Kelly J. Cross

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Bioengineering

As awareness grows about how difficult it is to increase the use of research-based instructional strategies (RBIS) among engineering faculty, we must develop a better understanding of not only what RBIS work, but also how they might fail when used by inexperienced practitioners. We conducted an effectiveness study to explore whether the course desi...

Team projects in undergraduate engineering programs are critical sites for professional skills development. Team projects allow students to try on professional roles as they interact with peers and faculty on projects designed to simulate engineering work. Also, engaging in engineering activities such as team projects can help students establish a...

Engineering employers, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the engineering accreditation agency ABET continue to identify communication and teamwork as essential for engineering graduates going into professional practice. The desire for students to enhance these and other professional skills has led to an increase in the number of team p...

Communication remains an essential skill for engineering graduates in both academic and industry settings, and ABET considers it a key student learning outcome for accreditation. Despite numerous studies of effective approaches to integrating communication into disciplinary courses, few engineering courses apply those approaches. To address this ga...

Teamwork and communication skills are essential to engineering practice, but often play a tenuous role in engineering coursework. In this workshop, we explore the role that faculty beliefs play in curriculum decisions around the teaching and learning of these skills. In particular, we explore the ways that values, competence, and autonomy influence...

Despite many years of focus, diversity remains a challenge across engineering disciplines, particularly with respect to minority students, and these students continue to lack support in many academic settings. Educators have proposed a variety of theories and approaches to address this challenge. One particularly promising explanation for lower rat...

Strong communication and teamwork skills remain essential for engineering graduates in both academic and industry settings. They are considered by ABET to be key student learning outcomes for accreditation and are consistently high on employers list of necessary skills for new hires. Despite recognition of their importance, gaps in teaching these s...

Communication and teamwork skills remain top-priority outcomes for engineering graduates. Yet researchers and educators alike know comparatively little about the teaching and learning epistemologies engineering faculty employ, or about how faculty epistemologies affect the learning mechanisms of engineering students. Our research seeks to address t...

Although vodka is a reasonably pure mixture of alcohol and water, beverage drinks typically show differences in appeal among brands. The question immediately arises as to the molecular basis, if any, of vodka taste perception. This study shows that commercial vodkas differ measurably from ethanol-water solutions. Specifically, differences in hydrog...

The (1)H-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shifts of ethanol and water hydroxyl groups show a pattern change at a critical ethanol concentration. Below the critical value (20 mol% at 400 Hz), only one hydroxyl peak appears due to fast proton exchange, whereas above the critical concentration, the ethanol hydroxyl peak splits from the water...

The science and technology enhancement program (STEP) at the University of Cincinnati (UC) links university faculty, graduate students, secondary teachers, and secondary students in an effort to enhance student competence and promote awareness in STEM disciplines. Graduate-student Fellows gain valuable experience assisting and teaching in urban hig...