Research Areas

The persistent pursuit of a more inclusive socially connected and scholarly engineering education. In the lab, in the field, and in the classroom, our faculty keep going to show the world what's possible.

Advancing Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity

reframing how we think about diversity, inclusion, and equity and designing improved interventions across all educational levels.


Related Research and Publications

Trends in the underrepresentation of women of color faculty in engineering (2005–2018)
Main, J. B., McGee, E. O., Cox, M. F., Tan, L., & Berdanier, C. G. P.; August 2022

Family formation and the career trajectories of women engineering PhDs
Joyce B. Main; August 2022

The role of the teaching assistant: Female role models in the classroom
Amanda L. Griffith, Joyce B. Main; December 2021

A Sociocultural Learning Framework for Inclusive Pedagogy in Engineering
Stephanie Farrell, Allison Godwin, Donna M. Riley; October 2021

Preparing Industry Leaders: The Role of Doctoral Education and Early Career Management Training in the Leadership Trajectories of Women STEM PhDs
Joyce B. Main, Yanbing Wang and Li Tan; August 2021

Social justice and inclusion: Women and minorities in engineering (Video)
Donna Riley, Amy Slaton, Alice Pawley; August 2020

Gatekeepers of Engineering Workforce Diversity? The Academic and Employment Returns to Student Participation in Voluntary Cooperative Education Programs
Joyce Main, Beata Johnson, Yanbing Wang; June 2020

Digging deeper: qualitative research methods for eliciting narratives and counter-narratives from student veterans
Catherine Mobley, Chaterine Brawner, Susan Lord, Joyce Main, Michelle Camacho; July 2019

Beyond pipeline and pathways: Ecosystem metrics
Susan Lord, Matthew Ohland, Richard Layton, Michelle Camacho; February 2019

Shifting the "Default": The Case for Making Diversity the Expected Condition for Engineering Education and Making Whiteness and Maleness Visible
Alice Pawley; November 2017

Sustainability Goals of Students Underrepresented in Engineering: An Intersectional Study
Allison Godwin, Leidy Klotz, Zahra Harari and Geoff Potvin; June 2017

Pushing and pulling Sara: A case study of the contrasting influences of high school and university experiences on engineering agency, identity, and participation
Allison Godwin and G. Potvin; November 2016

GLOBAL SEED GRANT: GirlEngage Program in Zimbabwe
Jennifer DeBoer, Dhinesh Radhakrishnan, Molly Fitzgerald; July 2020

NSF AWARD: Collaborative Research: Building Social Infrastructure for Achieving Change at Scale
Donna Riley; March 2019

NSF AWARD: Identifying Marginalization and Allying Tendencies to Transform Engineering Relationships
Alice Pawley, Matthew Ohland, Stephanie Zywicki, Darryl Dickerson; September 2019

defining and setting standards for quantitative and qualitative research methods, working with big and small data, and developing tools that serve our community


Related Research Publications

Development of Global Engineering Competency Scale: Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis
Andrea Mazzurco, Brent Jesiek, Allison Godwin; April 2020

A Size and Scale Framework for Guiding Curriculum Design and Assessment
Yi Kong, Kerrie A. Douglas, Kelsey J. Rodgers, Heidi Diefes-Dux, Krishna Madhavan; July 2017

The Power and Politics of Engineering Education Research Design: Saving the ‘Small N’
Amy Slaton, Alice Pawley; June 2017

Bridging the design-science gap with tools: Science learning and design behaviors in a simulated environment for engineering design
Jie Chao, Charles Xie, Saeid Nourian, Guanhua Chen, Siobhan Bailey, Molly H. Goldstein, Senay Purzer, Robin S. Adams, M. Shane Tutwiler; May 2017

Identity, Critical Agency, and Engineering: An Affective Model for Predicting Engineering as a Career Choice
Allison Godwin, Geoff Potvin, Zahra Hazari, and Robynne Lock; April 2017

Evaluation of current assessment methods in engineering entrepreneurship education
Senay Purzer, Nicholas Fila, and Kavin Nataraja; December 2016

A Developmental Model of Research Mentoring
Renata A. Revelo, Michael Loui; March 2016

The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development: An experiential case study of data sharing and reuse
Matthew Ohland, Russell Long; Spring 2016

Justifying aggregation with consensus-based constructs: A review and examination of cutoff values for common aggregation indices
David Woehr, Andrew Loignon, Paul Schmidt, Misty Loughry, Matthew Ohland; May 2015

The Informed Design Teaching and Learning Matrix
David Crismond, Robin Adams; October 2012

Rigorous research in engineering education (PDF Download)
Ruth Streveler, Karl Smith; October 2008

working with colleagues in other engineering disciplines to connect research findings to classroom practice


Related Research and Publications

Cultures of Engagement and Innovation: Realizing Purdue’s Public Mission of Access and Impact in Engineering Education
Robin Adams, Andrew Brightman, Jennifer DeBoer, Leah Jamieson, William Oakes, Donna Riley, Paige Rudin; August 2021

Person or thing oriented: A comparative study of individual differences of first-year engineering students and practitioners
Diana N. Bairaktarova, Mary K. Pilotte; February 2020

Breaking the tyranny of office hours: Overcoming professor avoidance
Elizabeth Broidy, Elizabeth Wirtz, Angela Goldenstein, Edward J. Berger; March 2019

Impact of the EPICS model for community-engaged learning and design education
William Oakes, James Huff, Carla Zoltowski, D Canchi; 2018

Impact of a student affairs-academic partnership on engineering student academic outcomes
Edward J. Berger, Julie Caruccio, and Lisa Lampe; February 2018

Mechanical Engineering Research Center (MEERCat)
Ed Berger, Jennifer DeBoer; established June 2017

CISTAR NSF Engineering Research Center
Monica Cardella, Allison Godwin, Workforce Development Co-Directors; established 2017

Supporting successful teams: Research to practice in capstone courses
Matthew W. Ohland, David Giurintano, Brian Novoselich, Patsy Brackin, Shraddha Sangelkar; 2014

NSF AWARD: Collaborative Research: Building Social Infrastructure for Achieving Change at Scale
Donna Riley; March 2019

2004-2017 Engineering Education Impact Report

Improving Pre-College Engineering Education

Faculty, staff and students of the INSPIRE research center lead the way in integrating engineering with science, math, and language arts in pre-college classrooms in a way that engages learners and promotes participation of students from groups underrepresented in engineering


Related Research and Publications

Understanding influences on engineering students’ civic engagement in high school
Athena Lin, Justin L. Hess; August 2022

The effectiveness of an integrated STEM curriculum unit on middle school students' life science learning
Saira Anwar, Muhsin Menekse, Siddika Selcen Guzey, Lynn A. Bryan; February 2022

The honeycomb of engineering framework: Philosophy of engineering guiding precollege engineering education
Senay Purzer, Jenny Quintana-Cifuentes, Muhsin Menekse; November 2021

INSPIRE Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering Research Areas
Broaden Participation, STEM Integration, Classroom Assessment, Learning in Informal Environments, Student Learning, Student Engagement

Multiple Representations in Computational Thinking Tasks: A Clinical Study of Second-Grade Students
Tamara Moore, Sean Brophy, Kristina Tank, Ruben Lopez, Amanda Johnson, Morgan Hynes, Elizabeth Gajdzik; February 2020

Design-based research to broaden participation in pre-college engineering: research and practice of an interest-based engineering challenges framework
Avneet Hira and Morgan Hynes; November 2017

The Role of Robotics Teams’ Collaboration Quality on Team Performance in a Robotics Tournament
Muhsin Menekse, Ross Higashi, Christian D. Schunn, Emily Baehr; November 2017

NSF AWARD: Excellence in STEM Teaching in Indiana through Integrating Engineering Practice and Design Principles
Lynn Bryan, Jill Newton, Siddika Guzey, Muhsin Menekse, Paul Asunda; July 2018

Understanding and Assessing How People Learn

from difficult technical concepts to teamwork, ethics, entrepreneurship, global competencies, and much more


Related Research and Publications

MIDFIELD: A Resource for Longitudinal Student Record Research
Susan M. Lord, Matthew W. Ohland, Marisa K. Orr, Richard A. Layton, Russell A. Long, Catherine E. Brawner, Hossein Ebrahiminejad, Baker A. Martin, George D. Ricco, Leila Zahedi; August 2022

Assessing learning processes rather than outcomes: using critical incidents to explore student learning abroad
Kirsten A. Davis, David B. Knight; March 2022

NSF DUE AWARD - Improving the Problem Solving Skills of Engineering Undergraduate Students by Infusing Engineering Design in Introductory Physics
Carina Rebello, N. Sanjay Rebello, Jason Morphew; July 2020

NSF RAPID AWARD - Approaches to Online Implementation and Social Support in Undergraduate Engineering Courses
Kerrie Douglas; June 2020

IES AWARD - Enhancing Undergraduate STEM Education by Integrating Mobile Learning Technologies with Natural Language Processing
Muhsin Menekse; August 2018

Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research: Updated Perspectives - Assessment in Engineering Education (Video)
Jim Pellegrino, Sean Brophy; July 2020

How Do Different Reflection Prompts Affect Engineering Students’ Academic Performance and Engagement?
Muhsin Menekse, Saira Anwar, Zeynep Gonca Akdemir; July 2020

Challenges to assessing motivation in MOOC learners: An application of an argument-based approach
Kerrie Douglas, Hillary Merzdorf, Nathan Hicks, Muhammad Ihsanujlhaq Sarfraz, Peter Bermel; February 2020

Human-centeredness in undergraduate engineering students’ representations of engineering design
Monica Cardella, William Oakes, Nusaybah Abu Mulaweh, Andrew Pierce; February 2020

Practicing Engineering Ethics in Global Context: A Comparative Study of Expert and Novice Approaches to Cross-Cultural Ethical Situations
Qin Zhu, Brent Jesiek; November 2019

Identifying the characteristics of engineering innovativeness
Dan Ferguson, Matt Ohland, enay Purzer, K. Jablokow; April 2017

A systematic literature review of US engineering ethics interventions
Justin Hess, Grant Fore; April 2017

Learning conceptual knowledge in the engineering sciences: Overview and future research directions
RA Streveler, TA Litzinger, RL Miller, PS Steif; January 2013

Research Seminars