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Engineering identity is an integral determinant of academic success in engineering school, as it allows students to have an understanding of themselves in relation to what they study. Studies in engineering and other STEM disciplines have shown a positive correlation between identity and retention. Previous studies by Carlone and Johnson, Hazari, and Godwin have examined the following facets of a STEM or engineering identity: performance, competence, recognition and interest. While many current papers examine how culture and social interactions may influence identity, this paper examines how doing engineering coursework can uncover or influence a student's engineering identity. This comparative case study examines how two students' experiences solving an Open-ended Modeling Problem (OEMP) in their statics class may have contributed to their engineering identities. Cristina and Dylan, our two cases, both recalled how they solved a problem about a hands-free crutch device in an interview at the end of the semester. None of the questions were explicitly about identity. The interviews indicate that both students were interested in solving these problems and recognized themselves as being capable of solving the problem. In the case of Cristina, the problem helped her build confidence, both through her understanding of the material and her problem solving abilities. Our results also saw both students discussing how the disciplinary authenticity made them 'feel like an engineer.' Implications of this work include a deeper understanding of how day-to-day problem solving within courses can influence engineering identity and may aid in understanding how certain activities and scaffolding can influence engineering identity. This is important as students who have strong engineering identities are more likely to stay in engineering, become competent engineers, and find success in their respective fields. This research can inform educators on the importance of assigning novel, ill-defined problems that require students to apply their critical thinking skills and logic skills in real world situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering problems are ill-defined, require assumptions, and have multiple unique solutions. Although most industry engineers solve ill-defined problems in groups, students typically only practice this in engineering design courses. Our research aims to expand these experiences to engineering science courses. Currently, most engineering science courses assign 'classic' textbook problems, where they are given certain physical parameters of a system, and are told to calculate an unknown value. Ill-defined modeling problems provide students with more opportunities to utilize engineering judgment when compared to traditional textbook problems, and when these problems are solved in a group setting, it is both a better representation of how engineering is performed in the industry, and can help students better understand the class concepts. This paper examines groups of students solving an ill-defined modeling task that asks students to design a portable pool lift. When working in a group, students have the opportunity to help each other understand what was taught in class, along with the ability to push back on other students' ideas. This will prepare students for their future career, lead to knowledge creation and help solidify concepts taught in class. This full paper analyzes data (approximately 15.5 hours) that was collected in the form of recordings of zoom meetings of two groups that were tasked with solving an ill-defined modeling problem in a second year statics course. Using comparative coding, we categorized how students spent time when working in their group. Results show students alternate between negotiating tasks, comparing assumptions, and aiding each other in understanding course concepts. Implications of this work include forming a better understanding of how students make decisions, judgments and build knowledge when working together on an ill-defined modeling problem. Similarly, the results may assist professors in iterating on assignment design to further engage students in knowledge creating and engineering judgment practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this complete research paper is to analyze the impacts of an open makerspace on the development of students' engineering identities. This paper seeks to build upon current belonging analyses about makerspaces and shift the focus towards students' engineering identities. Our team interviewed 17 first-year engineering students attending a small, private university located in the American southwest. During the interviews, they were asked to reflect on their experiences in classes and involvement in engineering related activities. Some of the interview questions are influenced by previous models of engineering identity. Our research team noticed a pattern of students spending personal time using the Makerspace in their engineering department. This is an open workshop where students have access to free supplies to do what we've called "make" which is the act of problem solving, designing, and building using the tools provided. The high rate at which this space is mentioned in tandem with the students' successes during the two semesters exemplifies the impact it has on student retention rates. We noticed a trend that students who have strong engineering identities tend to spend time making in the Makerspace. Any mention of the Makerspace itself or any connective context pieces relating to activities of the Makerspace spoken by the group of students were collected by our research team. This paper will examine how heavy of an impact, if at all, the Makerspace has on the further development of a student's ability to recognize themselves as an engineer if they came into college with an initial interest in making. Our analysis suggests the Makerspace provides an opportunity for students to display performance when making. This in turn causes students to see themselves as engineers when they experience internal and external recognition from being in the Makerspace. The results of this analysis will aid in the creation of effective intervention methods universities can implement during the first year engineering curriculum to increase retention rates. [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]

This paper provides an update on our progress within our National Science Foundation project examining the first two years of undergraduate engineering students' experiences through selfreports of their affect and engineering identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an update on progress within our National Science Foundation project creating an engineering professional development model for teachers of multilingual students. The multi-year, design-based iteration research study aims to produce a model for teachers and schools in similar multilingual elementary schools and communities. Currently in year one, we provide an update of our activities thus far and the theoretical background of our project. We hope this model will advance linguistic equity by creating space for more multilingual and multimodal activities in elementary school classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research paper, we sought to understand how meta-affect influences the strength of engineering identity in first-year students, since strong engineering identity is correlated with retention. Meta-affect refers to affect about affect, cognition about affect, and monitoring of affect. Goldin's research on meta-affect has suggested that there is a cycle wherein students' beliefs establish meta-affective contexts that in turn shape the experience of affective pathways. We analyzed transcripts of interviews conducted with students during their first year in an engineering program. The primary goal of the interviews was to gain insight into engineering students' affect towards math, science, and engineering and their engineering identity. For this comparative case study, we focus on three students with different engineering identities. Our goal was to investigate and provide evidence for the trends and relationships between beliefs, meta-affective-context, and affect and their influence on engineering identity. We found relationships between meta-affect and engineering identity related to specific beliefs: beliefs concerning getting help, the challenges of engineering, and performance ability. These relationships had different implications for the students' identities depending on the students' meta-affective contexts and affect. Understanding the relationship between these factors can help instructors promote more productive beliefs and meta-affect. This could potentially help strengthen engineering identity and increase retention of students within 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 research paper analyzes the emotions that students experience while completing ill-defined complex problems called Open-Ended Modeling Problems in their engineering courses. Students are asked to make their own modeling decisions, rather than being given those assumptions, as is the case in most textbook problems. There are many approaches they can take, and having to make decisions and assumptions that impact the problem has been found to generate strong emotions. Goldin's research on mathematics education asserts that students tend toward affective pathways while completing problems. An affective pathway is the sequence of emotions that a student goes through while solving a problem. Goldin theorizes that there are two main categories of affective pathways that students fall into: positive pathways and negative pathways. This paper builds on our previous work on the development of a survey instrument to quantitatively measure affective pathways. The survey asked students to drag and drop emotions into the order they experienced them during their problem solving process. In this study, we sought to improve upon our survey instrument. Based on our previous research, we added several emotions and alphabetized the list to see whether the order of words impacted the responses. Here, we examine the results from an updated survey question as well as a small set of interviews conducted to investigate how students approach answering the survey question by having them think aloud while completing it. The survey was sent to six classes at five universities, and interviews were conducted with six students at two of those universities. Through our analysis, we found that most students feel confused or frustrated at some stage, and that their emotions change as they continue from start to finish, which is in line with the findings of the previous version of the survey instrument. We are looking further into whether the students turned their frustrations into the positive or negative pathways that Goldin describes. From the interviews, we found most of the verbalized pathways matched what was submitted through the survey instrument. However, there were instances where the submitted and verbalized pathway did not match, suggesting further changes to the question's implementation. Developing a reliable method for measuring affective pathways will enable future study of why and when positive or negative pathways occur, as well as potential actions that engineering educators can take to help students interrupt negative pathways. Goldin's work suggests that negative pathways influence students' global affect, which could impact retention in engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examines the student perception and experience of solving open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs) through an autoethnographic account of the student-authors' personal reflections about an OEMP completed during an introductory level statics course. Currently, the student perspective is not represented in literature about engineering problem solving. This is significant as the student perspective is integral to understanding how students learn and develop an engineering mindset. By incorporating the student voice through autoethnographic techniques, this study can begin to fill this gap and provide meaningful insights about the student experience and perceived benefits surrounding an OEMP. Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that incorporates the researcher's personal experience in conjunction with traditional research methods. The authors believe this is an underutilized research method within engineering education research that could provide additional insights to shift teaching and learning within engineering classrooms. The studentauthors reflected on their personal experience solving an OEMP by retroactively responding to several written prompts. We analyzed our responses to determine possible patterns and emerging themes about the student perception of OEMPs. While instructors make choices about course learning objectives, many times these are primarily based on what instructors historically believe students need to know. Rarely are students given a platform to voice the meaningful knowledge they constructed after course completion. Implications for this work include providing information to instructors on how students view innovative, problem-based work and the benefits to their development as novice engineers. This study also suggests that autoethnography can serve as a valuable research method in engineering education, allowing for a direct examination of students' own experiences and perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering problems are ill-defined, require assumptions, and have multiple unique solutions. Although most industry engineers solve ill-defined problems in groups, students typically only practice this in engineering design courses. Our research aims to expand these experiences to engineering science courses. Currently, most engineering science courses assign 'classic' textbook problems, where they are given certain physical parameters of a system, and are told to calculate an unknown value. Ill-defined modeling problems provide students with more opportunities to utilize engineering judgment when compared to traditional textbook problems, and when these problems are solved in a group setting, it is both a better representation of how engineering is performed in the industry, and can help students better understand the class concepts. This paper examines groups of students solving an ill-defined modeling task that asks students to design a portable pool lift. When working in a group, students have the opportunity to help each other understand what was taught in class, along with the ability to push back on other students' ideas. This will prepare students for their future career, lead to knowledge creation and help solidify concepts taught in class. This full paper analyzes data (approximately 15.5 hours) that was collected in the form of recordings of zoom meetings of two groups that were tasked with solving an ill-defined modeling problem in a second year statics course. Using comparative coding, we categorized how students spent time when working in their group. Results show students alternate between negotiating tasks, comparing assumptions, and aiding each other in understanding course concepts. Implications of this work include forming a better understanding of how students make decisions, judgments and build knowledge when working together on an ill-defined modeling problem. Similarly, the results may assist professors in iterating on assignment design to further engage students in knowledge creating and engineering judgment practices. [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 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]

This research paper examines a pilot survey question to measure students' affective pathways when solving open-ended, ill-defined modeling problems. Research on affect in mathematics has discovered that students' emotions tend to fall into familiar patterns, or affective pathways, that students have developed over time. These pathways are in part influenced by their global affect, or student attitudes and values about a subject. It is inevitable that frustration will occur at some point when solving a challenging problem; however, from the point of frustration, some students experience positive pathways in which they move from those challenges into eventual satisfaction, while other students' affect falls into negative pathways that move from anxiety into fear or despair and rote procedures or avoidance of the problem. Just as students' global attitudes influences the emotions experienced throughout the problem, the traces of the affective pathways over time can in turn influence global affect - following a negative pathway repeatedly can, over time, build global hatred of themselves or the subject. These affective pathways have typically been assessed primarily through qualitative methods. In this study, we sought to measure students' affective pathways while undertaking ill-defined problems in engineering science courses. We included a pilot question in a survey given to students at three universities in four different courses solving open-ended modeling problems in one semester, asking them to drag and drop positive and negative affective words derived from our prior work into the pathway they took when solving the problem. Our goal in piloting this survey question is to have an effective way to measure students' affective pathways at scale in situations across their engineering education, in order to understand the implications on their global affect about engineering. We believe that the development of an effective tool for measuring affective pathways will facilitate future studies on retention in engineering. Keywords: affect, emotions, problem-solving, undergraduate engineering. [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 addresses responsive teaching, which is a particular form of formative assessment that instructors use to understand and respond to the "disciplinary engagement" of students in real-time during instruction While ideas about what constitutes "disciplinary engagement" are established in science education where responsive teaching has received considerably study, the field of engineering has not yet established a clear idea of what "disciplinary engagement" means-particularly in engineering science courses, which we define as the technical courses at the sophomore or junior level that are non-lab and non-design courses. In this paper we make progress toward an understanding of disciplinary engagement-and therefore responsive teaching-in engineering science courses by focusing on the content that an instructor elicits, notices, and responds to during in-class formative assessment. We first discuss the development and final version of a coding scheme that classifies the content that an instructor elicits, notices, and responds to during question-initiated dialogue. The main focus of this coding scheme is a set of four codes that describe different content being invited by a question or offered as a statement: 1) a number of definition, 2) mathematical reasoning or process, and scientific or engineering reasoning related to either 3) a specific example being discussed in class or 4) the course content outside of a specific example. We conclude the paper by presenting an example of how coded question-initiated dialogue can be analyzed to investigate the type of content being discussed by the instructor and the students. Analyzing two different engineering science courses, we find that one course featured more students and instructor questions addressing science and engineering reasoning, which maps to our expectations of the course based on our observations of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This student-led research project analyzes the impact that the conversion of a computer lab to a flexible classroom space had on informal use of the space outside of class time. Studies have been conducted on the benefits of informal learning settings, but there are few studies on how the physical space itself can support the informal learning process. Research surrounding learning spaces in libraries has emphasized use of collaboration and flexible spaces, but these studies have been conducted to inform space design decisions rather than assess the impact of those design decisions. This study investigates the unintended benefits of a new flexible classroom through a post-occupancy space analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aerospace curriculum during students' sophomore and junior years is dominated by core technical subjects such mechanics of materials, aerodynamics, propulsion, and controls. Ideally, these engineering science courses give students the theoretical background that they can apply in engineering design courses, on student project teams, and as a practicing engineer. However, it can be easy to teach engineering science courses with little connection to the practice of engineering. One way to make the connection between engineering science content and engineering practice is to frame this technical content as mathematical models that describe natural phenomena under certain simplifying assumptions. With this framing, the purpose of engineering science courses shifts from memorizing formulas and applying them to textbook problems, to modeling systems in the real world. This paper describes open-ended modeling problems that the first author developed for his sophomore-level aerospace mechanics of materials course, and assesses students' opinions of these problems. This paper first presents engineering judgment about mathematical modeling as a framework for open-ended modeling problems and then describes the initial set of two open-ended modeling problems that the first author designed around certain aspects of engineering judgment: making assumptions or simplifications, determining appropriate uses of technology tools, discretizing, and determining what elements or conditions were "typical." The paper then investigates student opinions of the open-ended modeling problems through two methods: quantitative analysis of a student survey that shows how students felt about the problems, and qualitative analysis of interviews with five students that probes why students felt they way they did about the problems. Students interviewed found that the open-ended modeling problems related to the real world, helped to teach course concepts, were fun, and made them think. Lastly, this paper concludes by describing modifications the first author made to the open-ended modeling problems for the next semester, as well as our future research plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of students solving open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs) in a sophomore level aerospace mechanics of materials course. OEMPs are homework problems that have no correct answer and ask students to create a model to solve a problem in a real world context. Students were asked to solve two of these problems as part of their regular homework assignment. Through interviews, five students in the course described their problem solving process and evaluated their models. Our analysis found students exhibited the productive beginnings of engineering judgement when creating their models. We also found students enjoyed and wanted more OEMPs given in their classes. Implications include creating more OEMPs for different types of engineering science courses and implementing a discussion or reflection for students after they turn in the problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexible classroom spaces, which have movable tables and chairs that can be easily rearranged into different layouts, make it easier for instructors to effectively implement active learning than a traditional lecture hall. Instructors can move throughout the room to interact with students during active learning, and they can rearrange the tables into small groups to facilitate conversation between students. Classroom technology, such as wall-mounted monitors and movable whiteboards, also facilitates active learning by allowing students to collaborate. In addition to enabling active learning, the flexible classroom can still be arranged in front-facing rows that support traditional lecture-based pedagogies. As a result, instructors do not have to make time- and effort-intensive changes to the way their courses are taught in order to use the flexible classroom. Instead, they can make small changes to add active learning. We are in the second year of a study of flexible classroom spaces funded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Undergraduate Education. This project asks four research questions that investigate the relationships between the instructor, the students, and the classroom: 1) What pedagogy do instructors use in a flexible classroom space? 2) How do instructors take advantage of the instructional affordances (including the movable furniture, movable whiteboards, wallmounted whiteboards, and wall-mounted monitors) of a flexible classroom? 3) What is the impact of faculty professional development on instructors' use of flexible classroom spaces? and 4) How does the classroom influence the ways students interpret and engage in group learning activities? In the first year of our study we have developed five research instruments to answer these questions: a three-part classroom observation protocol, an instructor interview protocol, two instructor surveys, and a student survey. We have collected data from nine courses taught in one of ten flexible classrooms at the University of Michigan during the Fall 2018 semester. Two of these courses were first-year introduction to engineering courses co-taught by two instructors, and the other seven courses were sophomore- and junior-level core technical courses taught by one instructor. Five instructors participated in a faculty learning community that met three times during the semester to discuss active learning, to learn how to make the best use of the flexible classroom affordances, and to plan activities to implement in their courses. In each course we gathered data from the perspective of the instructor (through pre- and post-semester interviews), the researcher (through observations of three class meetings with our observation protocol), and the students (through conducting a student survey at the end of the semester). This poster presents qualitative and qualitative analyses of these data to answer our research questions, along with evidencebased best practices for effectively using a flexible classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering science courses are typically taught with lecture-based pedagogies and routinely assign problems sets comprised of problems authored by the professor or from the course textbook. With the high number of required engineering science courses, students spend a substantial amount of out-of-class effort on these types of problems. Yet, there is little research on how students engage in and learn from these problem sets. This study examines three groups of students while they work on fluid mechanics problem sets and identifies instances and origins of productive disciplinary engagement. When students disagreed and debated how to solve problems, they engaged in productive disciplinary discussion. Three factors contributed to this active discussion and disciplinary engagement: the nature of the problem, the norms of the class, and the goals of the students. Our findings have implications for designing problem types that include conflicting constraints or require students to debate for a worked out solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examine the influence of an ill and well-defined problems in a first-year engineering design course. In many engineering courses, there has been a move to give students openended, undefined problems. Some says that more openended problems are required in the undergraduate curriculum to make prepare students for the types of problems they will encounter at the workplace.

Engineering design has universally been identified as essential to the practice of engineering. As institutions of higher education seek to improve their undergraduate engineering programs, significant attention has been directed to how to develop and improve students' engineering design practices. This effort often starts in first-year courses as it is coupled with initiatives to retain students. This paper presents both the adaptation of an existing methodology to study design practices to accommodate an in-class design challenge and initial results from the implementation of that methodology to study groups of students in a first-year LEGO roboticsbased engineering course at Tufts University. Preliminary results show students engaged in limited problem scoping and information gathering. These results add to differing results about the practices of first-year engineering, suggesting that context may play a large role in how students invoke design practices. Results also indicate that the majority of time was spent in physical construction and management of group communication. The implications of both of these findings are discussed with respect to instructional design for first-year students along with directions for future research and methodology refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]