Background: Participating in undergraduate research experiences (UREs) supports the development of engineering students' technical and professional skills. However, little is known about the perceptions of research or researchers that students develop through these experiences. Understanding these perceptions will provide insight into how students come to understand knowledge evaluation and creation, while allowing research advisors to better support student development.Purpose: In this paper, we explore how undergraduate engineering students perceive what it means to do research and be a researcher, using identity and epistemic cognition as sensitizing concepts. Our goal is to explore students' views of UREs to make the benefits of these experiences more accessible.Design/Method: We created and adapted open‐ended survey items from previously published studies. We collected responses from mechanical and biomedical engineering undergraduates at five institutions (n= 154) and used an inductive approach to analyze responses.Results: We developed four salient themes from our analysis: (a) research results in discovery, (b) research includes dissemination such as authorship, (c) research findings are integrated into society, and (d) researchers demonstrate self‐regulation.Conclusions: The four themes highlight factors that students perceive as part of a researcher identity and aspects of epistemic cognition in the context of UREs. These results suggest structuring UREs to provide opportunities for discovery, dissemination, societal impact, and self‐regulation will help support students in their development as researchers.

Contemporary science education frameworks identify computational thinking as an essential science and engineering practice that supports scientific sense‐making and engineering design. Despite national emphasis on teaching science, engineering, and computational thinking (NGSS Lead States, 2013), little research has investigated the ways that elementary teachers support students to engage in science and engineering practices (SEPs) within integrated science, engineering, and computational thinking curricula. This study explores how teachers provide verbal support of SEPs to upper elementary students during a 4‐week NGSS‐aligned curricular unit that challenged students to redesign their school to reduce water runoff. Students conducted hands‐on investigations of water runoff and created computational models to test their designs. Teacher audio data during the classroom implementation was collected and qualitatively coded for different purposes of verbal support, such as to understand how (pragmatic), when, and why (epistemic) to use SEPs, in three focal lessons. Results show that teachers provided a range of pragmatic and epistemic supports for many different SEPs in science‐focused and engineering‐focused lessons, but support for a more limited variety of SEPs in the lesson focused on computational thinking. Across the lessons, the majority of teacher support aimed to help students engage pragmatically with the SEPs through sense making and engaging prior knowledge. In addition, teachers provided epistemic support more frequently in the science‐focused lesson than in the engineering‐ or computational thinking‐focused lessons. Results also demonstrate differences within the quality of the verbal support across lessons. This study provides insight into how teachers may differentially support SEPs in elementary classrooms and the kinds of learning experiences and educative materials teachers may need to provide equitable supports for students across SEPs.

This paper presents the first results from draw-a-scientist tests (DASTs) over five years that were used to measure the effect of 8–10 week long astronomy clubs and week long summer camps on 3 rd–5 th grade elementary school students’ perceptions of scientists. We facilitated these DASTs prior to these clubs or camps, which provide a baseline for a student’s initial conception of scientists, and once at the end, to determine whether their conception changed, possibly as a result of their involvement. In total we analyze 89 pairs of DASTs using a numerical grading scheme designed to quantify the presence of various features in the drawn scientist and their activities. We find that there is a gender imbalance in both the pre- and postclub drawings, with only 32% and 35%, respectively, of students drawing female scientists. We also find that a third to a half of the scientists have a stereotypical appearance and/or are performing stereotypical activities. Although we find insignificant changes ($<5\%$) in most categories, we do find an 8% increase in the number of scientists that have a stereotypical appearance, which is worth following up, but a significant 12% decrease in the number of scientists who are performing stereotypical activities. In addition, we present some possible improvements to implementing DASTs and discuss other possible assessments that could provide a more direct method of gauging the effect of these astronomy clubs or camps.

In this Full Research Category paper, we will provide a detailed description of how we are using analytical memo-writing within a mixed methods grounded theory study. The goal of our work is to identify key elements from undergraduate research experiences (UREs) that can be translated into the classroom by exploring the connections between engineering students’ researcher identities, perceptions of research, and epistemic thinking within the context of UREs. The qualitative phase of our study which is the focus on this paper takes a grounded theory approach as we explore our research questions using in-depth interviews. Interviews were conducted by researcher pairs, transcribed, and cleaned. Preliminary analysis, which included initial coding, was conducted by researcher pairs to increase the validity of the analysis and facilitate analytical discussions between researchers. After initial coding, the researcher pairs constructed analytical memos with three parts: (1) summary of the participant (factual representation), (2) summary of salient themes/codes/analysis, and (3) connections of themes/analysis to other participants. We are using these memos to facilitate a constant comparative approach across participants, communicate and understand complex relationships between concepts, and enhance the development of our grounded theory model. As part of our description of our analytical memos, we provide details and examples from our study for each part of the memo. We also discuss the ways in which we have found the analytical memos to be helpful in our analysis. In particular, we discuss our use of the theoretical coding (three-part coding where you identify context, mechanism, and outcome) and magnitude coding (quantify qualitative data by creating Likert-type Scales for specific concepts) of our memos, which allow us to explore relationships between concepts and produce empirical support for the connections within our grounded theory model.

Elementary teachers are tasked with the challenge of implementing Next Generation Science Standards‐aligned projects that integrate science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computer science (STEM + CS) in a variety of classroom contexts. This study investigates how teachers verbally support students in two classrooms, one general education class and one inclusive class with a larger proportion of students with individualized educational plans, to engage in a Next Generation Science Standards‐aligned, STEM + CS unit. Teachers' verbal support for students to understand how (pragmatic) and when and why (epistemic) to use practices was examined during whole‐class discussions for a 4‐week unit in science, engineering, and computer science‐focused lessons. Bi‐weekly teacher surveys and weekly teacher interviews provided insight into the teachers' perceptions of students and project activities in each class section. Teachers reported instructional decisions to modify their enactment of the interdisciplinary curricular materials for the Inclusive Class and discussed their rationales for these modifications. Results suggest that instructional decisions that teachers made in how to verbally support students may depend upon their own knowledge of the different disciplines being integrated, their prior beliefs of students in different classroom contexts, and their in‐the‐moment perceptions of student needs. These factors may have led to different learning experiences for the students in each class section. Findings underscore the need for more research to better understand what kinds of support students and teachers need to be able to integrate engineering, science, and computer science content and practices within their elementary classrooms and provide equitable learning opportunities for all students.