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Item Critical Incidents in Engineering Students’ Development of More Comprehensive Ways of Experiencing Innovation(ASEE, 2018) Fila, Nicholas D.; Hess, Justin L.; Engineering Technology, School of Engineering and TechnologyNumerous approaches to fostering the innovative behaviors of engineering students have been explored, especially in recent years. However, often these studies are not qualitatively grounded in students’ experiences with being or becoming innovative. This study builds upon a previous study that explored differences in the ways engineering students understood and experienced innovation. While that study utilized phenomenography to explore variation in ways of experiencing innovation, here we used the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to explore how engineering students progressed from less to more comprehensive ways of experiencing innovation. We sought to address the research question, “What aspects of engineering students’ innovative experiences were critical to the development of their ways of experiencing innovation?” Through CIT, we identified 122 critical incidents among the 16 interviews. We used thematic analysis to group these incidents into four categories including: Learning From Immersion; Learning from Failure; Learning from Others; and Learning from Success. These categories encapsulated two to three incident types each, or 10 incident types total. Further, we utilized these findings to begin exploring trends in how critical incidents informed participants’ ways of experiencing innovation. These findings detail critical components for promoting students’ novel or more comprehensive understandings of and approaches to innovation that other engineering educators may utilize in their own courses and curricula. Importantly, we recognize that these findings are not exhaustive and future studies are to elaborate upon the the incident types and trend identified herein, and explore if and how these findings can translate to other populations.Item When Your Boss Supports You During Your Internship: The Impact Co-op Supervisor Support on Engineering Students’ Attitudes and Career Outlook(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2014-04-11) Egan, Toby; Carden, Lila; Greer, TomikaThe final steps in the undergraduate engineering education process often involve 'field education,' 'clinical experience' or 'co-op’ assignments. In many cases, engineering students rate the capstone engineering practicum experience as the most important aspect of their engineering professional preparation. Based on social learning and organizational support theories, we used a sequential exploratory mixed methods research approach to explore the experiences of 181 engineering students, attending two large public US universities, and participating in their co-op experiences. In interviews, co-op students identified support, coaching, sponsorship and challenging work tasks as important aspects of successful co-op experiences. After identifying and amplifying these key themes through a qualitative research process, we used a survey to examine issues identified in interview settings, in relation to these novice engineers’ attitudes and career outlook. Supervisors’ perceptions of the engineering students’ motivation, commitment, and performance were also measured. Study findings indicated that very early career engineers are often strongly influenced by their experiences with their co-op supervisors. The implications for the study emphasized that, when supported their supervisors, engineering co-ops (and similar engineering capstone experiences) facilitated by supported supervisors, can impact students’/employees’ performance, career outlook (regarding their long-term interest in the engineering profession) and overall attitudes regarding engineering as a college major and as a profession and life-long career. Methods used: exploratory mixed-methods—interviews and survey Analysis used: constant comparative analysis and structural equation modeling