Nicole Ralston

The population of first-generation (FGEN) students in higher education is growing rapidly. While prior research often centers on perceived deficits within this group, recent research has begun to shift the narrative by focusing on the unique strengths and diverse experiences these students bring to the academic environment. Transformative leadership, a framework introduced by Carolyn Shields, emphasizes challenging inequitable practices and structures in ways that foster individual or collective transformation. This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study utilizes that framework to explore both the perceptions of and the impact of transformative leadership for FGEN students, particularly in terms of fostering positive relationships, enhancing support networks, increasing persistence, and strengthening their sense of belonging. The findings connect to both institutional and programmatic recommendations as well as explicit pedagogies for faculty and college classrooms. We seek to offer practical recommendations for integrating these strategies both inside and outside the classroom to better support FGEN students’ leadership development.

In recent years, both the number of jobs and the rates of pay for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations has continued to increase, while disproportionalities by gender and race in these areas persist. These disproportionalities can be traced back to opportunity gaps in college. Transforming STEM education in higher education in culturally responsive ways is imperative to increasing representation and opportunities for historically underrepresented students. One way of doing so may be through professional development through book clubs. This study explored the impact of involving engineering faculty members in understanding and applying culturally responsive teaching through participation in self-guided learning activities, discussions, and a book club reading of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, by Zaretta Hammond [Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press]. This study found that participating in these modules and the book study produced statistically significant (p < 0.05) positive gains in culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy for university engineering faculty members. This collaboration across content areas suggests positive teaching and learning impacts in bringing a traditionally K-12 education-oriented text into STEM education at the college level.

The purpose of this research was to develop classroom project modules that supported students in developing an entrepreneurial mindset in the context of software engineering. The modules connect the software development life-cycle from beginning to end including user focused requirements elicitation and evaluating quality attributes. The modules were implemented in a junior level software engineering course, and three modules were surveyed in 2019 as part of a school-wide effort to embed entrepreneurial mindset into engineering curriculum. An IRB approved, student survey was developed and measured student perceptions of learning objectives that tie directly into ABET accreditation outcomes. Students reported they found the activities most helpful for designing, building, and testing real world systems. The development of these modules was a component of increasing the process focus of the software engineering course by implementing a novel version of agile software development with active learning techniques. The practical experiments in this course taught from 2017 through 2021 allow us to report extensions and variants for adapting this design to existing software engineering courses at other universities. Among these variants we propose adopting class-wide teams which is atypical at other universities for junior-level project courses. Qualitatively, we found that the student work completed in these modules to be higher quality than similar work submitted in prior years. Exam scores were improved when measuring students ability to create use cases, especially clarity and completeness. Student performance was greatly improved when writing use cases, especially clarity and completeness which was reflected in improved projects. Quantitatively, the same mindset objectives were assessed in other course modules as part a larger curriculum wide effort in Engineering. The numerical results indicate that the modules in this course outperformed other modules in the curriculum for most of the mindset objectives. Ultimately, the results indicate these types of modules may play an important role in entrepreneurial mindset development for computer science students.

The purpose of this research project was to explore doctoral student learning and development as scholarly practitioners through one innovative method: a course-based self-study. This self-study empowered doctoral candidates in three key forms of data collection: 1) two project-based course assignments; 2) a survey on course-based student learning; and 3) a self-reflection on learning in the self-study. Results indicate positive impacts in addressing real-life problems and in connecting students to cohort members. The application of skills and knowledge in a course-embedded self-study connects to the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) principles of creating scholarly practitioners and also developing activist leaders who build coalitions and focus on researching real life social justice issues. This study can serve as an exemplar for similar EdD programs who are developing scholarly practitioners.

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The purpose of this mixed methods study was to investigate the experiences of practitioner-scholars as they conducted their dissertations amidst the COVID-19 pandemic; the methodology utilized surveys at four time points across a 1-year span. Findings indicated increased impacts as the pandemic progressed, as well as both negative and positive pandemic impacts related to flow, as measured by the Work-Related Flow Inventory (WOLF). These impacts largely depended on the doctoral students’ personal and work life situations, indicating a need for doctoral programs to provide individualized support as students progress through their dissertation journeys, particularly during times of crisis.