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Facilitating Engineering Faculty Success: Faculty Development of Graduate Mentoring Practices

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Graduate Studies Division (GSD) Technical Session 3: Mentorship and Communication in Engineering Graduate Programs

Tagged Division

Graduate Studies Division (GSD)

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43679

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43679

Download Count

128

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Paper Authors

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Himani Sharma Arizona State University

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Amanda Marie Singer The Ohio State University

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Amanda Singer is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She graduated in 2021 from Michigan Tech with a Bachelor's and Master's of Science in Environmental Engineering. Her current research interests include engineering identity formation, community college engineering education, and mixed methods research.

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Mayra S. Artiles Arizona State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-7604-0410

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Mayra S. Artiles is an assistant professor in engineering at the Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research expertise includes engineering doctoral education structure, experiences of underrepresented students in doctoral engineering programs.

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Rachel Louis Kajfez The Ohio State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9745-1921

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Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Ohio State and earned her Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on the intersection between motivation and identity, first-year engineering programs, mixed methods research, and innovative approaches to teaching. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Identity and Motivation in Engineering (RIME) Collaborative.

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Holly M. Matusovich Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Dr. Holly Matusovich is the Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Studies in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and a Professor in the Department of Engineering Education where she has also served in key leadership positions. Dr. Matusovich is recognized for her research and leadership related to graduate student mentoring and faculty development. She won the Hokie Supervisor Spotlight Award in 2014, received the College of Engineering Graduate Student Mentor Award in 2018, and was inducted into the Virginia Tech Academy of Faculty Leadership in 2020. Dr. Matusovich has been a PI/Co-PI on 19 funded research projects including the NSF CAREER Award, with her share of funding being nearly $3 million. She has co-authored 2 book chapters, 34 journal publications, and more than 80 conference papers. She is recognized for her research and teaching, including Dean’s Awards for Outstanding New Faculty, Outstanding Teacher Award, and a Faculty Fellow. Dr. Matusovich has served the Educational Research and Methods (ERM) division of ASEE in many capacities over the past 10+ years including serving as Chair from 2017-2019. Dr. Matusovich is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Advances in Engineering Education and she serves on the ASEE committee for Scholarly Publications.

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Abstract

Establishing a positive, fruitful, and mutually beneficial advising relationship is a time-consuming endeavor, one that generally goes unrewarded during traditional faculty evaluations. Although previous research on doctoral advising has described the experiences of students and faculty, work to improve how faculty advise doctoral students has primarily taken a unilateral approach, either focusing on positive practices for facilitating student success or strategies for enhancing faculty productivity. Little research discusses the supports that promote or the barriers that prevent faculty from developing and adopting student-centered advising practices while meeting faculty members' personal satisfaction and productivity needs. Thus, this study explores research on faculty motivation and identity regarding developing successful advising practices which create value for both faculty and students. The study seeks to address the following research questions: What advising practices do faculty members in Chemical Engineering believe are most effective when advising doctoral students? How do faculty assess the effectiveness of doctoral advising practices? The team will address these research questions by using the three C’s (make connections, create value, and curiosity) of KEEN’s Entrepreneurial Mindset, which will allow a new approach to the faculty/student mentorship experience and contribute to the other aspects of KEEN. To identify effective doctoral advising practices and provide practical guidance and support for faculty advisors, we developed a four-part workshop series: Facilitating Engineering Faculty Success for the Chemical Engineering faculty. We focus on advising in the discipline of chemical engineering as prior work has shown that faculty advising as a practice is learned through socialization into a department and discipline. Additionally, one of the members of the research team has conducted extensive work studying chemical engineering advising from student and faculty perspectives, providing a research-based starting point. The workshop series, which includes topics and strategies pertaining to effectively identifying, onboarding, and mentoring students as well as setting graduate students up for success, was developed to coincide with a traditional advising cycle. This paper aims to discuss the process of developing the workshop series and will present initial findings from the first workshop. The first workshop, “Facilitating Engineering Faculty Success: Effective Strategies for Mentoring Graduate Students,” was designed and executed during the Fall 2022 semester and sought to identify how faculty believe they mentor students, how faculty align their mentoring priorities with their research agenda, and to better understand how faculty define success for their students. This paper examines the discussion contributions of seven faculty participants. Emergent themes from participant conversations included: navigating and setting appropriate expectation levels for graduate students with regard to research tasks, how to address differences in perspective and goals, and how to navigate self-doubt and problems outside the traditional roles of an advisor. Faculty discussions highlighted a variety of viewpoints and levels of experience as an advisor to doctoral students. They also underline effective strategies followed during challenging stages of their mentoring.

Sharma, H., & Singer, A. M., & Artiles, M. S., & Kajfez, R. L., & Matusovich, H. M. (2023, June), Facilitating Engineering Faculty Success: Faculty Development of Graduate Mentoring Practices Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43679

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