Board 90: Expanding Access to and Participation in MIDFIELD (Year 2)
- Conference
- Location
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Salt Lake City, Utah
- Publication Date
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June 23, 2018
- Start Date
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June 23, 2018
- End Date
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July 27, 2018
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topic
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NSF Grantees Poster Session
- Page Count
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9
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--30134
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/30134
- Download Count
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316
Paper Authors
Matthew W. Ohland
Purdue University, West Lafayette (College of Engineering)
orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-1452
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.
Susan M. Lord University of San Diego
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 Electrical Engineering at the University of San Diego. Her teaching and research interests include 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 Best Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Education. In Spring 2012, Dr. Lord spent a sabbatical at Southeast University in Nanjing, China teaching and doing research.
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 recent recipient of the NSF CAREER Award for her research entitled, “Empowering Students to be Adaptive Decision-Makers.”
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 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
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.
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, teacher 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, statewide pre-college math initiatives, teacher and faculty professional development programs, and S-STEM programs.
Nichole Ramirez Purdue University
Nichole Ramirez is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She received her Ph.D. in Engineering Education and M.S. in Aviation and Aerospace Management from Purdue University and her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from The University of Alabama. She is currently the Associate Director of Policy Analysis for the Multi-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD).
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 education and in higher education in general. However, simply 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 would enable study of engineering programs and benchmark metrics consistently. MIDFIELD has already been proven to facilitate data on student matriculation habits disaggregated across various engineering disciplines, ethnicities and genders. However its value as a predictive tool has also been somewhat limited due to the small (eleven) number of institutions who have provided their student data.
This project aims to expand MIDFIELD database from eleven 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 sheer 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 solely engineering.
As of October 4, 2017, we have secured participation agreements from 27 institutions in addition to the original 11, bringing the total number of institutions in MIDFIELD to 38. 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 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.
Whereas the 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 from partner researchers.
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., & Long, R. A., & Layton, R. A., & Brawner, C. E., & Ramirez, N. (2018, June), Board 90: Expanding Access to and Participation in MIDFIELD (Year 2) Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30134
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