The Engineering Education Research Group (EERG) is an interdisciplinary body of scholars dedicated to improving engineering education. We meet every two weeks to discuss a wide range of topics, including diversity, ethics, and inclusion in STEM, undergraduate engineering retention, socio-technical systems thinking integration into STEM curriculum, research methods, pedagogy, and teaching strategies.

This group welcomes people from all disciplines who care about improving STEM education broadly, which we believe involves the development of the holistic student and instructor that embraces the fusion of social and technical competencies. Our current group members include practitioners from Education, Physics, Environmental Science and Technology, Science and Technology Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Information Science, and of course, Engineering.

We have a speakers series that invites scholars, practitioners, and activists from around the United States in the engineering education field to share their work.

Please contact David Tomblin (dtomblin@umd.edu) if you would like to learn more or join us for our meetings. Below is a sample of some of our current research projects.

  • Integrating Socio-technical Systems Thinking into Technical Engineering Courses
  • Understanding how the routines and activities of a Science, Technology and Society program shapes STEM students’ reasoning about the ethical and the social dimensions of science and technology
  • The role of bodily posture and movement in how undergraduate STEM students perceive and enact relationships with society
  • Anti-racist engineering curriculum
  • Examining how engineering educators produce, reproduce, or challenge meritocracy and technocracy in pedagogical reasoning
  • The influence of public engagement exercises on technical expert decision-making
  • Understanding undergraduate socio-technical computer science problem definition in virtual spaces
  • The role of rhetoric in science and technology

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