Collaborative Research: Sustaining and Scaling the impact of the MIDFIELD project at the American Society for Engineering Education

A substantial investment by the National Science Foundation, including awards from Engineering Education and Centers in the Engineering Directorate and the Division of Undergraduate Education in the Education and Human Resources Directorate, has led to the creation of a large database of student records from multiple institutions that has yielded groundbreaking research on student pathways by a small interdisciplinary team of researchers, all while protecting student identity. Using this database, the team has shown that while individual engineering programs may have poor graduation rates, that a multi-institutional view reveals that engineering programs as a whole graduate a larger fraction of students than other groups of disciplines.

The team has also shown that women and men have similar graduation rates in engineering, likely a result of efforts to make engineering education a welcoming environment for women and the high academic credentials of the women who do study engineering. As with the overall graduation rate, individual institutions and programs can and do have worse outcomes.

A comprehensive study of student pathways in various engineering disciplines provided practitioners with rich information specific to their disciplinary context. The team has also designed a variety of metrics that have provided researchers and practitioners with an improved understanding of student pathways. The quality of the data source and the research team is attested by these substantial findings, multiple best paper awards, and other recognitions.

Following efforts to solicit data from additional institutions and create opportunities for other researchers to use the database, this project will make the data more accessible to a wider range of researchers while making it easier to recruit new institutional partners. Making the data available to a wider range of researchers in different disciplines will use result in a larger range of research results more quickly using different approaches.

This project will transition this useful dataset to ASEE, the American Society for Engineering Education, and allow ASEE to build the technical infrastructure to maintain the data collection after the transition. ASEE has a mechanism for collecting institutional data (though with less detail) and a mechanism for charging for access to the data they collect.

ASEE does not compete with alternative data providers because ASEE is not an academic institution, which will make it easier to solicit new data to expand this resource. The project will support ASEE in building a new data schema to collect and store this richer dataset as well as build a range of tools to make it easier for practitioners and researchers to view aspects of the data through dashboards.

During the term of the project, ASEE will also transfer all legal agreements with the institutional partners. The current team of researchers using the database will support this effort as a liaison to provide an interface with institutional partners. To support a growing community of researchers in using the database, the research team will also deliver workshops to help educate people about the database and how to use it effectively.

The research team will also continue to develop software tools that can be used by other researchers and practitioners to work with the database. Archiving and maintaining the data collection at ASEE ensures that the current dataset will be preserved, that it will grow to include a larger and more diverse set of institutions, and that the dataset will be more accessible, which will ensure that these insights are able to continue and, through ASEE’s national platform, influence multiple national stakeholders.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.