Dr. Noemi Mendoza Diaz, assistant professor of engineering instruction in the first-year engineering program at Texas A&M University, was recently awarded a two-year grant totaling $150,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The grant, Research Initiation: Exploring Enculturation of Engineering Students in the First-Year Engineering Program, enables researchers to investigate the incorporation of the engineering profession culture at Texas A&M, particularly in the first-year engineering courses.
“This award will positively impact the future of the first-year engineering program because it is devoted to analyzing the professional formation of engineers from an enculturation perspective,” said Mendoza Diaz, principal investigator of the project.
The co-principal investigators on the project are Dr. Jacques Richard and Dr. Tanya Wickliff, faculty members in the first-year engineering program, and Dr. So Yoon Yoon, an assistant research scientist with expertise in psychometrics and engineering education research with the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation (IEEI), which is a center within the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES).
The team hopes to facilitate an effective process of enculturation to engineering during a first-year engineering program and inform the engineering education community of its findings.