Project Details
Project PI: Dr. Grace Panther
Amount and Years: $649,950, 2024 - 2029
Funding: National Science Foundation Award #2339207
Abstract: Many groups have indicated a need to increase participation in the engineering workforce to address the world's grand challenges and for the U.S. to stay globally competitive. One approach to increasing participation in engineering has been focused on providing training to students that lack certain skills with the expectation that this support will help them to remain in engineering. One of the skills that students lack that has been identified in engineering education research is the skill to visualize and understand space. Most research has focused on identifying students who struggle with these skills and providing them with training to improve. Instead, this project will focus on the skills that students come with to engineering to better understand what changes to how engineering is taught can be made to support students with a range of skills to visualize and understand space. This project will build a solid foundation for the PI to be a life-long leader in discipline-based education research and re-envisioning engineering spaces. This project will contribute to the Research in the Formation of Engineers program by working to transform the engineer-formation system.
The aim of this project will be to transform the engineer-formation system by applying an anti-deficit perspective to re-envision engineering pedagogy to support a range of visuo-spatial skills. This project will be the first comprehensive and theory-based study exploring the strategies used by students to navigate visuo-spatial challenges in engineering. The work will challenge the deficit-orientated ideologies broadly adopted within current engineering education by taking an anti-deficit perspective (i.e., asset orientated perspective), to identify and leverage the strategies students use to be successful in undergraduate engineering degree programs. The overarching research question is: In what ways can an engineering program be re-envisioned to facilitate visuo-spatially diverse students? This project will interview students with a range of visuo-spatial skills to identify the strategies they use to navigate visuo-spatial challenges across a four-year engineering curriculum and explore the ways that visuo-spatial language and gestures are embedded in engineering curriculum through ethnographic-inspired course observations. The project will result in methodological contributions to the larger educational research community beyond engineering (e.g., geology, chemistry, biology) in terms of the use of asset-based approaches and qualitative methods to study visuo-spatial skills. The outcomes of the integrated research and education aims will directly have an impact on recruiting and retaining students in engineering who have a range of visuo-spatial skills. Through the unique education aim, a co-development workshop, both students and engineering instructors will be able to take action in enacting change. The integrated research and education plan overcomes several commonly encountered limitations in the adoption of pedagogical activities by integrating the stakeholders' (students and faculty) perspectives and concerns directly into the research and education outcomes. This project is jointly funded by the Engineering Education & Centers Division (EEC), the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Engineering Directorate's office.