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Expanding Access to and Participation in Midfield (Year 4)

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

NSF Grantees: Diversity 3

Tagged Topic

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

8

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34624

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34624

Download Count

296

Paper Authors

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Matthew W. Ohland Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-1452

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Matthew W. Ohland is Associate Head and 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.

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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 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.

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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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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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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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Russell Andrew Long

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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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Hossein EbrahimNejad Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)

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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 at West Lafayette (COE) 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 has been the dominant mode of studying student success in engineering and 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 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, ethnicities, and genders. However, its value as a predictive tool has been limited due to the small number of institutions included.

This project aims to expand MIDFIELD database from 11 to about 100 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 range of research classifications. The scope 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 records of all students matriculating over a period of time, researchers can study students across all disciplines, not just engineering.

As of October 10, 2019, 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 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.

Another important aspect of this project is educating the broader research community, expanding the network of researchers capable of conducting this research, and sharing of innovative research methods in addition to the actual data. Thus, during this last year, we held workshops at engineering education conferences and the inaugural MIDFIELD institute in June 2019. The MIDFIELD Institute brought together about twenty researchers from across the USA to examine effective data displays and gain experience working with midfieldr, an R package designed to facilitate accessing and analyzing MIDFIELD data. For these workshops and the Institute, we have created the midfielddata practice data set—a stratified sample of data from MIDFIELD.

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., & Layton, R. A., & Orr, M. K., & Brawner, C. E., & Long, R. A., & EbrahimNejad, H., & Al Yagoub, H. A. (2020, June), Expanding Access to and Participation in Midfield (Year 4) Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34624

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