Award Abstract # 2110727
Improving Students? Sociotechnical Literacy in Engineering

NSF Org: DUE
Division Of Undergraduate Education
Recipient: TRUSTEES OF TUFTS COLLEGE
Initial Amendment Date: June 4, 2021
Latest Amendment Date: March 31, 2022
Award Number: 2110727
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Karen Crosby
kcrosby@nsf.gov
 (703)292-2124
DUE
 Division Of Undergraduate Education
EDU
 Directorate for STEM Education
Start Date: June 1, 2021
End Date: May 31, 2025 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $549,912.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $549,912.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2021 = $549,912.00
History of Investigator:
  • Ethan Danahy (Principal Investigator)
    ethan.danahy@tufts.edu
  • Deborah Sunter (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Ellise LaMotte (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Jennifer Cross (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Chelsea Andrews (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Tufts University
80 GEORGE ST
MEDFORD
MA  US  02155-5519
(617)627-3696
Sponsor Congressional District: 05
Primary Place of Performance: Tufts CEEO
200 Boston Ave Suite G810
Medford
MA  US  02155-5808
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
05
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): WL9FLBRVPJJ7
Parent UEI: WL9FLBRVPJJ7
NSF Program(s): IUSE
Primary Program Source: 04002122DB NSF Education & Human Resource
Program Reference Code(s): 8209, 9178
Program Element Code(s): 199800
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.076

ABSTRACT

This project aims to serve the national interest by preparing engineering students to develop, analyze, produce, and assess engineering processes, products, and impacts through a lens of justice and equity. The project team will develop, study, and share a novel approach to integrating social justice topics alongside technical knowledge in a first-year engineering computation course. In undergraduate engineering education, discussions about ethics in engineering practice are typically addressed in stand-alone courses, late in the course progression. This separation leads students to consider the technical and social aspects of engineering as separate and unequal, with technical content usually viewed as more important. To remove this technical-social divide, this project will bring social, economic, and political considerations into a technical first-year course, ?Introduction to Computing in Engineering.? Course instructors, education researchers, and STEM diversity experts will redesign the course and develop new course materials that integrate topics of equity and justice in engineering and data science into readings, discussions, in-class exercises, and homework problems. To assist course instructors in implementing this revised course content, a cohort of upper-level students will be hired and trained via a weekly seminar to facilitate in-class discussions and activities. Using surveys, classroom video recordings, and interviews, the project will study the effectiveness of this approach and iteratively revise the course content and implementation structure over three years. Online resources will be created to distribute project materials to other engineering programs that are interested in adopting this approach.

This project will redesign an existing computing course around justice-based activities, supported by an Equity Learning Assistant (ELA) program that will train upper-level students to facilitate in-class discussions. Through the justice-based activities, students will learn the required computing technical skills by analyzing real, ethically complex data sets and working on personally meaningful equity-focused projects. This approach will provide students with opportunities early in their education to practice integrating social, economic, and political dimensions into their engineering work. Each section of the redesigned course will be supported by two upper-level students who are part of the ELA program. The ELAs will participate in a weekly equity pedagogy seminar to learn about critical data science studies and related pedagogical approaches. The project?s three-year mixed-methods research study will generate and disseminate evidence-based practices to develop undergraduates? sociotechnical literacy and sense of belonging in engineering. In producing new knowledge around these practices, this project will cultivate pedagogical change through a process-oriented approach (ELAs) together with a product-oriented approach (the sociotechnical course redesign). The project has potential benefits at both local and societal levels: the revised course and ELA seminar will directly benefit 600 first-year students and 30 ELAs; the development of the ELA Program will increase the School of Engineering?s capacity to transform engineering courses throughout the school to incorporate justice-based issues; the Tufts STEM Equity Group will provide the institutional infrastructure necessary to incorporate ethics and social justice in departments across Tufts? multiple colleges and programs; and dissemination efforts will enable engineering programs across the U.S. to adopt this approach. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Andrews, Chelsea and Rahman, Fatima "Characterizing student argument justifications in small group sociotechnical discussions" , 2023 https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43187 Citation Details
Meng, Jingshu and Norton, Hannah and Andrews, Chelsea "Board 122: Work in Progress: Identity and Positioning of International Students in Sociotechnical Discussions" , 2023 https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42426 Citation Details
Özkan, D. and Andrews, C. "Perspectives of Seven Minoritized Students in a First-Year Course Redesign toward Sociotechnical Engineering Education" 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , 2022 Citation Details
Ozkan, Desen and Hampton, Cynthia "How Do Students Take up Notions of Environmental Racism in an Engineering Computational Methods Course?" , 2023 https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43362 Citation Details
Pangan, T. J. and Andrews, C. "(Work in Progress) Examining how students critically evaluate racial bias in a medical device in a first-year computing course" 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , 2022 Citation Details

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