Leadership and Management in Engineering

This article discusses a project that implemented several systemic educational reforms in order to determine whether they would increase the awareness of high school students of potential science, math, and engineering careers enough to pursue one of these disciplines in college. The College of Engineering (COE) at San Jose State University (SJSU) in California coordinated the project that included educational reforms that helped increase engineering enrollments over a 5-year period. This vertical slice partnership was unique because it was composed of 12 organizations and educational institutions including the Hewlett Packard Foundation, the COE at SJSU, six K–5 schools, two middle schools, and two high schools in the East San Jose School District. The Hewlett Packard Foundation funded the project and provided personnel who participated in the project. The project demonstrated that the systemic educational reforms that were implemented to modify the delivery methods for math and science courses and the involvement of university faculty members in K–12 education had an impact on high school students selecting engineering as their major in college. This article provides information on how the project was developed, its organizational structure, specific tasks, how tasks were implemented, and the results obtained from the project. In addition to the project increasing engineering enrollments at San Jose State University, the project received the Ron Brown award for industry/education collaborations from the president of the United States.

This paper addresses the current and potential impact of the outreach activities that engineering professional societies (and others) offer to children and young adults and describes how to advance the outreach state of the art by using methods and tools that most engineers routinely use in their technical projects but do not typically transfer to an outreach project: research, training, adoption of best practices, and awareness of user needs and culture. Also critical, assessment (establishing goals, identifying outcomes metrics, and evaluating success) is discussed in the companion paper “Outcomes-Based Assessment: Driving Outreach Program Effectiveness” published in this special issue. Specifically, the paper discusses challenges facing professional society outreach efforts; key and proven practices for outreach success, including assessment; and the use of social science research in designing outreach programs. An extensive list of resources available to assist in designing effective engineering outreach is also provided.

Engineering professional societies are leading and prominent providers of engineering outreach activities in the United States. Many outreach efforts are innovative and impressive, but their ability to raise awareness about engineering and recruit more people to study engineering remains largely unknown. Comprehensive assessment and evaluation results that measure how effective these program activities are in meeting their goals and objectives simply are not available. Using the example of an engineering outreach program for high school girls, this paper describes good outreach practices, including use of proven practices and relevant research, effective assessment, and reports of outcomes; provides resources for tools that outreach professionals and practitioners can use to measure and continuously improve outreach impact; and makes the case that application of good engineering practice to outreach delivery is essential to reach engineering professional society outreach goals.

In this paper we report on our work to develop hands-on activities for middle school classrooms that clearly reveal how civil engineers make a substantial societal impact. These activities and their accompanying messaging vividly show how, through their work, teams of civil engineers help people around the world have better quality of life in a sustainable way. All activities are easily reproducible with low-cost materials and represent a number of specialization areas within civil engineering—namely, structural, urban and community planning, and water resources. The messaging that is an integral part of the activities uses the latest available research on why girls are underrepresented in civil engineering in particular, and the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in general, to highlight the communal goals and values that civil engineers strive for. The results presented in this paper should allow civil engineers to more clearly show how their work enacts communal and altruistic goals that are known to be generally more highly endorsed by women than by men. Preliminary results on the implementation of these strategies in the context of an all-girls middle school show promise in enabling a better connection between the civil engineering profession and female students.

This article describes the use of undergraduate college students as mentors who receive course credit for carrying out a properly structured mentor-assisted enrichment project (MAEP) with young proteges, using science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education kits and involving professional engineers, so that youth connect “learning about” engineering concepts with “learning how” they are applied in real-world situations. This approach involves both informal and formal education to produce multiple benefits for youth and undergrads, as well as for faculty who supply undergrads as mentors, teachers who supply young proteges, and engineers who share real-world experience. Participating companies and organizations also use this project as an opportunity to recruit future hires.