2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 90: Expanding Access to and Participation in MIDFIELD (Year 2)

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

This project seeks to expand the number of institutions participating in The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD is a resource enabling the study of students that includes longitudinal, whole population data for multiple institutions. Retention, measured in various ways, has been the dominant mode of studying student success in engineering education and in higher education in general. However, simply studying who matriculates and who graduates does not tell the complete story of a student's path through the engineering curriculum nor should it be used as a measure of an institution. A national, longitudinal student unit-record database would enable study of engineering programs and benchmark metrics consistently. MIDFIELD has already been proven to facilitate data on student matriculation habits disaggregated across various engineering disciplines, ethnicities and genders. However its value as a predictive tool has also been somewhat limited due to the small (eleven) number of institutions who have provided their student data.

This project aims to expand MIDFIELD database from eleven to 103 institutions containing over 10 million students. More specifically the data will represent over 50% of the U.S. engineering undergraduate degrees awarded and increase the diversity of institutions in the dataset. MIDFIELD will include public and private institutions, minority serving institutions, and institutions from a broad range of research classifications. The sheer scope and longitude of MIDFIELD will enable significant improvements in research in higher education. It will enable the development of research capacity to examine student characteristics (race/ethnicity/gender/social class) and curricular pathways (including coursework) by institution and over time. Because the dataset contains students records of all students matriculating over a period of time, researchers can study students across all disciplines, not solely engineering.

As of October 4, 2017, we have secured participation agreements from 27 institutions in addition to the original 11, bringing the total number of institutions in MIDFIELD to 38. In addition to collecting student record information, we are compiling academic policy information for each partner institution. We have also held workshops at engineering education conferences to educate the broader research community, expanding the network of researchers capable of conducting this research and the sharing of innovative research methods in addition to the actual data.

Whereas the project is designed to recruit a stratified sample of US institutions with engineering programs, institutions interested in joining MIDFIELD can typically be substituted for those originally targeted for recruitment. MIDFIELD partners have the opportunity to conduct peer comparisons, carry out research to inform local policies and practice, and receive unblinded information about their institution from partner researchers.

Due to the broad nature of the disciplines represented by MIDFIELD, this project has cross-Directorate support from the Directorates of Engineering, Math and Physical Sciences (MPS), and Education and Human Resources (EHR) as well as the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA). Within the MPS Directorate, this work is supported by Astronomy, and Physics; within EHR, this work is supported by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program.

Authors

Dr. Matthew W. Ohland http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-1452 Purdue University, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) [biography]

Matthew W. Ohland is Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He has degrees from Swarthmore College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Florida. His research on the longitudinal study of engineering students, team assignment, peer evaluation, and active and collaborative teaching methods has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation and his team received Best Paper awards from the Journal of Engineering Education in 2008 and 2011 and from the IEEE Transactions on Education in 2011 and 2015. Dr. Ohland is an ABET Program Evaluator for ASEE. He was the 2002–2006 President of Tau Beta Pi and is a Fellow of the ASEE, IEEE, and AAAS.
Dr. Susan M. Lord http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2675-5626 University of San Diego [biography]

Susan Lord is Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. She received a BS from Cornell University in Materials Science and Electrical Engineering (EE) and MS and PhD in EE from Stanford University. Her research focuses on the study and promotion of equity in engineering including student pathways and inclusive teaching. She has won best paper awards from the Journal of Engineering Education, IEEE Transactions on Education, and Education Sciences. Dr. Lord is a Fellow of the IEEE and ASEE and received the 2018 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award. She is a coauthor of The Borderlands of Education: Latinas in Engineering. She is a co-Director of the National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI).
Dr. Marisa K. Orr http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5944-5846 Clemson University [biography]

Marisa K. Orr is an Assistant Professor in Engineering and Science Education with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University. Her research interests include student persistence and pathways in engineering, gender equity, diversity, and academic policy. Dr. Orr is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER Award for her research entitled, “Empowering Students to be Adaptive Decision-Makers.”
Mr. Russell Andrew Long Purdue Engineering Education [biography]

Russell Long, M.Ed. was the Director of Project Assessment at the Purdue University School of Engineering Education (retired) and is Managing Director of The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD).
Dr. Richard A. Layton [biography]

Richard A. Layton is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. With Matthew Ohland, Layton is a co-founding developer of the CATME Smarter Teamwork system and the midfieldr R package for working with student unit records. He is a co-author of the Engineering Communications Manual, Oxford Univ. Press, 2017. He currently consults as a data visualization specialist using R.
Dr. Catherine E. Brawner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8172-7599 Research Triangle Educational Consultants [biography]

Catherine E. Brawner is President of Research Triangle Educational Consultants. She received her Ph.D.in Educational Research and Policy Analysis from NC State University in 1996. She also has an MBA from Indiana University (Bloomington) and a bachelor’s degree from Duke University. She specializes in evaluation and research in engineering education, computer science education, teacher education, and technology education. Dr. Brawner is a founding member and former treasurer of Research Triangle Park Evaluators, an American Evaluation Association affiliate organization and is a member of the American Educational Research Association and American Evaluation Association, in addition to ASEE. Dr. Brawner is also an Extension Services Consultant for the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) and, in that role, advises computer science and engineering departments on diversifying their undergraduate student population. She remains an active researcher, including studying academic policies, gender and ethnicity issues, transfers, and matriculation models with MIDFIELD as well as student veterans in engineering. Her evaluation work includes evaluating teamwork models, statewide pre-college math initiatives, teacher and faculty professional development programs, and S-STEM programs.
Nichole Ramirez Purdue University [biography]

Nichole Ramirez is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She received her Ph.D. in Engineering Education and M.S. in Aviation and Aerospace Management from Purdue University and her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from The University of Alabama. She is currently the Associate Director of Policy Analysis for the Multi-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD).

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