While many institutions express interest in integrating sustainability into their civil engineering curriculum, the engineering community lacks consensus on established methods for infusing sustainability into curriculum and verified approaches to assess engineers' sustainability knowledge. This paper presents the development of a sustainability rubric and application of the rubric to civil engineering senior design capstone projects to evaluate students' sustainability knowledge at two institutions. The rubric built upon previous assessment approaches to 2 FALL 2017 ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATIONUtilizing Civil Engineering Senior Design Capstone Projects to Evaluate Students' Sustainability Education across Engineering Curriculum evaluate student reports for nine different factors including dimensions of sustainability, Bloom's taxonomy, sustainability links, drivers for including sustainability, location of sustainability within report, qualitative/quantitative incorporation, sustainability source/reference, and sustainability topics. The sustainability content within Spring 2014, Fall 2014, and Spring 2015 senior design capstone projects from university A (UA, n = 181 students, n p = 28 projects) and university B (UB, n = 106 students, n p = 15 projects) was evaluated using a mixed-methods approach. The mixed-methods assessment included observation of student project presentations and evaluation of student reports via rubric. Rubric evaluation of student reports revealed that students' performance in senior design projects is primarily driven by their instructor's expectations; if sustainability is not a major deliverable, then students are less likely to integrate sustainability concepts that they learned from prior classes in their reports. To make sustainability a priority, senior design project requirements should be updated to explicitly require holistic sustainability applications. Instructors could approach raising sustainability expectations by engaging a sustainability expert as an advisor to the senior design course and/or utilizing a sustainability expert as project mentor, as demonstrated in the success of one senior design project at each institution during this study.
areas of research include modular, course, and blended models for integrating sustainability into civil engineering programs, entrepreneurship for engineering grand challenges and service-learning, and assessment in engineering education. Dr. Dancz has developed and evaluated open-access online active and experiential learning activities that immerse engineering students in sustainability and enable students to exercise their voice in solving grand challenges. As a Kolbe R certified consultant, Dr. Dancz utilizes conation and team science to recruit and retain students with diverse problem-solving instincts to improve communication, leadership, and impact the diversity of engineers as global change-makers. Dr. Jeffery M Plumblee II, Clemson UniversityJeff Plumblee, PhD, MBA is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in online service-learning at Clemson University. Plumblee founded the award winning Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries (CEDC) in 2009 while pursuing a doctorate in civil engineering. He has helped to grow the organization to 100+ students per semester, including 2-5 interns living in Haiti year-round. The program has overseen in excess of $2 million in sustainable infrastructure and economic development projects in Haiti. He is currently exploring ways to offer similar opportunities to a wider audience, including bringing the CEDC model into a domestic context, leveraging technology to virtually link students with service-learning opportunities and resources throughout the world, and starting a design challenge for high school students to address the needs of the less fortunate. Her research ranges from design of systems based on industrial ecology and byproduct synergies, life cycle and sustainability assessments of biopolymers and biofuels, and design and analysis of sustainable solutions for healthcare. Since 2007, she has lead seven federal research projects and collaborated on many more, totaling over $7M in research, with over $12M in collaborative research. At ASU, Dr. Landis continues to grow her research activities and collaborations to include multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable systems with over 60 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Landis is dedicated to sustainability engineering education and outreach; she works with local high schools, after school programs, local nonprofit organizations, and museums to integrate sustainability and engineering into K-12 and undergraduate curricula.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 A Piloted Rubric to Assess Civil Engineering Students' Grand Challenge Sustainable Entrepreneurship Projects AbstractTo prepare the next generation of civil engineers to tackle 21st century challenges, engineering education must commit to deepening engineer's social consciousness through exposure to societal problems in addition to teaching technical competencies. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges for Engineering offers a framework for exposing students to the role of a modern engineer and the complex global challenges that requi...
She has developed a research program in sustainable engineering of bioproducts. Her research ranges from design of systems based on industrial ecology and byproduct synergies, life cycle and sustainability assessments of biopolymers and biofuels, and design and analysis of sustainable solutions for healthcare. Since 2007, she has lead seven federal research projects and collaborated on many more, totaling over $7M in research, with over $12M in collaborative research. At ASU, Dr. Landis continues to grow her research activities and collaborations to include multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable systems with over 60 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Landis is dedicated to sustainability engineering education and outreach; she works with local high schools, after school programs, local nonprofit organizations, and museums to integrate sustainability and engineering into K-12 and undergraduate curricula.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015 Page 26.915.1 Improving engineering student persistence and diversity through conative understanding AbstractEngineering teaching strategies that engage students are desperately needed to recruit, retain, and prepare students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields to address challenges facing the 21 st Century. This paper describes a method for integrating behavioral instinct learning modules into freshman engineering classes. The method includes an online instinct assessment, in-class activities created to illustrate instinctive behavior related to engineering tasks, practicing awareness through class projects, and reflective writing to encourage students to critically think about this awareness for future classes, activities, and careers. The effectiveness of the methods described herein will be evaluated through the use of surveys, reflective essays, and interviews with faculty and students. The assessments have not yet been completed; we are in the midst of collecting data for the semester. Our initial results show that conative understanding increases satisfaction and confidence, which we hypothesize will lead to improved retention. This paper summarizes the conative interventions in engineering, the research methods, and preliminary results.
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