Julie P. Martin

Civil Engineering Faculty Incorporation of Sustainability in Courses and Relation to Sustainability Beliefs

AbstractProfessional practice within civil and environmental engineering demands that practitioners within the field have knowledge of sustainability. Engineering education has attempted to reflect this standard, as noted in statements of expected student outcomes from ABET. Yet, the degree of integration of sustainability in engineering education is varied and inconsistent across and within institutions of higher learning. In order to address this issue, this study investigates one of the potential barriers to integrating sustainability into undergraduate engineering classrooms: educators’ beliefs regarding sustainability. The two-fold relationship between civil engineering faculty beliefs about sustainability and actual practice of integrating and incorporating sustainability within their classrooms is investigated in this study. Using thematic analysis of semistructured interview data; we present three personas that emerged from the data set. These personas represent characteristics shared among partic...

Bridge to Persistence: Interactions With Educators as Social Capital for Latina/o Engineering Majors:

This study employs the notion of bridging social capital to investigate the extent to which different forms and quantity of interactions with educators predict intentions to persist in engineering among a sample of Latina/o engineering majors from five public 4-year institutions in the United States. Different forms of capital were effective for women and men on intentions to persist, and learning orientation emerged as the most important predictor of engineering commitment.

Special session: Introduction to systematic reviews in engineering education research

Systematic reviews are a new, fundamentally different approach to synthesizing engineering education research. The primary goal of the session is to increase the awareness and knowledge of engineering educators about systematic review methods. Systematic review methods, widely used in fields such as medicine, psychology and education, have only recently been applied in engineering education to analyze the state of the art. The paper presents steps to illustrate processes involved in a systematic review, sources of standards for systematic reviews, and strategies for information retrieval.

Factors influencing participants' selection of individual REU sites

This study seeks to elucidate factors influencing undergraduate engineering student intent to participate in research assistantships offered through National Science Foundation (NSF) research experiences for undergraduates (REU) site programs. Understanding participant decision criteria could increase targeting of specific student populations, improve program outcomes, and increase efficiency of site directors. This ongoing study builds off previous work by the NSF [1] on REU programs to answer the following questions: (1) are participant selection criteria uniform for all STEM REU programs or do they vary by program primary discipline, (2) do additional factors not previously considered, such as geography and other offers they receive, significantly impact REU selection, and (3) do factors significantly vary by each successive student cohort. To collect data, a survey was sent to REU participants through nine participating National Science Foundation (NSF) site administrators. Geographic distributions of applications were classified based on distance and spread with respect to hometown and indicated applicant divisions. Initial results showed that twenty five percent of these participants were offered multiple positions and seven percent of respondents declined another offer before accepting their current position.