The archived content below was originally hosted on PBWorks.com.
Welcome to the wiki page for the CAEE APS-SEED workshop session held at PN-ASEE/WCERTE 2008 at the University of Washington in November, 2008. Details about the workshop, the associated engineering education research (APS and SEED studies), and notes from the small-group discussions that took place during the workshop are below. The workshop was titled, "Linking research findings on engineering student learning and engineering teaching: Implications for engineering education". Co-presenters Cindy Atman, Debbie Chachra, and Ken Yasuhara acknowledge the contributions of Sheri Sheppard, Deborah Kilgore, Lorraine Fleming, Ron Miller, Karl Smith, Reed Stevens, Ruth Streveler, and other CAEE team members. For notes from the earlier FIE and POD/NCSPOD versions of this workshop, see this page.
The Academic Pathways Study (APS) is an extensive research study of engineering students conducted by the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). Find out more about CAEE by visiting our web site. In addition, the following overview paper is a good place to start to find out more about APS:
Sheppard, Sheri, Cynthia J. Atman, Reed Stevens, Lorraine Fleming, Ruth Streveler, Robin S. Adams, Theresa Barker. 2004. Studying the Engineering Experience: Design of a Longitudinal Study. In Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 20-23, 2004.
For more about the Studies of Engineering Educator Decisions (SEED) and related studies, see the CAEE web page about the Scholarship on Teaching Engineering element of the center. The "Publications and Resources" page on the CAEE web lists more papers, including some reporting on APS and SEED findings in depth.
Workshop attendees were provided an overview of CAEE and research findings about engineering students (from APS) and educators (from SEED). In small groups, they then selected an APS finding to focus on and discussed its implications on undergraduate engineering education. Attendees selected from the following three findings:
A. Engineering students become increasingly disengaged in both engineering and non-engineering courses over their undergraduate years.
B. Male engineering students have significantly higher self-confidence than female students in math, science, and open-ended problem solving.
C. Among first-year engineering students, females tend to situate engineering design problems in a broader context than males do.
These notes were transcribed directly from the note-taking forms submitted by the discussion groups.