Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Engineering Education
- Creators: Brunhaver, Samantha
Description
A concept found that students struggle with in statics and dynamics is free body diagrams. To capture the difficulties students have with this concept, faculty interviews were conducted to determine common errors seen in a classroom setting. The feedback was used to pull questions from a statics concept inventory focused on free body diagrams. Students who have passed statics and dynamics courses in their engineering degree were asked to participate in talk alouds to confirm the faculty input. The talk alouds provided first hand observations of the student thought process when they perform common errors in creating free body diagrams. The results highlighted that students commonly add forces that are not there or fail to only depict the external forces acting on the system in question. A professor describes the occurrence when students insist on adding forces that are not there as phantom forces. To remedy the idea of phantom forces, an intervention was proposed to be implemented into the classroom.
ContributorsTwet, Samantha Ann (Author) / Brunhaver, Samantha (Thesis director) / Lande, Micah (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Background – Among influential education reports, there is clear consensus that an expansive range of intrapersonal (e.g. self-regulation) and interpersonal competencies (e.g. empathy) highly influence educational and career success. Research on teaching and learning these competencies is limited in engineering education.
Purpose/Hypothesis – This dissertation study explores the impacts of a mindfulness training program on first-year engineering students and aims to understand potential impacts on the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies.
Design/Method – A four-session mindfulness-based training program was designed, developed, and facilitated to cultivate intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies. This study employed a multiphase mixed method design in which quantitative and qualitative data was collected from a total of 35 different students through a post survey (n=31), 3-month follow-up survey (n=29), and interviews (n=18). t-tests were used to evaluate the statistical significance of the program and a rigorous thematic analysis process was utilized to help explain the quantitative data.
Results – The results suggest that the majority of students became more mindful, which led to improved intrapersonal competencies (i.e. self-management, critical-thinking, focus, resilience, and well-being) and interpersonal competencies (i.e. empathy, communication, teamwork, and leadership).
Discussion / Conclusions – The study provides compelling evidence that mindfulness training can support the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal skills among engineering students, which can support their overall academic experience, as well as personal and professional development. Future design and development work will be needed to evaluate the integration and scalability potential of mindfulness training within engineering programs.
Purpose/Hypothesis – This dissertation study explores the impacts of a mindfulness training program on first-year engineering students and aims to understand potential impacts on the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies.
Design/Method – A four-session mindfulness-based training program was designed, developed, and facilitated to cultivate intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies. This study employed a multiphase mixed method design in which quantitative and qualitative data was collected from a total of 35 different students through a post survey (n=31), 3-month follow-up survey (n=29), and interviews (n=18). t-tests were used to evaluate the statistical significance of the program and a rigorous thematic analysis process was utilized to help explain the quantitative data.
Results – The results suggest that the majority of students became more mindful, which led to improved intrapersonal competencies (i.e. self-management, critical-thinking, focus, resilience, and well-being) and interpersonal competencies (i.e. empathy, communication, teamwork, and leadership).
Discussion / Conclusions – The study provides compelling evidence that mindfulness training can support the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal skills among engineering students, which can support their overall academic experience, as well as personal and professional development. Future design and development work will be needed to evaluate the integration and scalability potential of mindfulness training within engineering programs.
ContributorsHuerta, Mark Vincent (Author) / McKenna, Anna (Thesis advisor) / Pipe, Teri (Committee member) / Carberry, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This dissertation features three pieces of scholarship which showcase and demonstrate an ethic of queerness for engineering education research (EER). The concept of an ethic of queerness is introduced and constructed in Chapter 1 using tenets from the philosophy of pragmatism, systems thinking, critical theory, and the personal and collective experiences of queered communities immersed in normative spaces, such as engineering and engineering education. Chapter 2 is a scoping literature review on the state of research on the LGBTQIA+ engineering student experience compared to other relevant fields, revealing that EER is still nascent on the topic. Chapter 3 leverages arts-based qualitative inquiry to explore the opportunities and limitations of mixed-initiative creative interfaces (MICIs) when used as a tool for self care by queer(ed) subjects. Chapter 4 connects Patricia Hill Collins’ insider/outsider paradox framework to recent engineering education research through collaborative autoethnographies, illuminating the ways in which normative, oppressive social discourses are embedded within the EER system. Although Chapters 2-4 feature their own unique methodology and topic of inquiry, they are united through a motivation to deconstruct and re-imagine sociotechnical systems throughout engineering and EER through the lens of radical queerness. Chapter 5 summarizes how each of the prior chapters aligns with queerness as an ethic and explores avenues of future work from this dissertation. More specifically, each chapter represents a way of queering engineering education research methodology through the embrace of ambiguity and ephemerality, particularly with regard to the ways in which the author’s subjectivity and relationality to the roles of researcher, student, engineer, and engineering education researcher emerged throughout their doctoral education.
ContributorsJennings, Madeleine (Author) / Kellam, Nadia (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Thesis advisor) / Roscoe, Rod (Committee member) / Brunhaver, Samantha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023