In this research paper the pathways of 720 engineering freshman entering a large, southwestern university in Fall 2007 were tracked over their first four semesters along with their academic achievement and demographic information. The same analysis was performed on 1855 engineering freshman entering the same large, southwestern university in Fall 2012. Based on their junior entry status, we characterized student pathways in their first two years in terms of stayers (stayed in engineering), movers (stayed at the university but in a different major), and leavers (left the university). Our efforts address the research question: “What role does student performance, gender, and sense of belonging have in student persistence and destination during the first two years of engineering?” The results of our work indicate that student performance, gender, and sense of belonging all influence education pathway in different ways.
Bethany Smith is currently a master’s student in materials science and engineering at Arizona State University. She has been involved in STEM education research since 2012 under the direction of Professor Stephen Krause. Her research interests in STEM education include faculty development, best classroom practices, and improving undergraduate engineering student retention through understanding what makes students leave engineering. She will be pursuing her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering starting in 2016 at the University of California Berkeley.
Yong Seok Park is an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at California State University Fullerton. He earned his Master’s degree at George Washington University and his Doctorate at the Virginia Tech. Prior to joining California State Fullerton, Dr. Park was a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University. His research interests lie in undergraduate STEM education research and engineering design education.
Dr. Lydia Ross is a clinical assistant professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. She also serves as the executive director of the Association for Education Finance & Policy. She holds a PhD in Educational Policy and Evaluation from Arizona St
Stephen Krause is professor in the Materials Science Program in the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University. He teaches in the areas of introductory materials engineering, polymers and composites, and capstone design. His research interes
Ying-Chih Chen is an assistant professor in the Division of Teacher Preparation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
His research takes two distinct but interrelated paths focused on elementary students’ learning in science and engineering as well as in-service science teachers’ professional development. The first focus involves how language as a learning tool improves students’ conceptual understandings, literacy, and representation competencies in science. His second research focus is on how in-service teachers develop their knowledge for teaching science and engineering in argument-based inquiry classrooms. This research is aimed at developing measures of teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for adopting the argument-based inquiry approach, as well as developing tools to capture the interactive nature of PCK.
James A. Middleton is Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology at Arizona State University. For the last three years he also held the Elmhurst Energy Chair in STEM education at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Previously, Dr. Middleton was Associate Dean for Research in the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University, and Director of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992, where he also served in the National Center for Research on Mathematical Sciences Education as a postdoctoral scholar.
Eugene Judson is an Associate Professor of for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. His past experiences include having been a middle school science teacher, Director of Academic and Instructional Support for the Arizona Department of Education, a research scientist for the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (CRESMET), and an evaluator for several NSF projects. His first research strand concentrates on the relationship between educational policy and STEM education. His second research strand focuses on studying STEM classroom interactions and subsequent effects on student understanding. He is a co-developer of the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) and his work has been cited more than 1500 times and his publications have been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals such as Science Education and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.
Robert J. Culbertson is an Associate Professor of Physics. Currently, he teaches introductory mechanics and electrodynamics for physics majors and a course in musical acoustics, which was specifically designed for elementary education majors. He is director of the ASU Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) Project, which strives to produce more and better high school physics teachers. He is also director of Master of Natural Science degree program, a graduate program designed for in-service science teachers. He works on improving persistence of students in STEM majors, especially under-prepared students and students from under-represented groups.
Casey J. Ankeny, PhD is an Associate Professor of Instruction and Director of MS Program at Northwestern University.
Keith D. Hjelmstad is President's Professor of Civil Engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.
Dr. Claire Y. Yan is a senior instructor in the School of Engineering, University of British Columbia, Okanaga. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China and Ph.D. degree from University of Strathclyde, UK. Prior to joining UBC in 2008, she worked as a research scientist at Ryerson University on various projects in the area of CFD and heat and mass transfer. Dr. Yan has taught a variety of courses including fluid mechanics, fluid machines, mechanics of materials, calculus, and kinematics and dynamic. She has also developed undergraduate fluids laboratories and supervised many capstone projects. Her interest in SoTL is evidence-based teaching strategies, student engagement, faculty development, and teaching and learning communities. Dr. Yan is a registered P.Eng. with APEGBC and has served as reviewer for various international journals.
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