Her research interests include science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; supporting diversity in STEM fields with an emphasis on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students; and using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to improve students' communication skills during group work.

This dissertation presents four studies on the mathematical education of engineering students. The first study is a qualitative analysis of the beliefs of engineering faculty at a single institution regarding what constitutes "mathematical maturity" for engineering students. Faculty emphasized the need for mathematical modeling skills, fluent symbolic representation skills, and a combination of effortless algebraic fluency and ability to use computational tools. The second study is an analysis of the beliefs of engineering faculty at a variety of institutions. These faculty also emphasized modeling, representation, and computation, corroborating the results of the first study. The third study is an analysis of the mathematical content of engineering circuits and statics homework problems. Just 8% of statics problems and 20% of circuits problems use calculus, and in a much more limited way than what is taught in calculus. The fourth study presents a quantitative survey of engineering sophomores' perceptions of the relevance of mathematics to their engineering studies. The students have somewhat favorable views of the relevance of mathematics, but some high-performing students view mathematics as irrelevant.ii To David Pierce, for starting me on the path to becoming an educator.And to Caitlin McGuire, for helping me complete that journey.iii

He also has a courtesy appointment as a research assistant professor with the Department of Curriculum & Instruction. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Mavis Future Faculty Fellow and conducted postdoctoral research with Ruth Streveler in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. His research interests include creating systems for sustainable improvement in engineering education, conceptual change and development in engineering students, and change in faculty beliefs about teaching and learning. He serves as the Publications Chair for the ASEE Educational Research and Methods Division.

The low-cost intrinsic motivation (IM) course conversion project aims to promote the adoption of education innovations, lowering the costs of these innovations by promoting students' intrinsic motivation to learn and to invest in their own education. We have piloted and scaled the IM course conversion of a large enrollment, sophomore-level engineering course. As part of a broader evaluation, we interviewed 31 students to better understand how the IM course conversion affected students' motivations to learn. During these interviews, students described their experiences in the course as a story from the beginning to the end of the semester. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed with an open coding scheme focused on motivational and affective statements. Preliminary analysis indicates that strategic choices, positive team dynamics, and productive failures in the learning process all contribute to promoting students' intrinsic motivation to learn in both pilot and full scale IM course conversions.

The low-cost intrinsic motivation (IM) course conversion project is an effort to improve the quality of undergraduate engineering education by creating course designs that promote students' intrinsic motivation to learn while keeping the time and financial investments for those course designs low. Because of the project's explicit goal of creating a course design method that facilitates translation of practices across instructors and courses, a critical test of the method is the fidelity of implementation and outcomes across instructors. In prior papers, we have presented how the first IM-converted course promoted students' intrinsic motivation to learn and improved their conceptual understanding of the course content. In this paper, we present a replication study that explores and contrasts the implementation and outcomes of the second offering of the IM-converted course when it was taught by different instructors. We use a mixedmethods comparative case study to describe and contrast the two offerings of the course. We present a portion of these case study analyses, contrasting the data and results from course syllabi, student interviews, and course climate surveys.