This project will develop, implement, evaluate, and disseminate an approach to engage students early and on a continuing basis in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) programs. It will build the project team's professional formation of engineers (PFE) approach around multiple strategies based upon student needs - as well as institutional and departmental priorities and goals. This approach will enhance students’ sense of belonging to the CEE profession, department, and major - augmenting student experiences, performance, and retention in CEE departments. The world needs more civil and environmental engineers to address 21st Century societal grand challenges including climate change, the increasing frequency and intensity of disasters, water quality degradation and scarcity, infrastructure renewal, urban congestion, and pandemics. This project will create safe environments for all CEE students, particularly women and underrepresented minorities, and improve their sense of belonging within the academic program and the profession. Moreover, it will graduate more CEE professionals with augmented capabilities to address society’s grand challenges. This project supports the overall goals of the RED program, including enhancing the professional formation of students and transforming the culture of the department.
CEE programs across the nation struggle with retention of students, which stems from at least two major issues. First, CEE students do not begin to take courses in their major program until later in the curriculum to allow them to complete general engineering and non-engineering courses, such as math and science preparatory courses. This delayed engagement can lead to students feeling little sense of belonging in the program, having little understanding of the profession, and making little progress in constructing their professional identities - in the first two years of the program. Second, there are opportunities for CEE programs to continue modernizing, with ongoing technological change, to retain students who actively seek computational development. The objective of this RED grant is to develop an effective and scalable model to revolutionize CEE education through early and vertically integrated engagement. This project will create a spine of four mutually informing and highly interactive courses with vertically-integrated problem finding and problem solving. The courses will address society’s grand challenges and develop computational, teaming, and reflection skills. This project will lead to retention and graduation of civil and environmental engineers who are better equipped – technically, professionally, and socio-technically - to address society’s grand challenges. We will simultaneously implement faculty development initiatives to create more reflective and inclusive professors, and a workload model and teaching schedule to incentivize faculty engagement in large and interactive freshmen and sophomore courses. Further, we will create a Whole Person Education (WPE) award, and work with upper administration to develop a WPE metric for the faculty annual evaluation, as well as reappointment, promotion, and tenure processes. To accomplish these goals, this project will partner with Georgia Tech’s Biomedical Engineering RED Team to apply Schmader and Sedikides’ SAFE Model to improve the sense of belonging. This project also connects to Clemson University’s Civil Engineering RED Team to learn from their Arch framework for building technical and professional skills throughout the curriculum.
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.
