Rebecca Brent

• Doctor of Education
• CEO at Education Designs, Inc.

Black men are underrepresented in engineering in general and computer engineering (CPE) in particular. Using two unique datasets, (1) the Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) and (2) 10 interviews with Black men who persisted in or switched away from CPE at two predominantly White instituti...

An incredible set of free bimonthly engineering education webinars begins next week that might be of interest to you. Named the "Brent-Felder Webinar Series on Effective Teaching" by its organizers (the name wasn't our idea), it features some of the top engineering educators in the world (see picture below) and covers topics of great current intere...

Card sorting has been used in qualitative studies in various fields to better understand how individuals organize information and make choices based on it. As part of a mixed-methods study of why Black engineering students initially chose their major and why they subsequently decided to persist in or switch out of it, we developed a card-sort activ...

Our transformative mixed-methods project, funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers, responds to calls for more cross-institutional qualitative and longitudinal studies of minorities in engineering education. We seek to identify the factors that promote persistence and graduation as well as attrition for Black students in Electric...

The power of collaborative activities to improve students' learning, curricular retention, self-efficacy, and attitudes toward their instruction in face-to-face college classes is well supported by research. Whether the instruction qualifies as active learning, collaborative or cooperative learning, or an inductive approach such as inquiry-based, p...

This paper examines methods of actively engaging students in online university-level STEM courses. It describes a variety of synchronous and asynchronous engagement strategies, cites research supporting their effectiveness, and offers suggestions for maximizing the effectiveness of active engagement regardless of which strategies are adopted to ach...

In this Research Full Paper we examine the reported experiences of Black students who are majoring in or switched from electrical (EE), computer (CPE), or mechanical (ME) engineering. Prior work has shown different persistence trajectories for Black students in these majors relative to White students, as well as differences between Black men and Bl...

Our project aims to enhance understanding of the policies and practices that promote persistence and graduation as well as attrition for Black students in Electrical Engineering (EE), Computer Engineering (CpE), and Mechanical Engineering (ME). The qualitative portion of our study seeks to explore in depth the causes of the observed differences whi...

This Research Work in Progress paper reports on Year 1 of a three-year mixed-methods study to identify institutional factors that promote increased retention of Black students in engineering curricula and to determine causes of their attrition. The paper outlines preliminary findings from 14 interviews of students who left computer, electrical, or...

We present a visual, quantitative analysis of the academic pathways of Black men and women who enroll in Electrical Engineering (EE) or Mechanical Engineering (ME) at any point during their undergraduate experience (N=4816). Our research provides evidence that more Black students choose EE than ME, in contrast to national data for all races that sh...

In this work in progress, we use Lee and Matusovich’s model of co-curricular support (MCCS) and the recruitment aspect of the Building Engineering and Science Talent (BEST) framework to investigate the policies, programs, and activities for, and recruitment and retention of, underrepresented students at four institutions. These four colleges of eng...

span>La enseñanza centrada en el alumno es un extenso enfoque que incluye sustituir las clases dadas de la manera tradicional por el aprendizaje activo. Esto permite que los estudiantes sean responsables de su propio aprendizaje y además que el aprendizaje se dé al ritmo del estudiante y/o emplear el aprendizaje cooperativo, es decir, el basado en...

Teaching and Learning STEM presents a trove of practical research-based strategies for designing and teaching courses and assessing students’ learning. The book draws on the authors’ extensive backgrounds and decades of experience in STEM education and faculty development. Its engaging and well-illustrated descriptions will equip you to implement t...

Faculty at North Carolina State University, US, has realized that a powerful alternative to traditional lectures and readings is to have students go through complete or partially worked-out derivations and examples in class, explaining them step-by-step to one another. One format for this technique is an active-learning structure, called Thinking-A...

A department climate is the set of factors that affect whether department personnel feel appreciated, safe to express opinions, and respected by their administrators and colleagues. A 2006 study conducted by The University of Wisconsin Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI) demonstrated that climate significantly impacts fac...

Process Evaluation: The Vital (and Usually) Missing Piece in Educational Research Most large educational research projects are challenging to manage. Activities of many people must be coordinated, and unanticipated problems commonly arise at every turn. Project directors normally deal with the challenges by trial-and-error. Unfortunately, it can...

Background Economic globalization, rapid advances in technology and cognitive science, and a worldwide movement toward outcomes-based program accreditation increasingly require changes in the traditional model of engineering education design and delivery. As yet, no validated framework exists for designing instructional development programs that wo...

Academic and research institutions are making efforts to introduce a reliable grading process that can help them in assessing soft skills of engineering students. A reliable grading system needs to assess that students have been adequately instructed in appropriate methods and skills required to meet the criteria set by it. A grading checklist can...

Since its inception in 1992, the NSF-sponsored Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) has successfully induced large numbers of engineering faculty members to participate in instructional development programs and to adopt proven but (in engineering) non-traditional instructional methods. This paper briefly...

A multifaceted program at North Carolina State University involving workshops and mentorships helps prepare new faculty members and graduate students for successful academic careers. This paper describes the elements of the program, reviews assessment data for each element, and offers recommendations to engineering schools wishing to establish thei...

The National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI) is a three-day teaching workshop that has been given annually since 1991 in conjunction with the Annual ASEE Conference. In the early spring of 2008, a web-based survey sent to 607 workshop alumni asked about the effects of the NETI on their teaching practices, their students' and their own ratings o...

Institute and State University. The coalition began its second five-year funding period in 1997 with a mission of scaling up and institutionalizing the educational reforms developed and pilottested in the first five years. A major component of the Year 6–10 effort is the design and implementation of a coalition-wide faculty development (FD) program...

About 15 years ago one of the authors (RF) began to experiment with groupwork in his engineering courses. After making every mistake in the book (which he had not yet read), he recognized that there must be more to getting students to work together effectively than simply putting them in groups and asking them to do something, but he wasn’t sure wh...

This paper describes a faculty development program designed specifically for engineering faculty and implemented on an 8-campus coalition of engineering schools. In the five years of the program’s existence, a large percentage of the faculty has participated in faculty development activities and adopted proven but (in engineering) non-traditional t...

If you are like most university professors, you were not taught anything about how to teach in graduate school or when you began in your first faculty position. All you had to go on was how your professors taught, but nobody taught them anything about teaching either. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s our system. Teaching is too complex an...

In recent years the scholarship of teaching has gained increasing recognition in engineering education as a legitimate and valuable faculty activity. Growing numbers of faculty members engaged in educational research have been using surveys as principal components of their assessment programs. These researchers quickly discover that using individua...

B ackground The National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI) is a three‐day teaching workshop that has been given annually since 1991 in conjunction with the Annual ASEE Conference. Its goals are to improve the participants' teaching effectiveness, promote their engagement in scholarly teaching and educational scholarship, and motivate them to enga...

Two elementary schools received large three-year grants to support the integration of technology into their curricula. They each followed the same prescribed integration model but made substantially different implementation decisions. The differences are reflected in their responses to two questions: 1. How should limited resources be spent for tec...

Some of the significant mistakes that engineering instructors need to avoid during teaching engineering students, are discussed. An engineering student who is more careful and methodical but slow in problem solving may become a good engineer instead of those who are quick but careless. Instructors need to evaluate their students by conducting test...

The primary objectives of this engineering project are (1) to examine how to develop students' problem solving and computational skills early in their program of study and (2) to further enhance these skills by building upon critical computing concepts semester after semester. The project is a component of NC State University's quality enhancement...

Various myths about student ratings of teaching abound on every campus are discussed. Research studies have shown that student ratings correlate positively with every other measure of teaching effectiveness, including alumni ratings, peer ratings, and student motivation. Individual instructors who give high grades relative to local averages may get...

Academicians have been arguing for decades about whether or not faculty research supports undergraduate instruction. Those who say it doesa group that includes most administrators and faculty memberscite many ways in which research can enrich teaching, while those on the other side cite numerous studies that have consistently failed to show a measu...

Some of the significant mistakes committed by faculty members in teaching students are discussed. The first mistake committed by teachers is that they call for volunteers, when they ask questions in the classroom. This process leads to students avoiding to volunteer and interact with their teachers. Some teachers commit the mistake of discontinuing...

Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent have provided valuable suggestions to complete a writing project in a reasonable period of time. They have suggested that writers should give dedicate short and frequent periods of time regularly to their major writing projects, because the strategy of waiting for large blocks of time to work on major writing pro...

The ABET EC 2000 criterion requiring that engineering graduates 'understand engineering solutions in global and societal context' has proved problematic to address, because most engineering faculty are neither trained in, nor enthusiastic about including, topics which are logically part of the larger view required of 'global and societal context'....

The institutions associated with chemical engineering education are investing more money for the efficient faculty of chemical engineering. It is required to provide early guidance to the new teachers on the efficient teaching procedure, do good research, and balance the demands of teaching, research, service, and personal life. This orientation pr...

Academicians have been arguing for decades about whether or not faculty research supports undergraduate instruction. Those who say it does—a group that includes most administrators and faculty members—cite many ways in which research can enrich teaching, while those on the other side cite numerous studies that have consistently failed to show a mea...

The term cooperative learning (CL) refers to students working in teams on an assignment or project under conditions in which certain criteria are satisfied, including that the team members be held individually accountable for the complete content of the assignment or project. This chapter summarizes the defining criteria of cooperative learning, su...

Some of the significant tips are provided to overcome the challenges related to developing an approach for creating new courses in chemical engineering. Some of the significant steps that need to be followed to develop a rational approach, include start preparing the approach for teaching a new course, get feedback during the course, writing detail...

So it seems that it's no longer enough for you to teach about the Navier-Stokes equations and potential flow past submerged objects. The ABET coordinator says that students in the fluids course have to be taught oral communications too, and the department head got inspired at some workshop and now wants to teach critical thinking in every course, i...

Effective use of portable computers in lecture classes was discussed. Several formats for computer-based activities in class should be used on a rotating basis. If all students have computers, they may work individually, or in pairs or trios, or individually first and then in pairs to compare and reconcile solutions. If there are only enough comput...

The disadvantages of using powerpoint in conferences, presentations and invited seminars is discussed. One of the important disadvantages of powerpoint is that if the student did not have the copy of the slide in front of them they would frantically take note in a futile effort to keep up with the slide. Making powerpoints slides takes a huge amoun...

Students have different levels of motivation, different attitudes about teaching and learning, and different responses to specific classroom environments and instructional practices. The more thoroughly instructors understand the differences, the better chance they have of meeting the diverse learning needs of all of their students. Three categorie...

The Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) was an NSF-sponsored engineering education coalition that functioned from 1992 through 2002, comprising eight engineering schools that accounted for approximately 1/13 of all U.S. engineering degrees awarded. As part of its ongoing program assessment activities, S...

As college students experience the challenges of their classes and extracurricular activities, most undergo a developmental progression in which they gradually relinquish their belief in the certainty of knowledge and the omniscience of authorities and take increasing responsibility for their own learning. At a high developmental level (which few r...

As college students experience the challenges of their classes and extracurricular activities, they undergo a developmental progression in which they gradually relinquish their belief in the certainty of knowledge and the omniscience of authorities and take increasing responsibility for their own learning. At the highest developmental level normall...

The importance of student ratings which is considered as an essential component of faculty teaching performance evaluation is discussed. Students are equipped to judge whether a course is accurate and up-to-date, the assignments and tests are appropriately challenging and the content and learning objectives are consistent with the course's intended...

This paper is a guide to the effective design and management of team assignments in a college classroom where little class time is available for instruction on teaming skills. Topics discussed include forming teams, helping them become effective, and using peer ratings to adjust team grades for individual performance. A Frequently Asked Questions s...

A peer review protocol that serves both formative and summative functions has been implemented at North Carolina State University. For summative evaluation, two or more reviewers use standardized checklists to independently rate instructional materials (syllabus, learning objectives, assignments, tests, and other items) and at least two class obser...

The implementation of active learning in education to make students aware with a depth of undersatnding, which they would be unlikely to get any other way. The active learning could be made effective by getting active participation from students, who would normally sit and let others do the work. The active learning could be stopped from becoming s...

and be involved in the accreditation process on a continuing basis, not just in the months preceding each visit. Understanding the engineering criteria is no trivial goal, however; the jargon they contain (objectives, outcomes, outcome indicators, performance targets, etc. ) is dense and confusing, and universally agreed-upon operational definition...

As part of its program assessment activities, the Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) conducted a faculty survey of teaching practices, involvement in faculty development programs, and perceptions of the importance of teaching in the faculty reward system. The survey was first administered late in 1997...

The test grades which reveal performance of students in different learning and test-taking styles are discussed. Long tests discriminate students on basis of conceptual understanding or aptitude for engineering. Overlong tests frustrate and demoralize students which do not help students to become better or faster problem solvers. The tests are fair...

In August 2000 the North Carolina State University College of Engineering with partial sponsorship from the SUCCEED Coalition organized and presented a one-week orientation workshop for new faculty members. The workshop goal was to equip new faculty members to become what Robert Boice calls "quick starters," who meet or exceed their institution's e...

SUCCEED (Southeastern Universities and Colleges Coalition for Engineering EDucation) was one of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Engineering Education Coalitions and consists of eight public colleges of engineering located in the southeastern United States. Now in its ninth year of operation, SUCCEED has transformed itself from an incubator o...

SUCCEED (Southeastern Universities and Colleges Coalition for Engineering EDucation) was one of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Engineering Education Coalitions and consists of eight public colleges of engineering located in the southeastern United States. Now in its ninth year of operation, SUCCEED has transformed itself from an incubator o...

In August 2000 the North Carolina State University College of Engineering (USA) with partial sponsorship from the SUCCEED Coalition organized and presented a one-week orientation workshop for new faculty members. The workshop goal was to equip new faculty members to become what Robert Boice calls "quick starters", who meet or exceed their instituti...

SUCCEED (Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education)is an 8-campus coalition of engineering schools formed in 1992 under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. In 1997, members of SUCCEED's faculty development and program assessment teams designed a faculty survey of instructional practices and attitudes re...

Offers ideas for getting students at remote sites to collaborate when attending lectures in a synchronous course, working through lessons in an asynchronous course, and doing homework in either distance mode. (ASK)

The rise of instructional technology and distance learning signals the end of current realities in higher education. This should be regarded, however, as more of a boon than a bane to learning. This article contrasts two illustrative scenarios.

Pressures are building to reform American engineering education, not least of which is the impending adoption of Engineering Criteria 2000 as the default accreditation system. Teaching methods more effective than the traditional chalk-and-talk will be needed to equip engineering graduates with the technical, communication, and interpersonal skills...

This paper discusses the findings from a survey of engineering faculty at the eight colleges of engineering that make up SUCCEED, one of the National Science Foundations engineering education coalitions. Faculty members were surveyed on their use of various teaching methods in their undergraduate classes. Findings show that faculty members who repo...

This report presents findings of a survey of engineering college faculty at eight participating institutions in SUCCEED (Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education) concerning their use of various instructional methods, their prior involvement in instructional development programs, and their perceptions about institutio...

College teaching may be the only skilled profession that does not routinely provide training to its novice practitioners. New faculty members at most universities have traditionally had to learn by themselves how to plan research projects, identify and cultivate funding sources, write proposals and get them funded, attract and supervise graduate st...

When higher education adopted total quality management in the 1980s, changes were made primarily in business and service departments. Some curricula were revised, and a few instructors made changes in what they did in their classrooms, but most continued to teach the way they had always taught. This research is specifically concerned with the appli...

All engineering faculty members in the eight universities that comprise the SUCCEED Coalition were surveyed about their use of a variety of instructional methods and their perceptions about attitudes toward teaching on their campuses. The results provide a unique snapshot of engineering education at a transitional moment in its history. The same su...

The importance of preparing minority teachers has been well established and widely acknowledged. However, the number of minority teachers steadily declines while the number of minority students increases (Gordon, 1994; McLaughlin, 1994; Contreras & Nicklas, 1993). Nationally, the percentage of minority employees in education has dropped from 13% in...

A reform movement has been active in higher education for several decades. The proponents of change argue that the traditional teacher-centered approach to classroom instruction, which emphasizes lecturing, individual effort, and competition for grades, is not particularly effective for promoting learning and skill development. They claim that a mo...

Something (maybe the only thing) that most university administrators and educational reformers agree on is that the teaching evaluation methods used on their campuses leave a lot to be desired. The administrators often use inadequacies in the usual procedure (tabulating course-end student ratings) to justify the low weighting generally given to tea...