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As Huber (2002) noted, striving to understand how leadership is taught and learned is both a challenge and an opportunity facing leadership educators. This article describes the Leadership Aha! Moment assignment used in a leadership theory course to help students recognize the intersection of leadership theories and their daily lives while practicing their written communication skills. The assignment requires a paper in which students describe when they experienced something outside of class during the semester that made them understand something from the course on a deeper level. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the assignment is helping students connect with course content on a more personal level.

This study investigated how behavioral and emotional forms of engagement are associated with faculty support and student-faculty interactions among engineering students.

Quantitative research methods were used to analyze survey data from 781 undergraduates in seven large undergraduate engineering courses. Linear hierarchical regression models were used to evaluate the relationships between demographics (gender, race/ethnicity, family education, US status and transfer status) and student engagement and between faculty behaviors and engagement.

Faculty support was consistently, significantly and positively linked to all forms of student engagement, while student-faculty interactions were significantly and positively linked to effort and positive emotional engagement and negatively linked to attention and (an absence of) negative emotional engagement. Gender, race/ethnicity, international student status and transfer status significantly predicted at least one form of engagement.

Although this was a single institution study and cross-sectional, the findings suggest that faculty support and student-faculty interactions, while important for engagement, have different effects on different types of students. Faculty and teacher professional development efforts should raise awareness of these differences in order to enhance diversity and inclusion in engineering courses and curricula at all levels.

The analysis of behavioral and emotional forms of engagement represents more of a motivational lens on engagement in contrast to the traditional focus on time-on-task or time spent in fruitful educational practices, as is the norm with much of the engagement literature in higher education.