Holly M. Matusovich

Background: Interdisciplinary graduate education (IGE) operates through an ecosystem of departments, disciplines, expectations, and responsibilities. Within IGE, despite decades of policy initiatives and millions of dollars invested, engineering graduate students continue to struggle with developing and maintaining interdisciplinary identities and motivation. These struggles suggest the need to move beyond isolated programmatic interventions and employ systems‐level approaches to understand IGE. Purpose/Hypothesis(es): This study employs Ecological Systems Theory to examine how salient microsystems interact to shape engineering graduate students' experiences of IGE through proximal (i.e., what students directly encounter within settings) and distal (i.e., influences from settings students did not inhabit) processes. Specifically, we ask how IGE microsystem interactions shape students' identity‐based motivation. Design/Method: This study is the third phase of a longitudinal qualitative case study of a US National Science Foundation‐funded interdisciplinary program. We analyzed interviews with eight engineering graduate students and six program faculty to identify microsystem interactions and characterize their impacts on students' motivation using deductive coding, pattern coding, and visualization techniques. Results: We identified four primary microsystem interaction patterns that involve both proximal and distal processes of development: Supportive Reinforcements, Compounded Barriers, Negotiation‐Intensive Contradictions, and Transformative Tensions. Notably, we found interactions occurred across time, with both past and future microsystems impacting present experiences. Similarly, interactions often had cascading impacts across multiple microsystems. Conclusions: Because of interactions across microsystems, sustainable change in IGE requires coordinated action across multiple stakeholders to strategically align system functions, identify leverage points at generative interactions, and develop networked resilience spanning institutional and external partnerships.

The purpose of this study was to explore sense of belonging and intent to return for students in a STEM internship program. This study was grounded in an ethnographically informed case study of an internship program during the summer of 2021. We framed our analysis using Strayhorn's modified sense of belonging critical socioecological model, with a focus on institutional sense of belonging. The findings demonstrated that sense of belonging varied within the cohort and across the program and broader organization. Sense of belonging in the program was influenced by interactions with other program interns and program design, whereas organizational sense of belonging was influenced by interactions with their mentor and/or team and diversity. Additionally, we found that having a sense of belonging in the organization was a differentiating factor in intent to return. These findings point toward a need to further explore the dynamics of sense of belonging across institutional levels and examine the organizational environments that we are sending students to at the end of internships and experiential learning programs. By examining the nuances of students’ belonging in internships, this study extends higher education frameworks of student success into professional work environments.

Regardless of the quality of national doctoral support initiatives, sustained improvement in doctoral education depends on institutions’ ability to translate these models into contextually appropriate, locally meaningful practices. This study investigates the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI) project and explores how its transfer across five U.S. research institutions catalyzed change within their respective doctoral student support systems on its first implementation cycle. Guided by Kezar’s Change Macro Framework and implementation research, the study analyzed data collected during the transfer process, including pre- and post-implementation focus groups with Collaborating Institutional Leaders (CILs) and a post-training outcome survey measuring CILs preparedness. Findings show that while local RDI implementations preserved the program’s core elements, they adapted timing, structure, and delivery to suit specific institutional conditions. Two implementation models emerged: a concentrated pre-semester workshop and a distributed academic-year series. These initial iterations primarily catalyzed first-order change by creating new support structures for doctoral transition, peer connection, and sensemaking. However, preparedness for deeper cultural change remained limited. These findings suggest that contextual transfer can drive change when implementation strategies prioritize adaptation and local leadership. However, sustained second-order change requires a more deliberate focus on mentoring, advising, and institutional culture.

Doctoral students from underrepresented groups in engineering tend to complete their degrees at lower rates than their White and International peers. Research indicates that early support in doctoral programs, rather than later remedial efforts, can lead to long-term success. To that effect, we designed the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI), an early information intervention for minoritized doctoral students. In this work in progress, we specifically explore how this intervention supports doctoral student agency throughout the first year of the doctoral experience We address the following questions: 1) How can agency be encouraged/promoted among minority students in the first year of the engineering PhD? Employing a longitudinal qualitative design, we conducted monthly interviews with six participants throughout their first year of doctoral study in engineering programs. We ground our work in Klemenčič's Student Agency Model, focused on experiences affecting their persistence, to help uncover different aspects of agency that can manifest throughout this period of time. Preliminary results reveal that students cultivate agency through self-regulation, self-direction, self-determination, and self-efficacy, evident in their planning, motivation, and community engagement. Future work will focus on uncovering the specific mechanisms through which agency is enhanced. By linking positive first-year experiences to agency development, this research can guide interventions and tools for engineering departments to support student persistence.

The purpose of this Work-in-progress, research-to-practice paper is to illustrate the implementation of the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI) at an R1 university in the Northeast of the US. The RDI is a research-based NSF-funded intervention directed at first-year doctoral students in engineering programs that aims to address common student struggles such as doctoral program management, fostering advising relationships, day-to-day management activities, navigating the culture of graduate school, and finding their place in the research community. The RDI curriculum was built leveraging research findings from a large dataset from a different intervention project aimed at later-stage graduate students. Throughout this process, we studied the experiences of roughly 125 underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (URM) doctoral students and identified five themes relating to the common struggles they face throughout their Ph.D. One of the objectives of the RDI project is to disseminate our intervention to approximately 25 institutions. Over the past two years, leaders from institutions that were part of our pilot dissemination were trained in our RDI curriculum and implemented a version of the RDI in their schools. This paper describes the implementation in one of those institutions that built and adapted two different versions of the RDI based on their students' needs and the logistical constraints of their institution. Based on a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with the collaborating institutional leaders (CILs), our study showed three initial findings: 1) Both RDI models allow a supporting community to navigate the challenges in graduate school; 2) The biggest challenge for each local RDI model is logistical; and 3) The support offered to URM graduate students motivates CILs to continue implementing the local RDI.

Background: Tests are commonly and heavily used in fundamental engineering courses (FECs) to assess student learning of concepts. With existing literature presenting mixed benefits and disadvantages of testing to students' motivation to learn and documenting widely alternative assessments, the lack of questioning of heavy and common test usage must be addressed to diversify classroom assessment and promote intentionality in test usage.Purpose/Hypothesis: This study begins to address the lack of questioning by exploring and uncovering test usage beliefs and behaviors of seven FEC instructors from two engineering departments in a land‐grant, public, Research 1 universityDesign/Method: Grounded in the Situated Expectancy–Value Theory (SEVT), we conducted a multicase study. Data include two interviews, course syllabi, and sample tests provided by the participants, and public documents from the institution and departments. We conducted a priori and emergent coding and thematic analysis to identify the beliefs and behaviors before developing individual case summaries for cross‐case analysis to identify groupings.Results: Three test usage groups emerged: enthusiastic, default, and questioning. All test usage groups featured tests heavily in their FECs, resulting in varying alignment between these participants' test usage beliefs and behaviors.Conclusions: Our findings reveal the various factors that can shape FEC instructors' test usage beliefs and behaviors, and the complexity in terms of alignment. This work lays important implications, including laying the foundations for future scholarship on testing in engineering education research and leveraging findings to begin efforts in diversifying assessment approaches and promoting intentional test usage in FECs.

Graduate education in engineering is an extremely challenging, complex entity that is difficult to change. The purpose of this exploratory research paper was to investigate the applicability of the Collective Impact framework, which has been used within community organizing contexts, to organize the change efforts of a center focused on advancing equitable graduate education within engineering. We sought to understand how the conditions of Collective Impact (i.e., common agenda, backbone organization, mutually reinforcing activities, shared measurement system, and continuous communication) could facilitate the organization of equity-focused change efforts across a college of engineering at a single institution. To achieve this, we took an action research approach. We found the Collective Impact framework to be a useful tool for organizing cross-sectional partnerships to facilitate equity-focused change in graduate education; we also found the five conditions of Collective Impact to be applicable to the higher education context, with some intentional considerations and modifications. Through coordinated efforts, the Collective Impact framework can support the goal of reorienting existing decentralized structures, resource flows, and decision processes to foster bottom-up and top-down change processes to advance equitable support for graduate students.

A growing number of academic institutions have invested resources to integrate cyber ranges for applying and developing cybersecurity-related knowledge and skills. Cyber range developers and administrators provided much of what is known about cyber range resources and possible educational applications; however, the educator provides valuable understanding of the cyber range resources they use, how they use them, what they value, and what they do not value. This study provides the cyber range user perspective of cyber ranges in cybersecurity education by describing how K-12 educators are motivated using cyber ranges. Using mixed methods, this study explored educator motivation associated with cyber range usage through the lens of Eccles’ Situated Expectancy Value Theory. This research contributes to understanding how educators are motivated using academic cyber ranges for cybersecurity education. Overall, educators were motivated but professional development and preparation resources that do not assume any prior cybersecurity knowledge would contribute positively to their usage. Cybersecurity education stakeholders should continue to support cyber range integration to strengthen cybersecurity education programs and support educators' ability to become better cybersecurity educators.