Journal of Civil Engineering Education

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

Engineering and engineers are considered central to maintaining global competitiveness and the workforce needs of any nation. Media shapes public opinion, and the image of a profession can affect the way the public views that profession and professionals in the field. Very little research can be found which analyzes media portrayal of engineers and engineering to assess whether and how media influences people’s view of engineers and engineering. Two foundational research questions are addressed in this paper: (1) to what extent are engineers or engineering portrayed in broadcast network television evening news media? and (2) do these news outlets miss opportunities to identify and discuss engineering subjects and, subsequently, exclude engineers as experts? The conclusions are derived from data culled from 24 unique, randomly selected, and full episodes of evening news of three television broadcast networks in the United States yielding 257 individual news stories over the course of a year (2015) and the coverage of two significant disasters (2014 Oso landslide and 2015 Flint water crisis) with high relevance to civil engineering. The data reveal a nearly complete absence of engineers as experts and links to engineering concepts, with only one story mentioning the word “engineer.” The situation is further exacerbated as these evening news programs deemed it important to cover about 15% of the stories as they relate to topics and concepts within the purview of the field of engineering, but did not include voices of engineers or explicitly connect those topics to engineering, which the authors identified as the missed opportunities. The authors suggest investigating the reasons behind the near absence of engineering content and engineers as experts for future research studies, particularly in light of the observation that 19% of the analyzed news stories did feature speakers who were identified as an expert.

The transportation engineering field is currently experiencing a profound transformation driven by technological evolution, which highlights the importance of preparing students for the types of careers that will be available to them in the future. Although transportation engineering programs in the United States are typically at the graduate level, the majority of existing research has focused on undergraduate courses. This study focuses on master’s-level transportation engineering curricula, with the goal of investigating how changes in employment opportunities and day-to-day work responsibilities of transportation engineers over the coming 5–10 years will inform the topics that graduate-level curricula should include to set students up for future success. The study consists of in-depth interviews with a range of academics and practitioners and subsequent analyses of interview transcripts using thematic analysis methods. Seven themes were derived, pertaining to three categories: future opportunities, identified skills, and program structure observations. The three thematic categories are not independent, and their interactions with one another hold information that can lead to recommendations for the design of transportation engineering master’s programs.

The Geotechnical Women Faculty (GTWF) project has aimed since its inception in 2016 to promote gender parity among faculty within the subfield of geotechnical engineering and to increase the quality and number of connections among current faculty. This paper is a case study of one element of the GTWF project that offered seed grants to gender-diverse faculty groups to foster networking, collaborative, and mentoring relationships. Seed grants were evaluated through participants’ final reports and interviews conducted by GTWF project researchers. Content analysis was performed on the interview data using two different coding methods, manual and quantitative descriptive analysis (QDA) Miner, which were used together to identify key themes. The effectiveness of this project’s seed grants were judged through qualitative assessment, a novel approach among the existing literature on seed grant programs. The study’s findings demonstrate the effectiveness of small grant funding in promoting collaboration and mentoring among junior faculty and leading to greater reported levels of confidence and self-efficacy. Seed grant recipients experienced financial success, with approximately 50% of seed grant projects obtaining additional grant funding.

Construction management education in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) domain is increasingly challenged with managing limited resources while increasing instructors’ teaching effectiveness and improving students’ learning outcomes. To address this challenge, the authors proposed a new automated activity-on-node (AON) calculation grading (AACG) method to support AON grading without penalizing students for cascaded errors, improve grading efficiency, accuracy, and learning outcomes. In this paper, the proposed AACG method was evaluated in a sophomore level construction management course by cross-comparing grading and learning results in three consecutive semesters. The authors analyzed the benefits of the proposed AACG method through applying qualitative and quantitative analyses, in which the following learning theories were adopted for conducting qualitative analyses: grounded theory; instructional learning theory; science, technology, society, and environment (STSE) education theory; and self-assessment theory. Meanwhile, learning outcome factors assisted development and analysis of the proposed method. The AACG method was implemented using Excel and evaluated as applied to both formative assignments and summative exams. This study demonstrated that the AON grading challenges stemming from time constraints and learning outcome goals could be alleviated by the proposed AACG method. A comparative analysis revealed that the proposed AACG method could: (1) reduce grading time consumption especially when the score of each AON parameter is not an integer; (2) improve grading accuracy by reducing human errors that are involved in the traditional manual grading method; (3) provide simplified, timely, and explicit feedback to help students conduct self-assessment, encourage students’ active learning to improve learning outcomes; and (4) avoid penalizing students for cascaded errors in AON calculations. Although the statistical testing did not fully demonstrate significant improvement in time consumption and scores achieved when using the proposed AACG method, mean scores achieved and time consumption observably improved. An additional experiment comparing two exams of the same semester demonstrated significant improvement in scores achieved when using the proposed AACG method. The AACG method can also be applied to the grading of more general construction management topics when there are cascading relationships.

Students and professionals from a variety of domains have demonstrated different approaches to problem solving. These two populations have displayed differences when using and perceiving multiple representations of problem-solving tools. In the domain of transportation engineering, this difference has yet to be evaluated in detail. This study addresses that knowledge gap. We used a mixed-methods approach with measurements of eye movements for visual attention and reflective interviews to gather participants’ reported representation use and problem-solving assumptions with three taxonomies of representations (equations, graphs, and flowchart) because they solved an open-ended design problem. Visual attention (VA) was recorded with a head-mounted eye-tracking device. Reflective interviews were used as a self-reported depiction of overt VA on the selected representation, and to record assumptions made by each participant to solve the problem. Equations, graphs, and flowcharts received different magnitudes of statistically significant VA for both groups. Professionals had a significant difference in VA between the flowchart/equation and graph representations, whereas students showed a difference in all three categories. Professionals generally chose representations with higher complexity (use of different combinations of representations) than students, as reflected by their frequency of conjoining representation choices and their associated assumptions. Professionals commonly approached problem solving by documenting specific assumptions, whereas students approached the problem more generically. Efficient information extraction occurred for professionals, but it took more time for them to solve the problem than novices. Novices frequently utilized the flowchart. Differences in performance may be explained by professionals using conceptual frameworks, or rules for interpreting and navigating the problems that were potentially developed through exposure to the domain of knowledge and deep understanding of the subject matter.

Two-dimensional (2D) drawing is one of the most common communication approaches in the civil and construction engineering domain. However, there are limits to the traditional classroom setting for training in 2D drawing and interpretation skills. New visualization techniques exist for integrating the third dimension (depth) to 2D drawings, providing more accurate and natural representations of objects. This helps students to better understand 2D drawings and develop required spatial skills. This study employed cloud-based augmented reality (AR) technology to 3D-enable 2D drawings through virtually superimposing interactive 3D building information models onto 2D paper-based drawings. This research aims to understand if AR-enabled 3D augmentation can be used to facilitate students’ understanding of complex 2D drawings. An experiment was conducted to evaluate how AR could facilitate understanding 2D drawings against the conventional paper-only approach. The results revealed that AR was positively rated by students and could improve the accuracy of a plan-reading task.