Expanding Access to and Participation in MIDFIELD (Year 5)
- Conference
- Location
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Virtual Conference
- Publication Date
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July 26, 2021
- Start Date
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July 26, 2021
- End Date
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July 19, 2022
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topic
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NSF Grantees Poster Session
- Page Count
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7
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--37127
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/37127
- Download Count
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250
Paper Authors
Susan M. Lord University of San Diego
Susan M. Lord received a B.S. from Cornell University in Materials Science and Electrical Engineering (EE) and the M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University. She is currently Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. Her research focuses on the study and promotion of diversity in engineering including student pathways and inclusive teaching. She is Co-Director of the National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI). Her research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Lord is among the first to study Latinos in engineering and coauthored The Borderlands of Education: Latinas in Engineering. Dr. Lord is a Fellow of the IEEE and ASEE and is active in the engineering education community including serving as General Co-Chair of the Frontiers in Education Conference, President of the IEEE Education Society, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Education (ToE) and the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE). She and her coauthors received the 2011 Wickenden Award for the best paper in JEE and the 2011 and 2015 Best Paper Awards for the IEEE ToE. In Spring 2012, Dr. Lord spent a sabbatical at Southeast University in Nanjing, China teaching and doing research. She is on the USD team implementing “Developing Changemaking Engineers”, an NSF-sponsored Revolutionizing Engineering Education (RED) project. Dr. Lord is the 2018 recipient of the IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Matthew W. Ohland
Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)
orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-1452
Matthew W. Ohland is Associate Head and the Dale and Suzi Gallagher of 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 for the best paper published in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2008, 2011, and 2019 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.
Marisa K. Orr
Clemson University
orcid.org/0000-0001-5944-5846
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.”
Catherine E. Brawner Research Triangle Educational Consultants
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.
Russell Andrew Long
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.
Richard A. Layton Layton Data Display
Richard A. Layton is Professor Emeritus 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. He is a founding developer of the CATME system and a co-author of the Engineering Communication Manual. Now retired from teaching, he devotes his time to data visualization consulting, woodworking, and songwriting.
Hossein EbrahimNejad Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)
Hossein Ebrahiminejad is a Ph.D. candidate 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.
Abstract
This project seeks to expand access to and participation 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. Retention has been the dominant mode of studying student success in higher education. However, studying who matriculates and who graduates does not tell the 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 the study of engineering programs using consistent benchmarks and metrics. MIDFIELD has been used in high impact research on student matriculation patterns disaggregated across various engineering disciplines, races, and genders. However, its value as a predictive tool has been limited due to the small number of institutions included.
We aim to expand MIDFIELD from 11 to about 100 institutions containing over 10 million students. The data will represent over 50% of the USA engineering undergraduate degrees awarded and increase the diversity of institutions in the dataset to include public and private institutions, minority-serving institutions, and institutions from a range of research classifications. The scope of MIDFIELD will enable significant improvements in research capacity to examine student characteristics (e.g. race/ethnicity/sex) and curricular pathways by institution and over time. Because the dataset contains records of all students, researchers can study students across all disciplines, not just engineering.
To complement the student record data, we also document academic policies as represented in university and college of engineering catalogs and websites. Policies documented include: academic progress in engineering, engineering admissions policies for first-year students and transfers, engineering degree progression, engineering matriculation model, financial aid, grading policies, and policies for students with disabilities. For each institution, we provide a policy summary and offer upon request an NVivo file with all of the coded catalogs for researcher analysis.
An important goal of this project is to expand access to MIDFIELD and ensure its sustainability as a research infrastructure. This requires transitioning MIDFIELD to a permanent archive. We are exploring having American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) as an archivist. There is an engineering focus to MIDFIELD, which only recruits institutional partners that have at least one ABET EAC-accredited engineering program, and partnering with ASEE acknowledges that disciplinary focus. Further, ASEE is well known among engineering program administrators, facilitating the recruitment new institutional partners. Finally, incorporating MIDFIELD into ASEE’s data infrastructure will enhance ASEE’s ability to generate reports at a more detailed level. Thus, by archiving MIDFIELD, ASEE will support its mission of informing and improving the engineering education system.
Due to the broad nature of the disciplines in 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.
Lord, S. M., & Ohland, M. W., & Orr, M. K., & Brawner, C. E., & Long, R. A., & Layton, R. A., & EbrahimNejad, H. (2021, July), Expanding Access to and Participation in MIDFIELD (Year 5) Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37127
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