The following study was conducted as a qualitative narrative study of four Mexican American secondary engineering teachers, including my own auto-ethnography as a Mexican American engineer and educator, working in school districts populated by primarily Mexican American students. The study stemmed from a general lack of attention in the literature…

There is a considerable lack of women in the engineering disciplines at tertiary level in New Zealand. This is an economic issue because innovation and creativity in engineering are supported by diversity which directly and indirectly supports the New Zealand economy. Improving diversity in engineering will also improve equity. Literature suggests…

Background: Given the disparities in gender representation, efforts are needed to make engineering education more inclusive and attractive to young people. It is important that those entering engineering education are making this decision with sufficient understanding of what it means to be an engineer. This study explored how lower secondary…

Mathematics plays a crucial role in engineering education. Students who are good at math are often advised to consider engineering as a career. In this study, engineers, mathematics teachers, and engineering professors were asked about the type of mathematics representative of engineering, whether the engineering problems created by math…

K-12 science teachers in the United States are encouraged to teach their students engineering. When incorporating engineering into their science curricula, teachers commonly either focus on: (1) engineering and lace science throughout; or (2) science and lace engineering throughout. This study explores middle school students' nature of engineering…

The need for engineers in the workforce continues to grow. Filling this need requires recruiting future engineers to colleges and universities and retaining them through to degree completion. However, this is easier said than done. Universities are tasked with attempting to keep up with the demand for new engineers and companies are searching for…

Demand for engineering-interested and proficient high school graduates continues to grow across the nation. However, there remains a severe gap in college participation and employment in engineering fields for students with learning disabilities (SWLDs). One potential way to encourage SWLDs to consider engineering as a profession and promote the…

Underrepresentation of females in the field of engineering is overwhelming and posing a serious concern to the human race, especially in the developing countries. This has grievous impacts on the socio-economic and environmental growth and development of the nation. The paper seeks to investigate: (i) female students' knowledge of the fields of…

This study aimed to investigate students' perceptions of engineers and how they vary by grade level and gender. This study proposes an approach to understanding the Chinese students' perceptions of engineers and the interest preference of middle school students in the way of graphic analysis and questionnaire. This descriptive study incorporated a…

In this paper, we describe our solution to predict student STEM career choices during the 2017 ASSISTments Datamining Competition. We built a machine learning system that automatically reformats the data set, generates new features and prunes redundant ones, and performs model and feature selection. We designed the system to automatically find a…

The authors of this report aim to understand the health of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and labor market in the Appalachia region -- defined as the intersection of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia -- with a focus on the mining and extraction industry. This report is the third in a three-part series.…

As part of a longitudinal study of the development and implementation of a middle school engineering design curriculum, we have used an occupational values subscale of the Assessing Men and Women in Engineering (AWE) project's Engineering version of the Core Survey for Middle School-Aged Participants to measure student occupational interest in…

The proliferation of information and divergent viewpoints in the 21st century requires an educated citizenry with the ability to critically evaluate information and make informed decisions. To meet this demand, adaptive epistemic understandings and beliefs about the nature of knowledge are needed, such as believing that scientific knowledge is…

Engineers who choose to change careers and become mathematics teachers are a specific group as far as their mathematics learning in the context of engineering and their previous work experience are concerned. Regarding mathematics, they mainly engaged in applied mathematics associated with engineering, which is a highly practical field. This…

This dissertation investigates the intersection of economics of innovation and human capital development to understand how to empower individuals and marginalized communities to be directed to innovation and STEM disciplines. The research focuses on three main chapters: Chapter 1 examines the effectiveness of an education program in teaching and…