Deborah Kilgore

From fragmentation to continuity: engineering students making sense of experience through the development of a professional portfolio

Experience is commonly held to be essential for learning, especially in a professional discipline like engineering. However experiences, if unexamined, are not necessarily educative. This article explores the potential to fully claim prior experience as educative through the development of a professional portfolio. Eleven students developed portfolios and participated in qualitative interviews. The findings revealed that these students added educative value to their prior experiences in this process.

Outside the classroom: Gender differences in extracurricular activities of engineering students

Data from the Academic Pathways Study, a component of the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education, were used to investigate engineering student involvement in extracurricular activities. The study design used a variety of methods: the results presented here are from longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys of engineering students as well as interviews with graduating seniors. Quantitative data from both surveys suggest that women place higher importance on extracurricular activities than their male counterparts, as well as reporting higher participation in both engineering-related and non-engineering-related extracurricular activities. In addition, the importance of non-engineering extracurricular activities and the level of involvement of engineering-related extracurricular activities increases over four years of engineering education for women. For men, an increase with time was only observed for involvement in engineering-related activities. Results from the interviews corroborate the quantitative findings as well as suggesting some intriguing differences between genders: for example, that women may be more likely to take on leadership roles and men more likely to be involved in activities which involve design or ‘handson’ work.

What brings women to the table? Female and male students' perceptions of ways of thinking in engineering study and practice

Women represent only one fifth of engineering bachelors degree recipients in the U.S. This gender gap has stubbornly held for the past several years. Based on survey and interview data, this study examines the experiences and perspectives of 40 first-year women and men intending to study engineering at a public, research extensive university. We found that, regardless of gender, students view math, science, and other technical abilities as foundational in engineering. However, our findings also provide a complex picture of gender differences in the experiences and ways of thinking beginning undergraduates associate with engineering. With a more detailed understanding of what distinguishes women as early successes in the possible engineering pathways, this study provides empirical grounds for portraying engineering more broadly in order to recruit more women

Special session - linking research findings on engineering student learning and engineering teaching: Implications for engineering education

The goal of this special interactive session is to engage attendees in (1) knitting the results of two linked studies (of engineering undergraduates and engineering faculty) into the larger body of engineering education scholarship and (2) developing ways of thinking about these findings that can be used to inform engineering education program planning and classroom practice. The findings are from an extensive set of data collected over multiple years by the Academic Pathways Study (APS) and Studies of Engineering Educator Decisions (SEED), both of which are part of the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). These data sets present a unique opportunity to examine the intersections between research on engineering learning from the student perspective and research on engineering teaching from the faculty perspective.

Special session - academic pathways study: Special interactive session on findings and implications for engineering education and practice

The Academic Pathways Study (APS) is a mixed- methods longitudinal study of engineering students at four institutions. The goals of this special interactive session are to begin the processes of (1) knitting APS knowledge into the larger body of engineering education scholarship, and (2) develop ways of thinking about these findings that inform engineering education program planning and classroom practice.