Developing New Engineering Education Scholars through the NSF Session at the ASEE Annual Conference

This project aims to serve the national interest by disseminating NSF-sponsored research results to the engineering education community and to broaden awareness of these funding programs. The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference is the largest gathering of the year for engineering educators and researchers in the United States.

The conference enables scholars to learn and exchange ideas and gain training in pedagogy. Since 1992, the NSF has funded a poster session to highlight the breadth of sponsored engineering education work on topics funded by Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE), Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program (S-STEM), Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE), and Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE) etc.

This poster session has historically showcased the work of 120 to 250 projects each year at the annual conference. This project will continue facilitating the poster session and expand its impact through a mentored reviewer program. Junior scholars, such as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, will be trained to complete the peer reviews for the poster session and will be exposed to the breadth of sponsored projects.

Each fall, researchers with engineering education projects will be identified and invited to participate in the NSF Grantees Poster Session at the ASEE annual conference in June. Authors will submit an abstract followed by conference paper, which undergo peer review, to be accepted to the poster session. Concurrently, a cohort of junior scholars will be solicited to participate in the mentored reviewer program.

The selected scholars will be trained to effectively review conference abstracts and papers by following a given rubric. Each year, the poster session will result in hundreds of open-access proceedings papers published through ASEE. Additionally, the poster session will support networking between conference attendees and allow those without NSF funding to explore the breadth of sponsored programs.

The participants in the mentored reviewer program will benefit from training and exposure to multiple NSF-funded projects. These complementary efforts will broaden the exposure of engineering education research sponsored by the NSF. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

This project is also being co-funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC) in the NSF Directorate for Engineering, reflecting alignment with the overall goals of EEC.

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.