MARCH 2008
Providing interesting and useful information for engineering faculty. To subscribe click here.

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New and Improved Journal of Engineering Education!

The Journal of Engineering Education is a peer-reviewed international journal published quarterly by the American Society for Engineering Education. It serves as an archival record of the leading scholarly research in engineering education.

Visit www.asee.org/jee/ to read it online.

In this Issue:

I. Databytes

• Electrical Engineering Degrees Awarded by School (Top 50), 2006

II. Congressional Hotline

• WHITE HOUSE-CONGRESS IMPASSE HITS SCIENCE FUNDING
• SCIENCE COMMUNITY LOBBIES FOR SUPPLEMENTAL FY08 FUNDING
• HOUSE PASSES HIGHER EDUCATION ACT RENEWAL

III. Teaching Toolbox

• You Know It. Can You Write It? — With engineers expected to be not only smart but able to communicate well, educators find new ways to teach the second “R”

IV.  JEE Selects

• It’s About More Than Numbers – Engineers need to adjust their approach when conducting research on education

V. Fellowship and Scholarship Programs

• The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
• NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program
   

I. Databytes
 

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3rd edition now available!

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II. Congressional Hotline

WHITE HOUSE-CONGRESS IMPASSE HITS SCIENCE FUNDING

The budget climate with respect to science has indeed become bleak. The colossal FY08 budget fight that eventually yielded a compromise funding bill for most federal agencies also brought with it serious collateral damage. As the smoke clears, science has emerged as a major casualty of the President’s intransigence over top-line funding levels on the one hand—aided by Republican solidarity in both Houses of Congress—and the unwillingness of Congressional Democrats on the other to compromise other domestic funding priorities.

Taking into account inflation and congressional earmarks, current funding levels for NSF and the DOE Office of Science remain flat, and some programs have even been cut. Despite widespread bipartisan agreement on major funding increases for science—heavily promoted in President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) and the Democrats’ Innovation Agenda, and ratified by the America COMPETES Act—neither side seems willing to sacrifice to achieve it.

SCIENCE COMMUNITY LOBBIES FOR SUPPLEMENTAL FY08 FUNDING

A sustained effort by members of the science and education communities, led by the AAU and NASULGC, is underway to encourage Congress to restore funding levels for science that were originally included in both the President’s FY08 budget and separate appropriations mark-ups, and authorized in the landmark America COMPETES Act of 2007. The effort seeks to include additional FY08 science funding as part of an anticipated emergency war supplemental bill. Such a move, critics fear, would capsize the bill by turning the “emergency” supplemental into a second appropriations bill thereby opening an avenue for other constituencies to lobby for their own piece of the funding pie.

HOUSE PASSES HIGHER EDUCATION ACT RENEWAL

The House overwhelmingly passed a five-year renewal of the Higher Education Act on February 7, which includes requirements that would prod colleges to address illegal downloading and ease access for for-profit colleges to federal student aid. The reauthorization bill now faces a House-Senate conference to reconcile the bill with a version passed by the Senate in July

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III. Teaching Toolbox

You Know It. Can You Write It?

By Thomas K. Grose

One of the many questions science has yet to definitively answer is how neurons encode information.

That’s why the National Academy scheduled a workshop on this important subject. It asked a leading proponent of the theory that neural coding is based on the rate at which neurons fire their action potentials to give a keynote address. But a second speech will be delivered by another top researcher who advances an opposing theory: that coding results from the patterns of the action potential discharges. The researchers are eager to impress the distinguished audience by displaying a full grasp of the topic.

Accordingly, they both assign a team of bioengineering graduate students to research the literature and write a thorough report on alternative hypotheses for coding.

A plausible scenario? To be sure. But it’s actually a clever bit of fiction, albeit one that wasn’t devised to deceive or entertain, but to teach. The scene-setter was successfully used at Northwestern University in a junior-year bioengineering course—Neural Systems Physiology—to boost the writing skills of third-year students, while simultaneously helping them grasp a difficult subject. In a recent study, Northwestern researchers showed that the role-playing scenario—coupled with a classroom mini-debate—prodded students not only to make stronger written arguments but to improve their ability to synthesize and condense material from multiple research papers.

Role-playing and debates are examples of innovative techniques that engineering faculty--often working with professional writing instructors--are using to sharpen student writing abilities. Educators argue that the best way to hone students’ writing skills is to insert more writing instruction into engineering curricula. “If engineering students only rely on freshman English classes, they often find they can’t translate those skills to their engineering classes or professional work,” explains Penny Hirsch, associate director of Northwestern’s Writing Program and one of the researchers involved in the experiment. It’s also a signal to students that writing matters. “It’s particularly important to include [writing] assignments in engineering courses, which engineering students take much more seriously than they take the general education courses, where writing is usually taught,” explains Richard Felder, a chemical engineering professor emeritus at North Carolina State University who now co-directs the National Effective Teaching Institute.

Since the advent of the ABET 2000 accreditation process, which stresses writing skills, there’s been a bigger push to make engineering students better communicators. Industry, too, has been vocal in demanding engineering graduates who can effectively communicate and work in teams. Hirsch says the writing skills of engineering students are typically no better nor worse than those of most undergraduates. But, she adds, all their writing instruction has been in English classes. “They haven’t had much experience with engineering reports, lab reports, proposals and interview protocols . . . So if they receive no instruction in these areas in college, then it wouldn’t be surprising if faculty and people in industry assumed that their skills lagged behind.” And, says John Troy, the biomedical engineering professor who teaches the Northwestern course: “Being able to write well is becoming more and more important to their [engineers’] professional lives.”

Why? “Now it is very common for engineers to have to ‘sell’ their projects to managers through written reports or oral presentations. The emergence of the Internet has also increased the need for communication skills,” Troy says.

Faculty Resistance

Many engineering academics, because they inhabit a publish-or-perish environment, possess fairly strong writing skills and are more than capable of handling writing instruction. Still, there remains some deeply rooted faculty resistance to teaching writing. Engineering instructors continue to fret that embedding writing instruction in their courses will be too time consuming. They’re also reluctant to make room for it by removing important course content. But there are ways to win them over. There’s a growing body of research that shows that writing instruction can be a good way to teach scientific or technical material. Neural coding is a subject undergraduates often find perplexing, and it’s also not covered that well in textbooks, Troy says.

“So it was a good topic for research and to also let students do some writing. We didn’t want to sacrifice content.” It can also be a big selling point to engineering faculty--often suspicious of qualitative research--when the positive results of in-class writing experiments can be quantitatively measured. And that was certainly the case with the Northwestern study, where researchers were able to compare papers going back seven years, a period during which they implemented a number of teaching techniques.

In 2003 and 2004, Troy’s students were divided into teams and asked to write two papers. In those years, they were also given in-class writing instruction and shown examples of well-written reports. A later assessment, comparing the more recent papers to earlier ones (from 1999 to 2002), showed the extra instruction had indeed helped students improve their lower-level skills, including grammar and mechanics, but not their higher-level ones.

In particular, they were still having trouble writing cogent arguments, synthesizing, and making good use of graphics. So in 2005, the role-playing scenario was introduced so students could better understand that the practical challenge of writing the paper was also a means to help them understand the material. It was important, too, to put them in the roles of grad students, rather than leading researchers, because that made the scenario seem more realistic to them.

In previous years, Troy devoted two classes to writing. In the first, he demonstrated to students how he would research and write a paper. The second class was devoted to showing students examples of professional reports. In 2005, it was decided to make the second class an interactive session. Two student teams--which were essentially enacting the roles of the two teams of grad students in the scenario--were picked to debate the theories. After the mini-debate, moderated by a teaching assistant, there was a wide-ranging Q&A session involving the entire class.

The debate was scheduled just a week before the reports’ deadline, in hopes that it would inspire students to make necessary revisions. Also, Troy purposely skipped the debate to avoid inhibiting the students, freeing them to speak their minds and not give answers they thought he would want to hear.

After Troy graded the 2005 papers, they and the previous year’s papers were blind-scored by three experts and another non-engineering faculty member, and the results were crunched using analytical software. And it was clear that the class of ‘05 had made measurable strides in their argumentation and synthesizing abilities, though they were still somewhat struggling with visual aids. Hirsch thinks the role-playing and debate worked because it forced students to take the writing more seriously.

“Previously,” she says, “students saw it as another research paper, something to be done to get a grade.” The methods also helped them to connect the writing to their efforts to master the complexities of neural coding, she adds. “It brought the issues alive to them.”

A Way to Improve Design

Hirsch is also involved with a freshman design course at Northwestern, Engineering Design and Communication (EDC), which stresses writing and is team-taught by engineering and Writing Program instructors. In it, students are taught that writing is a form of designing, and that the clearer their writing, the better their designs. The class mainly relies on coaching, not lectures -- a form of teaching that’s alien to some engineering faculty. Says Hirsch: “But that’s the innovation: more teaching by coaching.”

A growing number of other engineering schools now have strong writing programs, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Colorado School of Mines. Rice University has the Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication, whose mission is to ensure Rice engineering students graduate with strong communications skills. Cain instructors work with the engineering school. For example, in 1999, in the second half of a year-long introduction to biology course that’s mandatory for all bioengineering students (BIOS 202), students were given a chance for extra credit if they wrote a paper based on articles in newspapers and magazines. Within a few years, the instructors realized the value of the assignment, and it became mandatory. Moreover, they now also require students to base their papers on primary scientific literature, not popular media stories. Then there’s the Rice chemical engineering class that has teams writing and presenting reports to the City of Houston mayor’s staff on whether recycling reduces air pollution.

One Rice professor, who teaches a course in emerging technologies, has students prepare reports in the guise of a corporate chief technology officer. Felder, of the Effective Teaching Institute, advocates writing assignments that are in “engineering contexts, simulating the sorts of things the students are going to have to do as professionals,” including writing reports, letters, memos and promotional material. “Students can learn a great deal about writing from short, focused assignments that fit naturally into the courses," he says.

Linda Driskill, director of Rice’s Cain Project, says it’s also vital for engineering faculty to work with writing instructors, who can show them how to more efficiently insert writing assignments into their courses and make effective use of grad students. “You can’t just assign long reports. That doesn’t change things; that’s just busy work,” Driskill argues. Hirsch says many engineering professors like the notion that writing assignments can coincide with course material, and that no one expects them to teach grammar, punctuation and editing. That’s one role-playing scenario they can most certainly avoid.

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IV. JEE Selects

It’s About More Than Numbers

By Maura Borrego

In the push to improve engineering education, it is often noted that engineering faculty receive little or no formal training in pedagogy. Now, engineering faculty are themselves conducting much more research on education and learning. Yet because they lack training in educational research methods, it is important to ask whether engineers’ usual methods are suited to this kind of research; and, if not, how to fill the gap.

To address the challenges of educational scholarship, engineers need to shift their thinking about research. First, they must recognize that what might seem like unnecessary “extra steps” are in fact crucial to the educational research process. Such steps include identifying and describing an underlying learning theory, explaining the applicability or transferability of results and describing how abstract concepts (for example, confidence) are measured. Trained in technical rather than educational research, the typical engineering educator is not accustomed to addressing explicitly such considerations, as these steps are assumed in technical work.

Engineering and science also feature a high degree of consensus on important research questions, appropriate methods, and what constitutes convincing evidence. This allows for a kind of communication shorthand, since the motivation for the work is generally understood and accepted by all. Yet achieving results that become a universally accepted truth is less likely in education research than in engineering. Because the objects of study are human beings, with their complex, varied, and changing perspectives, universality is essentially impossible.

Second, most engineering faculty members are more comfortable with numbers than with qualitative assessments, and therefore tend to value statistical significance as the most convincing evidence. Yet with some training, engineers can come to appreciate the ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches complement each other in augmenting our understanding of learning in an engineering context. In my studies of engineering faculty at the Rigorous Research in Engineering Education workshop, I have observed many faculty members shifting from quantitative-only research designs to mixed methods or qualitative approaches after refining their research questions, considering theories, and learning more about measurement and research methods.

Third is the issue of seeking help to navigate this new territory. The cultures of the Ph.D. and of engineering encourage faculty to be self-sufficient, independently training themselves in new techniques necessary for their work. Yet given the different requirements of educational research, it makes sense to enlist the help of a collaborator with complementary expertise. Understanding what scholars of education and other disciplines can offer—for example, help with assessment, curriculum design, educational technology, statistics, educational psychology, gender studies and policy—and being aware of reward systems in different departments and institutions, can help discussions go more smoothly. Both collaborators should see benefits for their careers. Engineers shouldn’t hesitate to ask acquaintances to recommend a collaborator. Often, they need to be the ones to initiate joint efforts, since they are most aware of the problems in engineering education that require study.

These are just a few of the difficulties engineers face when embarking on education scholarship. If the membership of ASEE is any indication, many believe it is crucial to work on improving engineering education. Knowing in advance what to expect can help overcome challenges as they arise, or avert them altogether.

Maura Borrego is an assistant professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. This article is adapted from “Conceptual Hurdles Experienced by Engineering Faculty Becoming Engineering Education Researchers,” Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 96, 2007, and the forthcoming “Characteristics of Successful Cross-disciplinary Engineering Education Collaborations,” in JEE, co-authored by L. K. Newswander.

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V. Fellowship/Scholarship Programs

Postdoctoral

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.  This program is open to U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents and offers a competitive stipend as well as insurance, relocation, and travel allowances.  The program offers one to three-year postdoctoral fellowships designed to increase the involvement of scientists and engineers from academia and industry to scientific and technical areas of interest and relevance to the Navy.  The program has a rolling admission.  Go to: http://www.asee.org/nrl/ .

Undergraduate/Graduate Fellowship

NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program. The purpose is to meet the continuing needs of the nation's aeronautics and space effort by increasing the number of highly trained scientists and engineers in aeronautics and related disciplines. Scholarships awarded include competitive stipend payments anticipated amount for undergrad up to $15,000 and up to $35,000 for graduate. There is an option to attend a summer internship (up to $10,000 per summer) at a participating NASA Research Center. The undergraduate program is open to U.S. citizens, applicants should have completed their sophomore year of college by Fall of 2008, and should be in good standing at an accredited college or university. The graduate program is open to U.S. citizens, the applicants should be be accepted or enrolled in an accredited program, and remain in good academic standing at their respected college or university. Website and online application will be open in mid-December, 2007. For more information, contact nasa.asp@asee.org

Scholarships

SAE Scholarship:

Through generous contributions from various corporations and universities, SAE is proud to award scholarship money to both undergraduate and graduate engineering students. SAE scholarships assist in developing the future engineering workforce by helping students achieve their dreams of becoming an engineer. Funded through the SAE Foundation, these scholarships encourage academic excellence and help students around the world to pursue their passion for engineering.

 http://students.sae.org/awdscholar/scholarships/