SEE is an international, open-access, peer reviewed journal that provides a venue for high-quality research conducted in all settings and contexts relevant to engineering education, with an emphasis on contextually rich reflective discussions of issues and approaches important to engineering education researchers and practitioners.SEE focuses on interpretive research paradigms and invites a wide range of studies that help expand the body of knowledge in engineering education, including ethnographic, anthropological, phenomenological, and other forms of empirical research, as well as literature reviews and theoretical or conceptual articles that seek to frame critical issues in the field. Studies can be conducted in any context relevant to engineering education, including K-12, higher education, classroom settings, and the engineering workplace.To support an intellectually vibrant vision of the field, SEE encourages rich and thorough descriptions of all aspects of research, including theoretical frameworks, epistemological underpinnings, researcher backgrounds and perspectives, impacts of contextual factors in data collection, research quality, and other appropriate aspects.To promote dialogue among scholars, the journal also welcomes respectful and productive commentary & response pieces that engage individual articles and authors in deeper discussions of the implications of the work.

Background: Engineers, educators, and policymakers throughout the United States have been trying to diversify engineering for decades. In response to this shared aspiration, professionals and educators from engineering and other STEM disciplines have constructed Broadening Participation as a phenomenon involving individual and collective efforts in the form of both research and practice.

Background: Social community is a framework for understanding the importance of social interactions within STEM mentoring programs. This study empirically examined the relationships described in the framework to explore how program elements and social support influenced student involvement. Purpose: Specifically, the study described how two engineering scholar programs that serve underrepresented and underserved students facilitated involvement in communities of practice, a proposed outcome of the social community model. Design: A survey (n = 256) was conducted with participants in both scholar programs and compared to responses of non-participants to learn whether the scholar programs led to greater involvement in communities of practice. Furthermore, interviews (n = 16) with scholar program participants were conducted to learn more about how they became involved in communities of practice. Results: We found that program participants were more likely to be involved in the three communities of practice (student diversity organizations, peer leadership roles, and undergraduate research) than demographically similar non-program participants. Furthermore, we found that mentors (peer leaders, program coordinators, and faculty) provided the necessary social support to encourage participants’ involvement. In particular, the essential role of peer leaders initiated community building and inspired subsequent participation in communities of practice. Conclusions: The social community framework for STEM mentoring programs provides a useful guide for understanding mentoring programs and benefits from examination of case studies to expand discussion of the theory and practices that promote student involvement in communities of practice.

Background: Hidden curriculum (HC) refers to the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended assumptions, lessons, values, beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives not openly acknowledged in any given environment. Purpose: The study goal was to identify sources of hidden curriculum within engineering educational structures and uncover how hidden curriculum was communicated to individuals, the interactions that transpired, and what individuals did because of those messages. We also examined how these messages vary by individuals’ intersectional identities. Method: The research team collected data using the UPHEME survey, a previously validated mixed-methods instrument with quantitative and qualitative items. There were 984 responses to the UPHEME survey administration at 58 colleges of engineering across higher education institutions in the US and Puerto Rico. We quantitized the qualitative responses of participants who described hidden curriculum sources, messages, and strategies undertaken. Results: Participants experienced HC messages, mainly that engineering is difficult and inflexible, people are underrepresented or undervalued in engineering and feel (un)supported in engineering. Women and non-binary participants with intersectional, marginalized racial and/or ethnic identities experienced HC institutionally, nonspecifically, and interpersonally. These participants changed their environments, negotiated themselves, and took no or minimal action in response to HC. Conclusions: We described sources of HC messages and how individuals responded to the messages. This characterization has implications for engineering administrators, faculty members, and students to identify and address HC messages. In the future, we plan to analyze other qualitative aspects of the UPHEME survey and address limitations with our approach.

Background: Teamwork is a commonplace component of engineering practice. Engineering educators have been studying ways to make teams more effective and inclusive. However, students’ interpersonal interactions often create exclusionary experiences. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study investigates how the team formation process and what kinds of teaming practices and behaviors promote inclusive team environments. We were sensitized to Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) revised theory of the five stages of teaming along with opportunity structures theory as frameworks to study how particular team interactions did or did not promote the inclusion of its members. Design/Method: This interpretive multi-case study used team observations, classroom artifacts, and student interviews in a first-year engineering course to understand the experiences of three teams. The primary data source, student interviews, were analyzed to understand the individual and collective team experience. These results were triangulated with the other data sources to build three team descriptions and a cross-team comparison. Results: Our findings indicate that the process of storming and norming in teams is an essential point in which social inclusion is built into teaming practices or not. While all teams, regardless of inclusive behaviors, were academically successful, the inclusive norms developed by some teams increased student learning and belonging. Conclusions: The emphasis on teaming in engineering education has often focused on the effectiveness of teams for a final project. However, the process of teaming and how peers shape the engineering environment is just as important for student’s belonging and persistence. The results of this work can provide strategies for supporting students’ teaming processes to develop more inclusive teams.

Engineering judgment is critical to both engineering education and engineering practice, and the ability to practice or participate in engineering judgment is often considered central to the formation of professional engineering identities. In practice, engineers must make difficult judgments that evaluate potentially competing objectives, ambiguity, uncertainty, incomplete information, and evolving technical knowledge. Nonetheless, while engineering judgment is implicit in engineering work and so central to identification with the profession, educators and practitioners have few actionable frameworks to employ when considering how to develop and assess this capacity in students. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework designed to inform both educators and researchers that positions engineering judgment at the intersection of the cognitive dimensions of naturalistic decision-making, and discursive dimensions of identity. Our proposed theory positions engineering judgment not only as an individual capacity practiced by individual engineers alone but also as the capacity to position oneself within the discursive community so as to participate in the construction of engineering judgments among a group of professionals working together. Our theory draws on several strands of existing research to theorize a working framework for engineering judgment that considers the cognitive processes associated with making judgments and the inextricable discursive practices associated with negotiating those judgments in context. In constructing this theory, we seek to provide engineering education practitioners and researchers with a framework that can inform the design of assignments, curricula, or experiences that are intended to foster students’ participation in the development and practice of engineering judgment.

<strong>Background:</strong> Dominant discourse regarding gender in engineering and engineering education relies on simplistic notions of gender as a rigid binary, which obscures the existence of transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people and the gender dynamics they experience. <strong>Purpose:</strong> This paper seeks to address the limits of the dominant gender discourse and research paradigm and propose new paths forward. This article calls researchers to intentionally transform their approach and framing of gender to create gender equity for all. <strong>Scope:</strong> An examination of existing literature in engineering education is put against prevailing theories of gender and human difference from across academia. The overwhelming majority of literature in the field exists within a reductive gender binary. TGNC students and professionals are largely invisible in engineering education research and theory and this exclusion causes harm to individuals as well as our community as a whole. Such exclusion is not limited to engineering contexts but is found to be a central component of systemic TGNC marginalization in higher education and in the United States. <strong>Discussion:</strong> We call for a substantive disciplinary shift towards studying the deep complexity of gender informed by, and accountable to, literature on gender theory, queer studies, and feminist research methodology. We propose interventions for engineering education researchers categorized into three levels: 1) Micro—to recognize gender diversity in engineering education; 2) Meso—to describe and analyze the experiences of TGNC students in research; and 3) Macro—to transform our discipline’s conceptualization and theoretical framing of gender.

<strong>Background:</strong> One of the most popular methods for studying the cognitive processes of design and problem-solving activity is Protocol Analysis (PA). As such, PA has been widely used in engineering design education research. <strong>Purpose:</strong> The aim of this work is to describe how PA has been used in engineering design education contexts, understanding the range of research questions that can be addressed by the method as well as providing some commentary on the strengths, limitations, and future directions of the method. <strong>Scope/Method:</strong> We conduct a systematic review of the literature following the PRISMA method. A search combining key terms – protocol analysis, design, engineering, student – and their variants in the Scopus database resulted in 126 articles, which were further reduced to 45 through two rounds of abstract and full-text screening. The main inclusion criteria was that the work use PA as the method to investigate design activities in an engineering educational setting. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> The use of PA has significantly contributed to understanding the cognition of students engaged in design activities and to improving engineering design education. Technological advances enable new efficiencies in protocol collection and analysis, offering promising new directions in the use of PA in more authentic learning environments.