ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY DEGREES INCREASE; GENDER GAP NARROWER AT MASTER’S LEVEL

By Daodao Wang

Engineering Technology programs awarded more bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2017 than in the previous year, when bachelor’s degrees totaled 6,981 and master’s degrees 723. As the accompanying graphic shows, the gender gap is narrower at the master’s level than at the bachelor’s (6.31:1 for bachelor’s, 2.75:1 for master’s). Racial and ethnic breakdowns show a slightly higher proportion of African Americans and a lower proportion of Hispanics among master’s degree recipients.

Figure 1. Engineering Technology Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees by Gender, 2017

Figure 2. Engineering Technology Bachelor’s Degrees by Race & Ethnicity, 2017¹

¹ “Foreign” group is removed from this race and ethnicity statistics so only citizens are kept.

Figure 3. Engineering Technology Master’s Degrees by Race & Ethnicity, 2017

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IV. POLITICAL HOTLINE

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READING AND THINKING

Well-educated graduates don’t need to be told what magazine to buy.

By Henry Petroski

A former provost of my university was fond of describing the ideal graduate of our college of arts and sciences as one who regularly read the American Scholar, Scientific American, and the Economist. It was not a final assignment for seniors to subscribe to these publications but a way of saying that an education did not end with a diploma.

I was reminded of this recently when I received an invitation to subscribe to the Economist. As has become common with such solicitations, the package included a brochure touting the features of the magazine and included endorsements from thought leaders. The one that caught my eye was from Larry Ellison, cofounder and chief technology officer of Oracle, the multinational computer technology corporation. His blurb reads in full, “I used to think. Now I just read the Economist.”

I doubt this is what my provost had in mind. Reading any current publication should not be a substitute for thinking. Rather, it should be a supplement to what we learned in school, a source of updating information and opinion, a stimulant to thinking.

My provost’s list of magazines was surely meant to be not prescriptive or exclusive but representative of how our alums could keep up with intellectual developments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. For example, his list might just as easily have included American Scientist, published by Sigma Xi, the scientific and engineering honor society, which was founded as the scientific counterpart of Phi Beta Kappa, publisher of the American Scholar. (In the interests of full disclosure, I write the Engineering column in American Scientist.)

The “science slot” might also have been filled by M.I.T.’s Technology Review, which would have at least implicitly recognized engineering as something the educated person today should consider on a par with the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Indeed, that is exactly what the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation had promoted with its New Liberal Arts Program.

But, as engineering educators know all too well, after about a half century of effort, engineering has not yet been fully integrated into college curricula. And this is in spite of the fact that engineering and its principal fruit, technology, are what drive and characterize our high-tech age. But we also know that when it comes to the big picture, academic change can move very slowly indeed.

Fortunately, there are publications of the kind, if not the exact ones that my provost advocated, that do enable college graduates—liberal arts majors, social scientists, biological and physical scientists, and of course engineers—to keep up with developments in their field and put them in the context of developments in the world. It is no longer—if it ever has been—sufficient to end an education after four years. A person who did so would be at risk of soon becoming obsolete or redundant in the workplace and woefully uninformed as a citizen.

While I do believe my provost had the correct idea, there should be no need to make explicit lists of magazines for post-graduate reading. If we instill in our students an appreciation for learning and reading not as a substitute but as a stimulant for thinking, they should naturally come to subscribing to and reading publications that best enable them to carry on almost painlessly their own form of lifelong learning.

Of course, today the concept of publication has taken on broader meanings than traditional magazines and newspapers, and we must also allow that a list of websites, blogs, and other digital forms of information may serve the same purpose. But regardless of what form the sources of their information may take, we should never want to see those we claim to have educated use reading as a substitute for thinking.

Henry Petroski is A.?S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and professor of history at Duke. His latest book is The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure.

HEARTS AND MINDS

Interdisciplinary approaches and biosensors can help measure student engagement.

By Idalis Villanueva, Brett Campbell, Adam Raikes, Suzanne Jones and LeAnn Putney

As engineering educators, we recognize the importance of—and need for—incorporating theories into instructional practice. But how do we measure what is occurring in the classroom in a way that can inform near-term adjustments?

Traditionally, metrics based on survey, performance, and observation data are used to understand students’ experiences in the classroom. While valuable, these data sources must be collected over long periods, during which more contextual information on the “how” and “now” are lost. Without a more holistic understanding of classroom experiences as engineering students take part in them, we risk losing valuable information that can shape future pedagogical and motivational approaches for engineering education.

Our study sought to explore how multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches might provide such real-time insights by examining an engineering design classroom across a semester. We used a combination of online surveys on emotions and electrodermal activity (EDA) wrist sensors across five engineering design workshops. Eighteen students out of a participant pool of 58 students in an engineering course agreed to wear a noninvasive EDA sensor that recorded their biometric skin conductance during class. The EDA data were sampled at 4Hz (taken every quarter second), providing a deeper look into student engagement in the classroom. When paired with a topic emotions survey, these biometric data were used to identify potential correlations between reported and physical responses—akin to a lie detector for engagement.

Findings from the semester’s first challenge suggest that in introducing design topics, for example around generating ideas to solve an engineering problem, negative emotions such as anger had a significant inverse correlation to EDA. The effect was minimized as students progressed through each class and across the semester.

This points to the importance of considering classroom strategies that will help students manage any negative emotions they may experience when facing a new class or topic. Furthermore, our data indicate that student-led activities generate higher engagement than those led by the instructor. Together, these findings point to the need to understand the real-time effects of teaching pedagogies and strategies in helping students emotionally and mentally cope with complex topics such as those found in engineering.

We recommend that engineering educators begin to think of ways to facilitate more real-time engagement in their classrooms with purposeful motivational outcomes. Based on our work, reducing the role of anticipatory responses due to other factors (e.g., uncertainty, newness to a topic) can help students engage more with the course topics. Specifically, educators can do more to explain the rationale behind design topics, explicitly state the motivation for course topics, and clarify any expectations for engaging in student-led individual and collective activities.

Moreover, it will be important for engineering educators to understand the effectiveness of their preferred choice of instruction (e.g., lecture, active learning) for engaging students in a course topic. For this, educators can pre-assess students’ preferred activity types early and throughout the semester to inform classroom strategies to achieve intended learning outcomes. Further research may demonstrate how different educational contexts and course topics in engineering can influence students’ engagement.

Idalis Villanueva is an assistant professor of engineering education and adjunct professor of biological engineering at Utah State University. Brett Campbell is an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. Adam Raikes is a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University’s College of Medicine. Suzanne Jones is an associate professor in the department of teacher education and leadership at Utah State University. LeAnn Putney is professor and chair of the department of educational psychology and higher education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This article is excerpted from “A Multi-Modal Exploration of Engineering Students’ Emotions and Electrodermal Activity in Design Activities” in the July 2018 Journal of Engineering Education.

VII. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS

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X. SOUND OFF