AAE PhD student wins best paper at ASEE Conference
AAE Ph.D. candidate Diane Aloisio won “best paper” at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition.
Aloisio’s paper, “Development of a Survey Instrument to Evaluate Student Systems Engineering Ability,” won "best" in the systems engineering division, as well as “best” at the Professional Interest Council level (PIC-II) at the conference June 26 in Salt Lake City. The five winners from each PIC are invited back to the conference next year to present, and one overall winner will be chosen.
“This was a nice surprise,” says Aloisio, who co-authored the paper with Karen Marais and Hanxi Sun. “It was the first time our research group submitted a paper to this conference. I met interesting people, explored topics outside of my research and received some really positive feedback on the paper.”
The paper examined better ways of teaching systems engineering so systems engineers require less on-the-job training before taking roles at respective engineering companies. A crucial step to improving systems engineering education is identifying and assessing the strengths and inadequacies. Aloisio’s paper proposes an approach based on an analysis of the types of errors systems engineers make in practice.
In previous research, Aloisio analyzed a large set of systems engineering failures and identified “decision errors” – decisions made before the accident that accident investigators identified as contributing significantly to the accident. Aloisio and her team developed eight survey questions based on failures in their dataset.
“Initial statistical analysis indicates there may be a correlation between a student’s performance in and exposure to systems engineering-related classes and the student’s performance on our survey,” she says.
Aloisio is defending her Ph.D. work this semester and has accepted a position at Dynetics in Huntsville, Ala., where she will work on a systems engineering team.
Aloisio, D. C., & Marais, K., & Sun, H. (2018, June), Development of a Survey Instrument to Evaluate Student Systems Engineering Ability Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. https://peer.asee.org/30325