Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Lily Gossage

143  On Exploring the Connection between Hispanic Engineering Students’ Educational Goals and Communal Obligations: for Project-Based Learning through Community Engagement Lily Gossage, College of Engineering California State University, Long BeachAbstractThe goal of this research was to acquire a deeper understanding of the perceptions held byLatino/Hispanic engineering students, specifically what factors students associate theireducational efforts with and the extent to which their communal goals impact their academicgoals. Blending the concurrent nested and

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Amelito Enriquez; Catherine Lipe; Tom Nguyen

  225 Transferring students are interviewed in depth about how the program has impacted theiracademic and professional development.4. Student Involvement in Program ActivitiesThis section summarizes the results of the implementation the program undertaken during thefirst two years of Cañada College’s NSF S-STEM program. Table 7 summarizes the participationlevel of students in the various program activities designed to keep them engaged. Academicsupport services include the Math Lab, tutoring, MESA study groups and faculty office hours inthe MESA Center. On-campus workshops include resume writing, applying for scholarships,applying for internships, writing personal statements, applying for transfer, financial planning,time management, the

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Angela Beck; Jim Helbling

meeting (i.e., for 5 hours and20 minutes per week). Both team teachers attend all class meetings. Each week's instruction isorganized to include four (4) primary activities, each designed to target some specific aspect ofengineering or communication education. These activities include engineering lectures,communications lectures, team meetings (which include a status report and an informal briefing),and open work sessions.The first activity is an engineering lecture, given by the AE professor the first class meeting ofthe week. This lecture lasts approximately 1 hour and is carefully designed to provide timelyreminders of key concepts, processes, and equations that students are most likely to use in thecoming week. As previously mentioned, one of

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Mohammad N. Amin; Pradip Peter Dey; Bhaskar Raj Sinha; Gordon W. Romney

of a recentlycompleted student Capstone project “Smart Phone Book Search”, ii) analyzes how the studentsmet the program goals and gained practical experience dealing with real life problems, and iii)demonstrates how the project provides a viable solution.In the current busy Internet world, we are all actively engaged in a great variety of differentpursuits and heavily dependent on our mobile phones to maintain immediate contact with family,friends, and colleagues. We often store information in our mobile phones and later randomlyretrieve such information as needed. Contact information stored in our mobile phone is used fora variety of purposes beyond making a phone call, and serves as an important general purposedata source. The “Smart Phone

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

AJ Almaguer

deploy them at local k-12 schools and community partners. It is a student-run organizationand a course offered at UC Berkeley. BEAM has made great efforts to constantly evolve, assess,and redesign itself into a flexible program to achieve our mission: to impact the future ofstudents in our community through hands-on learning. It is our belief that BEAM serves as amodel for effective student-led outreach and education partnerships between universities andtheir surrounding educational institutions. Our ten-week course consists of a day-long mentortraining followed by a guest lecture series, weekly volunteer site visits, and a final project. Thecourse adheres to engineering and education principles including: ABET Criteria, engineeringdesign loop

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Fariborz M. Tehrani

active listening. Thisoptimized student-oriented environment requires adopting different styles based on readiness ofstudents and their current stage of learning. The flexibility in teaching style allows the instructorto apply different techniques to guide and persuade students in early stages of learning, and tokeep them engaged through active participation and communication, while mastering theirknowledge and skills. Further, adopting appropriate style at each stage based on the needs ofeach individual student keeps the communication open between students and the instructor, andmakes the instructor approachable for students.The foregoing guidelines can be adopted in preparation of course materials and evaluationmethods. Whereas, the objective

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bradley A. Hyatt

enjoyed participating in the evaluation of students;  The industry members requested more input on the verbiage used within the rubrics in order to make them more clear;  The use of an iPad to “score” the student presentations saved a great deal of time when evaluating and grading the assignments;  Establishment of the base rubric provided a good format for adapting rubrics for specific course deliverables.RecommendationsFinally, based upon these assessment and the overall efforts during the case study, here are somerecommendations for future implementation:  Engage industry members in the creation of the evaluation criteria. This would improve the rubrics and have the industry member

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Amelito Enriquez

for New College Students: A Summary of Research Findings of the Collaborative Learning Project. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.19. Smith, B., & MacGregor, J. (2009). Learning Communities and the Quest for Quality, Quality Assurance in Education: An International Perspective, v17 n2 p118-139.20. Barnes, R., & Piland, W. (2010). Impact of Learning Communities in Developmental English on Community College Student Retention and Persistence, Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, v12 n1 p7-24.21. Weiss, M., Visher, M., & Wathington, H. (2010). Learning Communities for Students in Developmental

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Stacy Gleixner; Elena Klaw PhD; Patricia Backer

way to get involved while they are students. Theproject fosters an ethic of civic engagement among the engineering students. This engagementwith the community should enhance their engagement with learning and increase their dedicationto engineering.[13] The positive effects of integrating service-learning in the curriculum includeimproved retention and graduation rates particularly among underrepresented groups andwomen, and a stronger civic ethic among students.[14,15,16]Students, particularly women and underrepresented groups, cite the ability to make a differencein society as one of the main reasons they choose careers in science and engineering.[17]However, the impact engineers have on society is more commonly viewed from a

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Shoba Krishnan; Ruth Davis; Marco Bravo; Melissa Gilbert

” and “Civic Engagement,” as well as other more traditional areas.Experiential learning through involvement in community-based projects integrates service withacademic education. Students apply classroom knowledge to community problems, thusenhancing learning while providing needed services to society. Research has shown thatexperiential learning reinforces classroom knowledge and helps in student retention. Our own work reported by Davis1, states that showing the social relevance of engineeringby engaging the students with the community in an effort to define and implement projects thatmeet real needs seemed to have a positive effect on the involvement of women and minoritystudents. Over the course of three years of community-based

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Rafael D. Alvarez; Raga M. Bakhiet; Theresa M. Garcia; Angeline V. Yang

achieving STEMindustry positions or graduate school. The STEM Partnership of San Diego (SPSD) which, as awork in progress in its fourth of five years, is a student success initiative built on best practicesof the Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Achievement (MESA) Program and grant fundsfrom the National Science Foundation (NSF). The SPSD provides essential academic and careerdevelopment services to students majoring in STEM fields. Services include internships and/orundergraduate research experiences for diverse students. More than 600 STEM students areserved annually at the community college and university level. The best practices of MESAfocus on student groups that historically had low levels of attainment; SPSD enhances academicsupport

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

of Situational Leadership in Engineering 114 Classrooms  Jin-Lee Kim, et al., Effectiveness of Using Visualization in Construction Education 125 Concurrent Session Presentations04 00 05 15 PM Experiential Learning  Stacy Gleixner, et al., Service Learning Project in a Multi-Disciplinary Renewable 134 Energy Engineering Course  Lily Gossage, On Exploring the Connection between Hispanic Engineering 143 Students’ Educational Goals and Communal Obligations: For Projects-Based Learning through Community Engagement  Shoba Krishnan, et al., Projects Integrating

Collection

2011 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Collin Heller; Brian P. Self

motivation. To help providemotivation and real-world context in our dynamics course, we have implemented an AccidentReconstruction Model-Eliciting Activity (MEA).MEAs originated in the math education community. They focus on the process of problemsolving and model development, rather than just a final answer. The originators of MEAspropose six primary principles to develop new problems1. These principles support andencourage open-ended problems in a realistic engineering context. By requiring students to applyproblem-solving and modeling skills, MEAs promote long term retention of concepts.The Accident Reconstruction MEA asks student teams to create a new procedure that police inSri Lanka can use when determining if a driver was speeding just prior