This narrative review addresses emerging application of user experience (UX) design principles within education contexts, particularly science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education settings. In this review, “UX design” is employed as an umbrella term to describe design philosophies, approaches, and tools that have originated within technology product design-related fields, namely user-centered design and human-computer interaction. UX design implies commitment to user-focused approaches to product development; UX design commonly includes construction and use of specific design tools (e.g., personas, scenarios, and usage models) that synthesize and contextualize product users’ goals, needs, wants, and behaviors in memorable and empathic ways. This review not only explores implementation of UX design tools and frameworks within education settings, but also examines the methods that have used to develop and implement UX design tools from data generated with students and faculty. Findings reveal that, although nascent, current scholarship provides evidence to support use of UX design tools and approaches to promote instructional innovation and the transfer of research to promote institutional change. To advance these purposes, STEM scholarship should focus on providing methodological detail and evidence of assessment of outcomes related to UX implementation. The results further suggest that future work in this area should explore novel approaches for representing UX design tools contextually within STEM settings.

A robust and intuitive understanding of fluid mechanics—the applied science of fluid motion—is foundational within many engineering disciplines, including aerospace, chemical, civil, mechanical, naval, and ocean engineering. In‐depth knowledge of fluid mechanics is critical to safe and economical design of engineering applications employed globally everyday, such as automobiles, aircraft, and sea craft, and to meeting global 21st century engineering challenges, such as developing renewable energy sources, providing access to clean water, managing the environmental nitrogen cycle, and improving urban infrastructure. Despite the fundamental nature of fluid mechanics within the broader undergraduate engineering curriculum, students often characterize courses in fluid mechanics as mathematically onerous, conceptually difficult, and aesthetically uninteresting; anecdotally, undergraduates may choose to opt‐out of fluids engineering‐related careers based on their early experiences in fluids courses. Therefore, the continued development of new frameworks for engineering instruction in fluid mechanics is needed. Toward that end, this paper introduces mobile instructional particle image velocimetry (mI‐PIV), a low‐cost, open‐source, mobile application‐based educational tool under development for smartphones and tablets running Android. The mobile application provides learners with both technological capability and guided instruction that enables them to visualize and experiment with authentic flow fields in real time. The mI‐PIV tool is designed to generate interest in and intuition about fluid flow and to improve understanding of mathematical concepts as they relate to fluid mechanics by providing opportunities for fluids‐related active engagement and discovery in both formal and informal learning contexts.

Background: Across academic disciplines, researchers have found that argumentation‐based pedagogies increase learners' achievement and engagement. Engineering educational researchers and teachers of engineering may benefit from knowledge regarding how argumentation related to engineering has been practiced and studied.Purpose/Hypothesis: Drawing from terms and concepts used in national standards for K‐12 education and accreditation requirements for undergraduate engineering education, this study was designed to identify how arguments and argumentation related to the engineering‐designed world were operationalized in relevant literature.Methodology: Specified search terms and inclusion criteria were used to identify 117 empirical studies related to engineering argumentation and educational research. A qualitative content analysis was used to identify trends across these studies.Findings: Overall, engineering‐related argumentation was associated with a variety of positive learner outcomes. Across many studies, arguments were operationalized in practice as statements regarding whether an existing technology should be adopted in a given context, usually with a limited number of supports (e.g., costs and ethics) provided for each claim. Relatively few studies mentioned empirical practices, such as tests. Most studies did not name the race/ethnicity of participants nor report engineering‐specific outcomes.Conclusions: Engineering educators in K‐12 and undergraduate settings can create learning environments in which learners use a range of epistemic practices, including empirical practices, to support a range of claims. Researchers can study engineering‐specific outcomes while specifying relevant demographics of their research participants.

The Corona Virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) catalyzed a global shift to distance education known as an emergency transition to remote teaching (ERT). While prior research investigates students' experiences during traditional online learning, fewer studies examine students' affective responses (i.e., feelings, emotions) to those experiences, particularly when remote learning is unexpected and unplanned. To understand how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduates responded affectively to the COVID-19 ERT, researchers generated open-ended survey data with 1340 undergraduates (253 female) in 27 courses across seven U.S. institutions. Using an inductive qualitative approach, researchers developed a three-tier thematic model to synthesize the self-reported reasons underlying participants’ affective responses to the COVID-19 ERT. Findings reveal a complex mix of positive and negative emotional responses among participants that included frequent occurrences of feelings of stress and uncertainty traced to a variety of external, internal, and contextual factors. Implications for STEM teaching practice are discussed.

This paper reports on narrative inquiry research conducted with nontraditional undergraduates as they pursued a common goal of becoming engineers. Participants were enrolled in a two-year engineering transfer program offered in the evenings, via synchronous broadcast distance instruction, by a public, land-grant university situated in the western United States. The purpose of the research was to understand the experiences of nontraditional students during the two-year program, which they accessed at regional campuses within or near their local communities, and later as they transitioned to the four-year university campus located in another city away from these communities. In this paper, personal, social, and institutional tensions, arising from instances of deficit thinking and emerging from within the participants’ lived and told stories, are identified and examined. Despite deep, personal reactions to the bias they experienced, participants overcame perceptions of personal deficiency to pursue and achieve their goal of becoming engineers. Participant counter stories further revealed ways in which their unique life experiences alternately served to enhance and deepen their engineering education.