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Board 95: Expanding Access to and Participation in MIDFIELD (Year 3)

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Tagged Topic

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32467

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32467

Download Count

359

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Paper Authors

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Matthew W. Ohland Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-1452

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Matthew W. Ohland is Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He has degrees from Swarthmore College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Florida. His research on the longitudinal study of engineering students, team assignment, peer evaluation, and active and collaborative teaching methods has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation and his team received Best Paper awards from the Journal of Engineering Education in 2008 and 2011 and from the IEEE Transactions on Education in 2011 and 2015. Dr. Ohland is an ABET Program Evaluator for ASEE. He was the 2002–2006 President of Tau Beta Pi and is a Fellow of the ASEE, IEEE, and AAAS.

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Susan M. Lord University of San Diego

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Susan M. Lord received a B.S. from Cornell University and the M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is currently Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. Her teaching and research interests include inclusive pedagogies, electronics, optoelectronics, materials science, first year engineering courses, feminist and liberative pedagogies, engineering student persistence, and student autonomy. Her research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Lord is a fellow of the ASEE and IEEE and is active in the engineering education community including serving as General Co-Chair of the 2006 Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, on the FIE Steering Committee, and as President of the IEEE Education Society for 2009-2010. She is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Education. She and her coauthors were awarded the 2011 Wickenden Award for the best paper in the Journal of Engineering Education and the 2011 and 2015 Best Paper Awards for the IEEE Transactions on Education. In Spring 2012, Dr. Lord spent a sabbatical at Southeast University in Nanjing, China teaching and doing research.

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Marisa K. Orr Clemson University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-5944-5846

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Marisa K. Orr is an Assistant Professor in Engineering and Science Education with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University. Her research interests include student persistence and pathways in engineering, gender equity, diversity, and academic policy. Dr. Orr is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award for her research entitled, “Empowering Students to be Adaptive Decision-Makers.”

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Richard A. Layton Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

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Richard Layton is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. His areas of scholarship include student teaming, longitudinal studies of engineering undergraduates, and data visualization. He is a founding developer of the CATME system, a free, web-based system that helps faculty assign students to teams and conduct self- and peer-evaluations. He is a co-author of the Engineering Communication Manual, an undergraduate text published in 2016 by Oxford Univ. Press. He can occasionally be found playing guitar at a local open mic.

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Russell Andrew Long Purdue University

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Russell Long, M.Ed. was the Director of Project Assessment at the Purdue University School of Engineering Education (retired) and is Managing Director of The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). He has extensive experience in performance funding, large data set analysis, program review, assessment and student services in higher education. One of his greatest strengths lies in analyzing data related to student learning outcomes and, therefore, to improving institutional effectiveness. His work with MIDFIELD includes research on obstacles students face that interfere with degree completion and, as well, how institutional policies affect degree programs. His group’s work on transfer students, grade inflation, and issues faced across gender and ethnicity have caused institutions to change policies so that they may improve. Awards and publications may be found at https://engineering.purdue.edu/people/russell.a.long.1.

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Catherine E. Brawner Research Triangle Educational Consultants

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Catherine E. Brawner is President of Research Triangle Educational Consultants. She received her Ph.D.in Educational Research and Policy Analysis from NC State University in 1996. She also has an MBA from Indiana University (Bloomington) and a bachelor’s degree from Duke University. She specializes in
evaluation and research in engineering education, computer science education, and technology education. Dr. Brawner is a founding member and former treasurer of Research Triangle Park Evaluators, an American Evaluation Association affiliate organization and is a member of the American Educational Research Association and American Evaluation Association, in addition to ASEE. Dr. Brawner is also an Extension Services Consultant for the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) and, in that role, advises computer science and engineering departments on diversifying their undergraduate student population. She remains an active researcher, including studying academic policies, gender and ethnicity issues, transfers, and matriculation models with MIDFIELD as well as student veterans in engineering. Her evaluation work includes evaluating teamwork models, broadening participation initiatives, and S-STEM and LSAMP programs.

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Hossein EbrahimNejad Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering)

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Hossein Ebrahiminejad is a Ph.D. student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. He completed his M.S. in Biomedical Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in Iran. His research interests include student pathways, educational policy, and quantitative research methods.

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Hassan Ali Al Yagoub Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8812-4109

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Hassan Al Yagoub is a Ph.D. student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. His research interests include diversity & inclusion, students’ persistence, advising and mentoring, engineering career pathways, and school-to-work transition of new engineers.
He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Hassan worked for five years at General Electric where he graduated from their Edison Engineering Development Program (EEDP) and then worked as a gas turbine fleet management engineer. In addition to his technical role, Hassan supported the recruiting, interview, and selection process of the EEDP Program, where he mentored interns, co-ops and Edison associates from the Middle East and Africa regions by developing and teaching a technical training curriculum, providing guidance for graduate school applications, and providing career consultation.

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Abstract

This project seeks to expand the number of institutions participating in The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD is a resource enabling the study of students that includes longitudinal, whole population data for multiple institutions. Retention, measured in various ways, has been the dominant mode of studying student success in engineering and in higher education in general. However, studying who matriculates and who graduates does not tell the complete story of a student's path through the engineering curriculum nor should it be used as a measure of an institution. A national, longitudinal student unit-record database enables study of engineering programs and benchmark metrics consistently. MIDFIELD has been used in high impact research on student matriculation habits disaggregated across various engineering disciplines, ethnicities and genders. However, its value as a predictive tool has been limited due to the small (eleven) number of institutions included.

This project aims to expand MIDFIELD database from 11 to 103 institutions containing over 10 million students. More specifically the data will represent over 50% of the U.S. engineering undergraduate degrees awarded and increase the diversity of institutions in the dataset. MIDFIELD will include public and private institutions, minority serving institutions, and institutions from a broad range of research classifications. The scope and longitude of MIDFIELD will enable significant improvements in research in higher education. It will enable the development of research capacity to examine student characteristics (race/ethnicity/gender/social class) and curricular pathways (including coursework) by institution and over time. Because the dataset contains students records of all students matriculating over a period of time, researchers can study students across all disciplines, not just engineering.

As of October 1, 2018, we have secured participation agreements from 27 institutions in addition to the original 11, bringing the total number of institutions in MIDFIELD to 38. Thirty-one (31) other institutions are in the process of signing agreements. In addition to collecting student record information, we are compiling academic policy information for each partner institution. We have also held workshops at engineering education conferences and the American Sociological Association annual conference to educate the broader research community, expanding the network of researchers capable of conducting this research and the sharing of innovative research methods in addition to the actual data.

This expansion project is designed to recruit a stratified sample of US institutions with engineering programs. Institutions interested in joining MIDFIELD can typically be substituted for those originally targeted for recruitment. MIDFIELD partners have the opportunity to conduct peer comparisons, carry out research to inform local policies and practice, and receive unblinded information about their institution.

Due to the broad nature of the disciplines represented by MIDFIELD, this project has cross-Directorate support from the Directorates of Engineering, Math and Physical Sciences (MPS), and Education and Human Resources (EHR) as well as the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA). Within the MPS Directorate, this work is supported by Astronomy, and Physics; within EHR, this work is supported by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program.

Ohland, M. W., & Lord, S. M., & Orr, M. K., & Layton, R. A., & Long, R. A., & Brawner, C. E., & EbrahimNejad, H., & Al Yagoub, H. A. (2019, June), Board 95: Expanding Access to and Participation in MIDFIELD (Year 3) Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32467

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