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| January 2010 | Subscribe |
PREMIER SPONSOR |
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Sponsors:
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In This Issue:
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I. Databytes |
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Engineering Research ExpendituresEngineering research expenditures continue to increase as shown in the graph below. Since AY1998-99, the annual increases in actual and constant dollars have been 7.3% and 4.5%, respectively. The average expenditure for the 193 engineering colleges that submitted data to the ASEE survey was $30,448,000. 
For AY2007-08, the 10 universities with the largest expenditures accounted for 28.5% of the engineering total and awarded 26.9% of the engineering doctoral degrees. The 20 largest accounted for 45.2% (42.3% of the doctorates) and the 30 largest accounted for 57.7% (54.5% of the doctorates). The 193 colleges submitting survey data awarded 94.9% of the engineering doctoral degrees in AY2007-08. This article was provided by Engineering Trends. For more information, visit Engineering Trends at engtrends.com.
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III. Teaching Toolbox |
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OPENING MINDS, RAISING SIGHTSMentored by technical professionals, girls explore routes to upward mobility. By Corinna Wu One sunny Friday afternoon, Google engineering manager Patty Legaspi stood before a classroom of girls at Oakland Unity High School and told them the story of her life. Born in Berkeley, Calif., to Mexican immigrants, she and her siblings grew up not far from where the girls sat that day. “Thirty-sixth and East 14th? You know where that is?” Legaspi asked. Heads nodded. Legaspi told the girls that she graduated from high school in 1999 with a 4.0 GPA, but her parents didn’t want her to leave home for college because it would take her away from her family. It was a situation many of the girls might find familiar. But Legaspi’s very presence in the classroom offered proof that such obstacles could be overcome. Legaspi volunteers as a role model for Techbridge, an after-school program run by the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland that aims to get girls in underrepresented groups excited about engineering. All women in technical fields, role models engage in hands-on projects with the students, give them tours of their workplaces, or simply visit their schools and talk, as Legaspi did. Begun in 2000, Techbridge operates in 18 middle and high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and serves about 400 girls each year. Some 2,500 students have gone through the program. Many of the girls may not know an engineer, let alone have a family member in the profession, says Linda Kekelis, Techbridge’s project director. Asking them what they want to be elicits responses such as “a cashier” or “to do hair and nails,” Kekelis says. The role models, who often share backgrounds similar to the girls’, help to forge a personal connection and introduce engineering as a potential career. As in Legaspi’s case, cultural pressures can discourage some girls from pursuing a college degree. Latinos place a lot of importance on keeping their families together, she explains, so parents don’t like the idea of daughters leaving home for school. “Many immigrant parents don’t get that college is a must-have,” Legaspi says. With the help of counselors at her Catholic high school, Legaspi put college applications together and found a way to address her family’s concerns. By enrolling at Holy Names College (now University) in Oakland, she was able to attend a school close to home. Later, she transferred to Mills College, still in Oakland. A Gates Millennium Scholarship helped cover the cost. Legaspi excelled academically and landed a coveted job at Google after graduating in 2002. Sharing a personal story is an effective way to make a connection with kids, Kekelis says. But that might not occur to an engineer who deals with adults most of the time. When one role model tried to give an hourlong PowerPoint presentation to a group of Techbridge students, the girls’ “eyes glazed over,” Kekelis recounts. “Most role models don’t know how to be a role model.” Now, Techbridge offers training workshops each fall, giving role models tips on how best to relate to girls. The organization also provides a toolkit on CD-ROM containing suggestions for fun icebreaker activities, lists of questions role models can ask students, sample agendas for classroom visits, and links to additional engineering resources for girls. Techbridge has a roster of hundreds of role models, so it can match the right person with a particular project, says program coordinator Martha Peña. Even role models who have been working with Techbridge for several years will get regular calls from the staff to discuss their needs. “That’s why we have good retention of role models,” Peña says. Josetta Jones, a Techbridge role model for about five years, benefited firsthand from exposure to older professionals. While a chemical engineering major in college, she got the chance to hear a talk on patent law arranged by the National Society of Black Engineers. It intrigued her, and she eventually decided to go to law school after getting her engineering degree. Now she is herself a patent attorney with Chevron. “It just takes somebody to let you know what opportunities are available and to be thinking about it early enough,” Jones says. “I want the girls to understand that you might want to do something else besides be a scientist, but you can still be in a technical field and have a great impact with it.” During classroom visits, Jones has helped girls make rubber balls and tie-dyed T-shirts in order to talk about the chemistry involved. Legaspi’s job at Google involves managing engineers who test software, so she led the girls at Oakland Unity through an exploration of Google Earth, the global geographical mapping application. The girls used the software to search for the places that mattered to them – their homes in Oakland, the cities their families came from in Mexico and Central America, and fun spots like Disneyland. Juliana Velez, a former Techbridge student who is now a junior at MIT majoring in mechanical engineering, got interested in green buildings after meeting role models from Swinerton, a construction engineering firm. “I’d always been interested in the environment and recycling, but I didn’t really know what green buildings were,” Velez says. “I found the role models who came in very engaging and very interesting.” She interned at Swinerton last summer and plans to continue studying green building design in graduate school. Tours of role models’ workplaces are coordinated with the hands-on projects the girls work on throughout the school year. If the girls do a project with circuits, like rewiring an “Operation” game board, they might visit a company like Intel. A project to build a green dollhouse might merit a visit to a construction site. The workplace tours take some creative planning to make them most effective. “A lot of companies have a standard tour they give to adults,” Peña says, “but children will be falling asleep or texting their friends in the back.” So when a group of Techbridge girls toured Yahoo, the planners decided to make it a scavenger hunt. The search required the girls to ask questions of the engineers who work there. Each after-school session starts with an icebreaker activity to get everyone talking, and that can be a good opportunity to learn what the girls are interested in. One time, for example, Jones simply asked whether the girls preferred the singer Beyoncé or Rihanna. “Part of that is so we can have an open discussion so that what I say has some truth and validity to them,” Jones says. “To gain their trust is very important.” Jones also takes cues from the teachers who supervise the Techbridge program at their schools. “The teachers really let the role models run the class for the afternoon, but I do watch how the teachers interact with the girls,” Jones says. The teachers “let the girls know that we can work at this together and that we can have a friendly relationship.” Techbridge encourages the role models to speak candidly about their experiences, which can include stories about how tough it can be to pursue an engineering career. Legaspi told her class about eight grueling hours of interviews she endured to get the job at Google. She left in tears but got the job. At the end of her recent visit, the girls were sufficiently comfortable to inquire about her pregnancy and her husband and family, as well as her job. “I love challenges,” Legaspi told them. “Every day I learn something new.”
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IV. JEE SELECTS |
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CLUES TO ONLINE LEARNINGStudent do best when monitoring themselves. By Paul S. Steif and Anna Dollár As many experienced educators can attest, good students seem to know when they’re learning. They are the ones in class who are able to formulate and ask questions that pinpoint an issue they don’t understand. How students monitor and reflect on their ability to absorb material takes on added significance with the growing availability of online instructional materials. Such courseware has enormous potential to engage students beyond the classroom and provides an important learning alternative for those who can’t be reached through lectures and expository texts. But online materials may be only as good as the extent to which they encourage students to regulate themselves and monitor what they learn. Our research joined the concept of self-regulation, known to be relevant in other learning contexts, to courseware assessment. We tested whether learning gains are related to total usage of courseware or to usage suggestive of self-regulation. On-line interactive materials can support self-regulation more actively than purely expository materials and even traditional homework sets. They can prompt students at various points to respond to questions and perform various tasks, thus providing the students immediate feedback on their performance. Our study used a Web-based Engineering Statics courseware that we had developed. Since statics is a subject that requires solving problems as well as understanding concepts, larger tasks have been dissected and then presented using carefully designed sequences of short text, graphics, and videos. Also embedded into the course are about 300 virtual “tutors.” These are online learning tools designed based on cognitive principles to interact with students in ways that mimic a human tutor – i.e., offering hints, giving feedback when the student errs, suggesting what to do next, and maintaining a low profile when the student is performing well. The system on which the courseware runs maintains log files of all student interactions. To address the research question, students in a lecture-based statics course were assigned to use the courseware as part of homework assignments, and to take paper-and-pencil diagnostic quizzes both before and after online instruction. Learning gains of students on the quizzes, as well as in class exams, were analyzed and compared with usage patterns inferred from log files. We found that learning gains, as well as performance on the relevant class exam, appeared to be more closely correlated with self-regulation of learning than with total usage of the courseware. Students who did no end-of-module self-assessment activities performed significantly worse on the corresponding class exam compared with those who did some or many self-assessment activities. In addition, we found that students who did few in-module learning activities performed significantly worse on in-class diagnostic quizzes compared with those who did medium and high numbers of activities. Our findings are relevant to both courseware designers and engineering classroom instructors. Self-regulation of learning is likely to be critical to successful use of courseware. Therefore, designers should build into courseware means for users to gauge whether they have indeed learned what the courseware was intended to convey, as well as opportunities to seek more instruction. They could help instructors and students by trying to produce data that meaningfully track student learning. Such data could provide powerful insights to both instructors and students. In evaluating courseware for adoption, instructors should consider whether it stimulates students to gauge and regulate their own learning. Instructors should also employ classroom activities that prompt more students to self-reflect more often. We need to help students understand that they are the ones chiefly responsible for monitoring and regulating their learning and that in doing so, they can contribute significantly to their own success. Paul S. Steif is a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Anna Dollár is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This article is adapted from “Study of Usage Patterns and Learning Gains in a Web-based Interactive Static Course,” in the October 2009 Journal of Engineering Education.
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V. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS |
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Job-hunting? Here are a few current openings:1. Civil Engineering -- 3 opportunities 2. Mechanical Engineering -- 3 opportunities 3. Aerospace Engineering -- 1 opportunity 4. Assistant Dean -- 1 opportunity Visit here for details:
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VI. COMING ATTRACTIONS |
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A SNEAK PEEK AT PRISM’S UPCOMING JANUARY ISSUEJanuary’s Prism concerns itself with federal policy. COVER STORY: At university engineering labs, there’s no recession in innovation. The top 103 North American research universities garnered a growing 2,952 U.S. patents in fiscal year 2009, according to the Patent Board. But researchers wanting to commercialize those inventions have found new hurdles barring their path. In the first half of 2009, first-time investments in companies by venture capitalists collapsed by nearly two-thirds from the year before, to levels not seen in 15 years. To cope, academics and entrepreneurs are learning to become as innovative in the boardroom as they are in the lab. And universities are bolstering their own efforts to equip their spin-offs with the expertise and even the cash necessary to withstand the blows of the economy. FEATURE ONE: Hard times have come to Berkeley, UC’s flagship campus and home to a College of Engineering that’s one of America’s finest. Berkeley’s COE -- as are the other engineering schools within the UC System -- is being hammered by drastic cuts in state higher-education financing triggered by the State of California’s budget meltdown. The college has the resources to see it through this year. But if the cutbacks continue much beyond that, they could eventually damage its sterling, world-class reputation, making it harder for it to retain top faculty and attract high-caliber grad students. “It’s pretty bad,” admits S. Shankar Sastry, Berkeley’s engineering dean. “There’s no way to sugarcoat cuts of this magnitude.” FEATURE TWO: It’s exactly 3,435 miles from Cambridge, Mass., to the Galeries Lafayette, the most famous department store in Paris. And yet an improbable idea from honed in Harvard’s Engineering Sciences 147 course has traveled that equally improbable distance to the store’s gourmet food counters. One of the most bizarre concepts in 21st century food, Le Whif is a chocolate inhaler that delivers a mouthful of flavor—dark chocolate, chocolate raspberry or mint chocolate—with virtually no calories.
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VII. COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS |
ASEE/NSF Corporate Research Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
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