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Prior methodological literature on conducting interviews emphasizes the importance of skill development in conducting interviews. However, in contrast to qualitative data analysis, there are few systematic processes in place to guide the interviewer into reflexivity about their role in the interview situation. Here, we present the interview quality reflection tool (IQRT) as a process that we developed from conducting and mentoring semi-structured and unstructured interviews focused on personal lived experiences. The IQRT prompts the interviewer to transcribe each interview question and reflect on how the spoken question served to advance experiential quality in the interview. We illustrate the IQRT itself before demonstrating how we authors used the process to examine experiential quality in three cases conducted in our prior research. Finally, we consider how the IQRT enables researchers to examine the interview situation as a whole, by increasing the self-awareness of the interviewer, and the parts, by commenting on the mechanics of constructing useful questions.

Early in their careers, engineering education researchers, trained in quantitative precision, may suddenly need to capture the nuances of human experience. They must transition to qualitative methodologies to explore the lived experiences of study participants, aiming to uncover the reasons behind their behaviors. This change may be daunting, causing a fear of misrepresenting study participants. But the rewards can be immense. Qualitative interviews unlock insights that can influence and improve educational practices and policies. Honing the craft of interviewing requires practice and patience, as well as a steady commitment to interpreting and transforming raw data into meaningful and coherent social science research. Yet the quality of such studies and the richness of their findings rely heavily on the quality of the interviews themselves. Here, Rivera-Jimenez et al suggest key practices to become proficient in the craft of interviewing.

Academic and non-academic expectations contribute to students’ stress and impact achievement and retention. This qualitative study investigates how expectations are socially constructed in engineering programs and internalized by students. Data was collected in focus groups with 38 participants at two universities. Using constant comparative methods, findings identify sources of expectations and mechanisms by which students internalized these. Sources comprise academics, superiors, peers, extra-curricular, and influences from outside the major. The mechanisms of compounding, conflicting, and triangulating show that the interplay of expectations amplifies their emotional impacts. Implications for educators are to communicate academic standards without inadvertently reinforcing problematic social performance expectations.

Students in global service-learning and similar programs frequently encounter substantial social, cultural, political, and ethical differences when working with project partners in different countries and regions. Neglecting such differences can lead to project failures and/or disempowered communities. In response to these challenges, educational resources have been developed to teach students to think about how the people, social structures, and other contextual factors associated with projects can affect, and be affected by, students’ designs. Yet, there remains a scarcity of valid and reliable instruments to evaluate the effectiveness of such interventions. The purpose of this study is create a theoretically and empirically grounded instrument, the Energy Conversion Playground (ECP) design task, that is able to provide a meaningful and robust assessment of an individual’s ability to identify salient technical and non-technical considerations when approaching an engineering design task situated in a developing country context. We present the scenario and an accompanying rubric that was first developed inductively from student responses to the scenario (specifically 449 discrete items from 93 ECP design tasks submitted by students who attended a Global Engineering Design Symposium). Further development of the rubric involved deductive grounding in relevant literature. To demonstrate the sensitivity of ECP design task to changes in students’ thinking, we also performed comparative analysis of responses from a subset of the students (n=37) who completed the same instrument both before and after participating in the GEDS.

Twenty-first century engineers face incredible challenges and opportunities, many of which are socially complex, transcending the traditional \"technical\" boundaries of engineering. The technology produced by engineers must not only function as predicted by mathematical and theoretical models but must also operate beneficially and seamlessly in complex social contexts. In this sense, engineers must embody an integrated social and technical – or sociotechnical – identity rather than a dualistic social/technical one. A growing body of scholarship has discussed how dominant cultures of engineering shape students' and professionals' understandings of social and technical dimensions of their work. Further, engineering education research has advanced understanding of how engineering identity is formed by external, structural forces. Yet, from a psychological perspective, we know little about how engineering students come to perceive and embody their identities as engineers, especially in relation to social and technical dimensions of these identities. Thus, I organized this study around the following research questions: RQ0: How do students psychologically experience identity trajectories of becoming engineers? RQ1: How do students perceive the social and technical features of engineering identity? RQ2: How do students internally experience their identities as engineers, particularly with regard to social and technical dimensions of these identities? RQ3: How do social and technical perceptions of their engineering identity develop and change in the course of the engineering curriculum or in the transition to the workplace? I investigated these questions using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to generate a robust, nuanced understanding of seven participants' journey from being engineering students to being full-time engineers. The data sources for the investigation were semi-structured interviews. I interviewed participants from electrical, mechanical and civil engineering disciplines one month before they graduated and then a second time after they were approximately 2-3 months into their respective careers. Additionally, I analyzed participants in two separate male and female groups, in order to establish a baseline for comparing the findings with respect to gender. The objectives of this investigation, then, are to: (1) develop a clear understanding of how engineering students develop their social and technical way of being engineers undergraduate education, (2) generate a developmental theory regarding how students relate ways of enacting engineering in the technical and social domains, and (3) identify what experiences, particularly from engineering coursework or in the engineering workplace, shape their social and technical perceptions of being engineers. This particular study is part of a larger investigation that examines how students come to view social and technical perceptions of their engineering identities throughout the entire engineering curriculum and into the workplace. The findings of the investigation highlight the complexity of becoming both male and female engineers, specifically by demonstrating a somewhat contradictory relationship between what participants perceived to be engineering and how they actually embodied an engineering-self. They further demonstrate the manifold ways that participants realized and prioritized identities outside of engineering and how these multiple selves interacted in ways that affected their engineering identities. Additionally, findings for both male and female groups suggest that some psychological patterns might be related to gender. In sum, the findings depict a complex picture of engineering-students-turned-engineers as whole persons. By focusing on how engineering identity development is embodied, the findings generate multiple theoretical insights that bear relevance for engineering education research and provocative implications that bear significance for engineering educators, students, and employers.

Integrating Human Values into a Continuous-Time Signals and Systems CourseA growing body of scholarship suggests that when engineering students engage purely scientificand mathematical ways of knowing, they disengage from human dimensions of engineering.Based on these findings, several have commented that interventions be made within engineeringscience courses to engage students in sociotechnical ways of understanding engineeringconcepts, thereby relating abstract and mathematical concepts to a world of people. Thesecommentators maintain that through the engineering science courses, which dominate a typicalengineering degree plan, students are coming to embody a professional identity. As studentsdevelop these engineering identities, how do we educators guide their conceptual understandingof engineering content in a way that connects with their responsibility to value people in theircareers?As an early-career faculty member in a small electrical engineering program, I set out toincorporate human values and social justice in a continuous-time signals and systems class. Withmy program being within a faith-based, liberal arts university that explicitly aims to integratefaith and learning, I have felt institutionally supported in this endeavor. Moreover, I have beenacademically supported for this integration based on previous work, including strategies onincorporating social justice in a thermodynamics course. Despite such support, I haveencountered multiple obstacles, along with some success, in integrating social justice into thetraditional signals and systems curriculum.In this paper, I authentically and reflectively depict my journey as an engineering educatordelving in the challenge of humanizing a continuous-time signals and systems class. I ground thediscussion of this paper in data from frequent reflections documented by 14 students in thecourse, responses to a design-task scenario taken at the beginning and end of the course, alongwith data from a log that I regularly maintained as an instructor.Specifically, I describe the signals and systems course and how I structured content andassessment plans to create space for human values. Additionally, I critically examine how somebarriers that worked against my efforts. For example, one obstacle was related to my owninternal sense of conflict between two roles that I adopted in teaching the course – that of aninstructor responsible for a conceptually crowded class and that of a mentor guiding students intoa sociotechnical profession. Finally, I share practical strategies and lessons learned forcultivating integrative ways of thinking about engineering science concepts.In sum, the intent of this paper is to provide some practical and informed recommendations forintegrating human values and social justice into an engineering science course. However, I alsowish to make visible those obstacles that hinder instructors from incorporating human values inan engineering science course, even when they feel committed to doing so. By making thesehindrances visible, I hope to foster conversations that support each other in promotingsociotechnical endeavors in the engineering curriculum.Note: this paper is one of four in the session, “Pushing the Boundaries of the Liberal Arts andEngineering: Integrating Social Justice in Engineering Science Courses.”

Shame provides a key mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion in engineering contexts. In order to better understand how engineering students experience shame, we used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to critically examine the individual experience of shame in the case of a high-performing, White woman who was a junior mechanical engineering major at a faith-based university (n=1). In particular, we attended to the complex relationship between personal expectations that formed the context for her shame experiences: achieving excellence in performing tasks while maintaining strong social relationships with others. We discuss the implications of this single case study on broader narratives of inclusion in the context of engineering education.

This research paper presents the findings of an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of a student’s experience of frustration in the context of an introductory programming course. We contend that the embodied experience of frustration is ubiquitous yet underexplored within the context of engineering and science education. After interviewing the participant, we analyzed the interview transcript using IPA, a qualitative research method that provides the researcher with a tool to generate coherent insight on complex psychological experiences. In this paper, we present seven themes that demonstrate how the student’s frustration experience was connected to his identity formation, experience in shame, and maladaptive help-seeking behaviors.

This research paper presents the findings of an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) case study of the experience of shame in a woman engineering student. Our overarching research question that framed this study was: How do woman students with multiple salient identities psychologically experience shame in the context of engineering education? We present findings derived from in-depth analysis of an interview with a single case: A White, female student-athlete who majored in mechanical engineering at a private, liberal arts university (pseudonym: Nicole). We selected Nicole as a case in order to critically examine the tensions experienced among multiple salient identities in women engineering students. The findings demonstrate how the study participant internally negotiated the expectations of others with her own self-concept. That is to say, in reaction to a shame experience, the participant evaluated and often adjusted the value she ascribed to the expectations of others and the ways in which those expectations fit into her core identity. Overall, the findings provide a sensitive description with which connections can be forged between broader discussions of engineering education and how cultural expectations manifest within the lived experience of the individual student.

A critical aspect to engineering in the workplace is the ability to design solutions to ill-structured problems. Prior research has shown that such solutions are highly effective when they are evaluated in relation to multiple design concepts. However, a documented problem among engineering students is that they tend to fixate on their initial design ideas rather than branching out and continuing to develop new concepts. In order to address the issue of fixation, 77 Design Heuristics has been established as a method to cultivate ideation among engineers and engineering students. This method for generating design concepts comes in the form of 77 cards, each with a different cognitive prompt for generating a solution (e.g., reduce material, flatten). Through the use of the 77 cards, engineers and engineering students are able to expand their horizons of possible design ideas and develop many unique concepts. Using a freshman engineering course, we integrated the 77 Design Heuristic cards to document how initial ideas develop into final concepts. We analyzed 12 first-year engineering students that were distributed in three different design teams, in order to better understand how they responded to the use of this instructional tool. Our findings demonstrate key influences that did foster idea fluency (Theme 1: Influence on Design Concepts) but also ways that students attached to certain concepts throughout the design process (Theme 2: Resilient Concepts).