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The professionalization of IT has long been complicated by disagreement over the appropriate model to employ. Physicians, lawyers, scientists, engineers, artisans, and artists have all one been invoked at one time or another by one group or another as guiding examples for the development of an IT profession. Yet none of these has proved fully convincing. Discusses the different kinds of professional practice which have been likened to IT, considers why it has proved so difficult to settle on a single one, and suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing IT practice.

Morgan State University (Morgan) is a leading undergraduate institution for black science and engineering doctoral degree recipients. Morgan also is a leader in the production of black engineering degree recipients in the United States. This chapter provides a historic overview of the major programs with a tie to the impact on the institutional metrics, a discussion of the process for developing researchers in science and engineering, and alumni perspectives. The undergraduate research development models used in engineering at Morgan are compared and contrasted with the life sciences and physical sciences. The programs focus on developing communities of engineering practice and communities of science, thereby enhancing students’ self-efficacy and resilience, shaping disciplinary identity, and creating learning communities. These approaches are critical for the success of minority students and are supported by the social science literature. Best practices have been adopted at varying levels by the School of Engineering, the School of Computer Mathematics and Natural Science and the Behavioral Science departments that have netted these Ph.D. outcomes including multiyear mentored research, research training courses, and participation in professional meetings. Multiple approaches to student development, when matched with the disciplinary culture, are shown to result in national impact.

This paper seeks to examine whether the primary factors motivating the career plans of high‐achieving Indian adolescents vary between academic specializations. Particular attention is to be paid to differences between science and business students.

The study surveyed approximately 2,700 secondary school students in South India regarding their academic and career plans and their perceptions of business compared with science. Survey results were analyzed using both descriptive techniques and multinomial logistic regression.

Students perceive business to be comparable with, but not superior to, science and engineering. The proportion of students choosing business over science increased among males and in some more economically developed cities. Engineering students were most likely to cite parents as a major influence, while business students more often pointed to salary and career prospects.

The study's scope was limited to South India. Greater geographic coverage could broaden the generalizability of the results.

The increasing desirability of formal business education can give rise to a stronger entrepreneurial base and greater business development in India. Furthermore, improved management skills in the Indian workforce can attract higher value‐added offshore work from multinational corporations.

The existing literature contains little empirical research directly comparing business students with their peers in science and engineering, with no such study previously conducted in India. The results shed light on what attracts students to each track and can inform policy aimed at encouraging further enrollment in specific fields.

This paper aims to determine the extent to which graduate student funding portfolios vary across and within engineering, life sciences and physical sciences academic fields for degree recipients. “Graduate student funding portfolios” refers to the percentages of students funded by fellowships, research assistantships, teaching assistantships, personal means and other sources within an organizational unit.

Using data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates data set, the authors analyze doctoral students’ self-reported primary mechanisms of funding across and within academic fields varying along the Biglan taxonomy. The authors used cluster analyses and logistic regression to investigate within-field variation in funding portfolios.

The authors show significant differences in doctoral student funding portfolios across dimensions of the Biglan taxonomy characterizing academic fields. Within those fields, the authors demonstrate considerable variation in funding; institutions cluster into different “modes” of funding portfolios that do not necessarily map onto institutional type or control variables.

Despite tremendous investment in graduate students, there has been little research that can help characterize at the program-level how graduate students are funded, either by internal or external mechanisms. As programs continue to feel the pressures of more limited resources coupled with increasing graduate enrollment demands, investigating graduate student funding at a macro level is becoming increasingly important so programs may better understand constraints and predict shifts in resource availability.

The authors designed a science and engineering curricular program that includes design features that promote student interest and motivation and examined teachers' and students' views on meaningfulness, motivation and interest.

The research approach consisted of mixed methods, including content analyses and descriptive statistics.

The curricular program successfully included all four of the US National Academies of Sciences' design features for promoting interest and motivation through scientific investigation and engineering design. During interviews, teachers and students expressed evidence of design features associated with interest and motivation. After experiencing the program, more than 60% of all students scored high on all four science and engineering meaningfulness and interest survey items.

A curricular program that extends science learning through the engineered design of solutions is an innovative approach to foster both conceptual knowledge development and interest and motivation in science and engineering.

The paper raises the question of a persisting masculine dominance in engineering disciplines and the reasons behind it. Rather than addressing gender‐specific socialisation as a cause of the under‐representation of women in engineering education, it aims to focus on the social and cultural practices of engineering itself, asking to what extent these practices are gendered and/or gendering.

The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in two departments at a technical university in Switzerland: mechanical engineering and materials science. An exemplary piece of field data is analysed in order to generate relevant concepts for characterising and contrasting cultures in engineering disciplines. Results are discussed in the framework of Bourdieu's theory of the scientific field.

Group culture in materials science values individuality and plurality, hence leaving more scope for gender diversity; group culture in mechanical engineering values the subordination of individual needs to group norms and tends to reproduce features of homosocial male worlds. The results support the hypothesis that disciplinary cultures in engineering are gendered and have a gendering effect of their own.

Case studies in other disciplines and national contexts are needed to broaden the empirical basis of the argument.

Policies to achieve gender balance in higher education should not only aim at supporting women, but also at changing disciplinary cultures.

The paper presents a shift of focus from women's socialisation to gendering practices in engineering disciplines.

Performing efficient literature searches and subscribing to the most comprehensive databases for interdisciplinary fields can be challenging since the literature is typically indexed in numerous databases to different extents. Comparing databases will help information professionals make appropriate choices when teaching, literature searching, creating online subject guides, and deciding which databases to renew when faced with fiscal challenges. The purpose of this paper is to compare databases for searching the chemical engineering literature.

This paper compares journal indexing and search recall across seven databases that cover the chemical engineering literature in order to determine which database and database pair provide the most comprehensive coverage in this area. It also summarizes published, database comparison methods to aid information professionals in undertaking their own comparative assessments.

SciFinder, Scopus, and Web of Science, listed alphabetically, were the leading databases for searching the chemical engineering literature. SciFinder-Scopus and SciFinder-Web of Science were the top two database pairs. No single database or pair provided 100 percent complete coverage of the literature examined. Searching a second database increased the recall of results by an average of 17.6 percent.

The findings are useful since they identify “best bets” for performing an efficient search of the chemical engineering literature. Information professionals can also use the methods discussed to compare databases for any discipline or search topic.

This paper builds on the previous literature by using a dual approach to compare the coverage of the chemical engineering literature across multiple databases. To the author’s knowledge, comparing databases in the field of chemical engineering has not been reported in the literature thus far.

The purpose of the current study is to assess Omani teachers’ performance on tasks related to the stages of engineering design. To achieve this, data from an engineering design test was used, and demographic variables that are correlated with this performance were identified.

This descriptive study employed a cross-sectional design and the collection of quantitative data. A sample of preservice science teachers from Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) (n = 70) participated in this study.

Findings showed low and moderate levels of proficiency related to the stages of engineering design. Differences between males and females in terms of performance on engineering design tasks were found, with females scoring higher overall on the assessment. Biology preservice teachers scored higher than teachers from the other two majors (physics and chemistry) in two subscales. There were also differences between teachers studying in the Bachelor of Science (BSc) program and the teacher qualification diploma (TQD) program.

This study provides an overview, in an Arab setting, of preservice science teachers’ proficiency with engineering design process (EDP) tasks. It is hoped that the results may lead to improved instruction in science teacher training programs in similar contexts. Additionally, this research demonstrates how EDP competency relates to preservice teacher gender, major and preparation program. Findings from this study will contribute to the growing body of research investigating the strengths and shortcomings of teacher education programs in relation to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

The Times for 29th May 1867 carried on its correspondence pages letters from Earl Granville and Lord Taunton warning of the decline of British manufacturing industry and the need to establish industrial (technical) education along the lines of the Grandes Ecoles already established in France and on the Continent generally. Lord Taunton also called for the Government of the day to hold an official inquiry into industrial education on the Continent and wrote that it “should tell the people of England authoritatively what are the means by which the great States are attaining an intellectual preeminence among the industrial classes and how they are making this bear on the rapid progress of their national industries.”