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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (67)
Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to dramatically reshape areas of application has
drifted into and out of our public and academic discourse over several peroids1. With advances in computing and cloud technology it has seen another revival garnering attention as Google’s Alphago2, a simulated Go player, resoundingly defeated the most s...
COMPLEX-IT is a case-based, mixed-methods platform for applied social inquiry into complex data/ systems, designed to increase non-expert access to the tools of computational social science (i.e., cluster analysis, artificial intelligence, data visualization, data forecasting, and scenario simulation). In particular, COMPLEX-IT aids applied social...
Equitable and inclusive publishing practices for engineering education research have received increased attention in recent years. JEE editorials and guest editorials have raised awareness about multiple challenges, including the problematic Whiteness and maleness of much research and the need to make diversity the default condition (Pawley, 2017),...
Advances in the integration of smart technology with interdisciplinary methods has created a new genre, approachable modeling and smart methods – AM-Smart for short. AM-Smart platforms address a major challenge for applied and public sector analysts, educators and those trained in traditional methods: accessing the latest advances in interdisciplin...
Worldwide, engineering design is seeing an increase in pre-college settings due to changing educational policies and standards. Additionally, these projects can help students develop critical skills for a broad range of problem settings, such as design thinking and reflection. In design and other contexts, reflection is a mental process where someo...
Empathy has received increased attention for its role in engineering design. While research on empathy in engineering and engineering design is still relatively new, there are already several definitions or models of empathic design for engineers. Moreover, there are a variety of ways that scholars have integrated empathy into engineering design cu...
As professionals in the workplace, engineers often have high levels of power or social influence over other people or groups they work with, including in decision-making, project planning, and other professional activities. The concept of power has received considerable attention in the social sciences and humanities but has received less attention...
Despite an increasing focus on integrating engineering design in K-12 settings, relatively few studies have investigated how to support students to engage in systematic processes to optimize the designs of their solutions. Emerging learning technologies such as computational models and simulations enable rapid feedback to learners about their desig...
The complexity of design problems compels the collection of rich process data to understand designers. While some methods exist for capturing detailed process data (e.g., protocol studies), design research focused on design activities still faces challenges, including the scalability of these methods and technology transformations in industry that...
In this work-in-progress research-to-practice paper we present a newly integrated set of lenses for creating a senior capstone design course. Our future graduates face several concurrent challenges including both the increasing complexity of technology and rapid pace of innovations, and growing expectations of what engineers design will address in...
Developing a course is a substantive design activity. Within a complex and dynamic context and user base, educators must scope ambiguous problems and develop detailed solutions that are often novel and iterated upon over time. While much attention has been given to course design as a process, less attention has been paid to what a course is as a de...
Authentic design problems necessarily reflect the complexity of real-world dynamic, open systems that have numerous components and nonobvious connections across different systems or components. As engineering design teams define, scope, and research their problem the team will develop a shared understanding of the problem and any complex system(s)...
An engineer or engineering team's conception of the nature of a design problem for a given project will have a marked effect on what criteria and constraints are identified, what ideas are explored, what models or prototypes are tested, and ultimately what artifact emerges from their process. For engineering design instructors, deeply capturing stu...
CONTEXT Grit is conceptualized as a combination of passion and perseverance. Engineering education researchers are increasingly interested in studying grit as factor in student persistence, retention and success. The number of engineering education publications on grit is steadily rising each year, and there has been enough research on the topic th...
Engineering design projects provide wide learning opportunities, including developing design thinking abilities. Yet, creating engaging and impactful engineering design challenges is difficult due to the open-ended, cross-disciplinary, and iterative nature of design projects. One critical attribute of these design challenges is their authenticity o...
Outside of pursuing degrees and employment in professional fields, most of the public’s
experience with the ideas, ethos, and practices of a professional field may come from either direct interaction with professionals or through popular media depictions. The influence of popular media depictions likewise affects public understanding and perception...
This multiple case study focused on the implementation of a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation to help students engage in engineering design to learn science concepts. Our findings describe three case studies that adopted the same learning design and adapted it to three different populations, settings, and classroom contexts: at the middle-scho...
Despite 20 years of increasing acceptance, implementing complexity-appropriate methods for ex-post evaluation remains a challenge: instead of focusing on complex interventions, methods need to help evaluators better explore how policies (no matter how simple) take place in real-world, open, dynamic systems where many intertwined factors about the c...
Abstract: In design, reflection is a central practice that helps designers evaluate past strategies, synthesis knowledge they've gained and plan future actions. For novice designers, developing reflection abilities may be particularly important as it may both help them develop this specific ability and more broadly develop their design thinking abi...
Abstract: Systems thinking is described as the cognition a person uses in the solution and design of large-scale complex systems, often requiring hypothetical and holistic approach. Engineering and systems thinking are commonly part of a K-12 education, particularly in high school. Because systems engineering is a complex process to undertake, it i...
COMPLEX-IT is a case-based, mixed-methods platform for social inquiry into complex data/systems, designed to increase non-expert access to the tools of computational social science (i.e., cluster analysis, artificial intelligence, data visualization, data forecasting, and scenario simulation). In particular, COMPLEX-IT aids social inquiry though a...
Design thinking is often hidden and implicit, so empirical approach based on experiments and data-driven methods has been the primary way of doing such research. In support of empirical studies, design behavioral data which reflects design thinking becomes crucial, especially with the recent advances in data mining and machine learning techniques....
In engineering education and STEM education more generally, the use of microcontrollers is increasingly common across a wide range of design projects found in robotics, programming, makerspaces, e-textiles, and more. Exemplified by the Arduino Uno, microcontrollers make tangible computing possible by connecting digital and physical worlds, and help...
In professional engineering design process, iteration is critical to improving design outcomes and takes different forms at different points during idea generation, prototyping, and refining stages. In engineering education, iteration is a desired and encouraged step for learning valuable design practices that include testing, troubleshooting, and...
Two leading camps for studying social complexity are case-based methods (CBM) and agent-based modelling (ABM). Despite the potential epistemological links between ‘cases’ and ‘agents,’ neither camp has leveraged their combined strengths. A bridge can be built, however, by drawing on Abbott’s insight that ‘agents are cases doing things’, Byrne’s sug...
In the UK, calls for the application of insights from the study of
complex adaptive systems to public policy evaluation are beginning
to be taken seriously in government. Policymakers and analysts
are accepting the fallibility of overly simplistic, definitive, or
linear analysis, or are finding traditional forms of analysis and evidence
less approp...
As solar energy becomes increasingly affordable, many schools are considering installing new solar power systems. Can students contribute to the design, evaluation, and decision-making process in any way? Many students are familiar with solar power and energy, having researched solar energy on the internet, built solar cookers, inspected mini solar...
Engineers typically approach design in teams, particularly when dealing with complex problems that may need to be decomposed into several parts or subsystems to be designed individually and integrated. Team design projects during students' college years can serve as critical experiences to prepare for professional work on design teams. However, the...
Abstract Students from a middle school (N=152) and from a high school (N=33) completed the same energy-efficient home design challenges in a simulated environment for engineering design (SEED) supported by rich design tool with construction and analysis capabilities, Energy3D. As students design in Energy3D, a log of all of their design actions are...
This paper provides a theoretical perspective of how modeling and simulation on a CAD platform can be used to teach science concepts and inform design decisions. The paper discusses the educational implications of three recent advancements in CAD technologies: system integration, machine learning, and computational design. The challenges to design...
There has been a drive to incorporate design into K-12 programs in the form of engineering design projects. This presents a unique opportunity to study design cognition from a population that likely has minimal exposure to design. In this study we employ a method of utilizing fine-grained computer logs to capture students' design actions to better...
Using a life course perspective, this literature review synthesizes research on women's underrepresentation in computing fields across four life stages: 1) pre-high school; 2) high school; 3) college major choice and persistence; and 4) post-baccalaureate employment. Issues associated with access to, and use of, computing resources at the pre-high...
The role and influence of department heads on women in academia is understudied and weakly conceptualized. This article expounds on prior work, which identified limitations of department head literature, to put forth three problematic discourses that run through much of the department head research: the discourse of fairness, the discourse of colle...
Background
The participation of women in engineering education has increased only slightly since the 1980s, despite the publication of many research studies on gender in engineering education. We think that these studies have not affected practice because researchers have focused too narrowly on how gender relates to engineering education.
Purpose...
In this study, life course theory was used to synthesize research on women's underrepresentation in computing across 4 stages of their academic trajectory: pre high-school, high-school, college recruitment, and college retention. The Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Explore databases, as well as select journals that publish on women in...
Inspired by storytelling circles with female academics, this article examines the role of department heads vis-à-vis gendered career experiences and women's persistent underrepresentation among science and engineering faculty members. It focuses on the level of power heads are afforded, presents new and understudied perspectives on the department h...
Engineering education scholars have demonstrated an interest in broadening the scope of the field in multiple ways, including issues addressed and approaches employed. These scholars have argued the need to broaden the epistemological and methodological boundaries of the field. However, numerous challenges to such expansion exist, and they must be...
Although the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering tenure- Track faculty positions is often linked to the conflict between childcare responsibilities and the normative academic tenure- Track pathway, previous studies have tended to focus on individual life choices, rather than the effects of institutional-level policies and struct...
Underrepresentation of female engineering faculty persists across the country1. Moreover, the numbers of female faculty remain disproportionate to the numbers of women receiving PhDs2, and those numbers are even lower for the subset of women of color3-4. For instance, across STEM fields, despite accounting for approximately 13% of the PhD graduates...
Women continue to face barriers and unequal expectations in the academy. Parental leave policies have been instituted in many countries to help address some of these barriers. Nevertheless, many researchers have found that the presence of such policies is not enough to ensure they are used by those they were intended for. We conducted an in depth q...
Many retention studies focus on which students enter engineering or how long engineering students persist. We propose studying an alternate pathway, students who switch into engineering from other majors. Examining such pathways reveals a previously understudied aspect of the engineering pipeline and may be leveraged through institutional policies...
In this chapter, we provide readers with the first formal overview of case-based complexity science and its related methodology, case-based modeling.Case-based modeling, championed largely by [1], constitutes a fifth major method for modeling complex systems, offering itself as an alternative to (and also integration of) agent (rule-based) modeling...
Policies such as paid parental leave can be leveraged by universities to address ongoing challenges with women under-representation in STEM academic positions. We have undertaken a deep, comprehensive and systematic study of one such policy at one Midwestern institution, exploring the recently instituted parental leave policy that allows women and...
Many digital databases housed on the web today are organized in ways that are problematic for systems researchers, primarily because they are prear-ranged for conventional, reductionistic, linear, statistically-aggregated re-search. To make use of such data, systems researchers need an intermedi-ary, e-scientific framework that can translate their...
