal training roles are typically supplanted as the normative method of training but can continue to exist in parallel with formal methods. As in other fields, the ongoing professionalization of faculty development has created significant formalization of training. While the positive impact of formalization is clear in many areas of faculty development, little is known about how formalization affected the informal roles, activities, and perceptions that served to train faculty. This exploratory study reports on data gathered at a workshop designed to document and share stories of ongoing informal faculty development by engineering faculty. The results show that participants struggle to articulate their role in faculty development independent of the systems, programs, and individuals that make up the formalized training systems. Participants were unsure what to do, what they were allowed to do, and whether to label such work faculty development. They saw importance in informal faculty development work but seemed to feel a lack of agency to name such work as faculty development because it exists outside of the professionalized and formalized sphere of modern "faculty development." The results suggest a paradox: faculty without a formal role in faculty development are still interested in aiding their peers' growth informally but are unclear on their role without guidance from the formal system, which inherently reinforces the role of the formal system as the arbiters of faculty development.

Background: Engineering and technology students need to acquire, evaluate, apply, and document information to solve complex ill-defined problems. However, there are few assessment tools to evaluate how these students approach information. Purpose: The authors integrated information literacy standards with self-directed learning theory to create the self-directed information literacy (SIL) scale as an assessment of students' self-directedness using high-quality information skills in engineering projects. The purpose of this research is to examine the measurement properties of SIL to inform the use and interpretation of SIL's scores among diverse learners. Method: The authors administered SIL to first-year engineering and technology students (n = 1,603). To test three hypotheses about SIL scores related to validity, reliability, and fairness, we conducted a series of psychometric analyses, including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and measurement invariance between groups. Results: The results of the CFA were acceptable for the proposed higher-order factor structure of SIL and a separate "Beginner Behavior" factor. Measurement models for male and female scores were found invariant; however, there were measurement differences between groups of students based on their experience with instruction in the English language. Conclusions: SIL can be scored to assess engineering and technology students' specific SIL subfactors ("Recognize," "Seek," "Evaluate," "Apply," "Document," and "Reflect") or scored as an overall broader measure of self-directedness with information. A separate factor, "Beginner Behavior," can be used to moderate ceiling effects. SIL scores can be used for gender comparisons but should be carefully evaluated when the sample includes students who are new to curriculum and instruction in the English language.

In this study, we describe similarities and differences in how faculty members from across disciplinary backgrounds conceptualize design. The study is situated in an innovative transdisciplinary undergraduate degree program centered on a studio-based learning experience co-taught by multi-disciplinary faculty. While faculty celebrated the opportunity to integrate multiple disciplinary perspectives, they showed a lack of awareness about differences in how they conceptualized design and design pedagogy, especially early on. In-depth interviews and sketches of eight faculty members provided insights on alignment around core concepts of design, design process, and design instruction. Common themes in design definitions included creation of something new, human-centered design, and focus on problem framing over solution development. There was disagreement on the relationship between design and other ways of knowing, such as problem solving and scientific reasoning. Most used process models incorporating non-linearity, iteration, prototyping, and balance between research and design ideation. While there were many similarities in teaching approach, the rationale given for decisions varied, highlighting underlying differences in how participants thought about teaching design. Instructional alignment is an important consideration in designing a transdisciplinary learning experience, but may be hard to achieve due to cultural and institutional disciplinary boundaries. Collaborative teaching efforts benefit when faculty engage in self-reflection, discussion, and engagement in meaningful synthesis work related to understanding what design is and how it can be taught. Such work will enable a team to create purposeful learning experiences which leverages the benefits of exposure to a range of design problems, contexts, users, and design "flavors."

This article discusses the findings of a survey of nearly 300 computing professionals who are involved in the design and/or development of software across a variety of industries. We report on the surveyed professionals' perceptions of the importance of a range of topics and skills, and the degree to which 55 recent graduates felt that each topic or skill was emphasized in their undergraduate experience. Our findings highlight the value of breadth and flexibility in technical skills, and the universal importance of critical thinking, problem solving, on-the-job learning, and the ability to work well in cross-disciplinary teams. These findings align roughly with recommendations by the ACM/IEEE task force on computing curricula. However, the recent graduates we surveyed report inconsistent coverage of these most important areas within their degree experiences. We discuss implications for education and for future research.

Educating new students in miniaturization science remains challenging due to the non-intuitive behavior of microscale objects and specialized layer-by-layer assembly approaches. In our analysis of the existing literature, we noted that it remains difficult to have low cost activities that elicit deep learning. Furthermore, few activities have stated learning goals and measurements of effectiveness. To that end, we created a new educational activity that enables students to build and test microfluidic mixers, valves, and bubble generators in the classroom setting with inexpensive, widely-available materials. Although undergraduate and graduate engineering students are able to successfully construct the devices, our activity is unique in that the focus is not on successfully building and operating each device. Instead, it is to gain understanding about miniaturization science, device design, and construction so as to be able to do so independently. Our data show that the activity is appropriate for developing the conceptual understanding of graduate and advanced undergraduate students (n = 57), as well as makes a lasting impression on the students. We also report on observations related to student patterns of misunderstanding and how miniaturization science provides a unique opportunity for educational researchers to elicit and study misconceptions. More broadly, since this activity teaches participants a viable approach to creating microsystems and can be implemented in nearly any global setting, our work democratizes the education of miniaturization science. Noting the broad potential of point-of-care technologies in the global setting, such an activity could empower local experts to address their needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning to design is important to engineering students, Learning to prototype and use prototyping as part of the design process is a critical part of learning to design. Prior research shows that students prototype in different ways and towards different goals than professionals during the engineering design process. In this study we explore students' use of prototyping from a lens of prototyping as performance of the design process, as opposed to looking at professional purposes for prototype creation. We use a mixed-methods approach consisting of survey data across an undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum and interviews with juniors and seniors in the program. Our results suggest that students attach their prototyping to the context in which it occurs. Prototyping to our participants is a goal of the design process, seen as necessary to demonstration of course accomplishment. and involves purposeful but a-professional goals such as learning to build things as a relevant factor in their prototyping. We discuss the implications of' different but purposeful student prototyping for researchers and instructors through links to information literacy and prototyping as a source of design information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information literacy and lifelong learning are essential for engineers as they constantly renew and expand their knowledge and skills to keep abreast with the development of new technologies. However, the lack of validated information literacy assessments relevant for engineering students makes it difficult to determine how well those students are acquiring needed information literacy skills. We describe validity evidence for the Critical-Thinking Engineering Information Literacy Test (CELT), an instrument designed to assess students' information literacy associated with critical thinking in an engineering context. By examining psychometric properties of CELT through Rasch modeling applications, we present evidence of appropriate and fair use of CELT among first-year engineering student populations. From our analysis, we find that CELT is appropriate for use in the classroom to assess information skills associated with critical thinking among first-year engineering students, when students' experience with English language is part of their score interpretation. We discuss specific recommendations for use with students who have little experience learning in an English language environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conjunction with the drive towards human-centered design in engineering education, questions arise regarding how students build and engage a socially-aware engineering identity, and how this identity points towards beliefs about the nature of reality. In this paper, we describe how students in a transdisciplinary undergraduate program struggle to engage with ontological and epistemological perspectives that draw on this social turn, particularly in relation to human-centered engineering approaches and sociotechnical complexity. We use a critical qualitative meaning reconstruction approach to deeply analyze the meaning-making assumptions of the students. Our findings reveal characteristic barriers in engaging with other subjectivities, and related epistemological and ontological claims implicit in these subjectivities. Specifically, we show that students' observable behaviors often mask misalignments between their epistemic beliefs and the designerly practices they employ failing to account for the multiple subjective realities that the tools are designed to uncover. For these students, that misalignment makes the learning or practice of designerly behaviors less formative of a designerly identity. We conclude with implications for encouraging socially-aware identity formation in engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN 1974, amid the spirit of the civil rights revolution, the goals of the gay and lesbian liberation movement seemed boundless. U.S. Representatives Ed Koch and Bella Abzug of New [...]

To the Editor: I'm sorry if I offended Barbara Hoffman back in the early 80's [responding to her letter in the March-April 2011 issue], and I'm amazed she remembers it [...]