The ASEE Best Diversity Paper Award was started during the Year of ACTION on Diversity, authorized by the ASEE Board as 2014-2015. In the YOA discussed, engaged, and highlighted individual and collective activities that serve to advance the Society's diversity efforts and inclusivity. Engineering is empowering society in unprecedented ways. It is at the core of all innovation and the most important discipline to address current and emerging challenges in the US and on a global scale. A fundamental requirement to enabling this, however, is for the engineering education community and the engineering profession to enlarge the engagement in engineering of all segments of our society. In particular, engineering must include and help promote the pursuit of engineering education and engineering careers for all those who have been historically under-represented within engineering. ASEE believes that diversity and inclusiveness enrich and are essential to educational experiences and innovations that drive the development of creative solutions in addressing the world’s challenges. The true power of diverse engineering disciplines is that we learn from experiences, perspectives, and approaches that are different from our own. Diversity, both intellectually and socially, can only fuel innovation and the development of imaginative and enduring solutions to global problems. The ASEE Statement on Diversity and Inclusiveness is available here: http://diversity.asee.org/about
This call for nominations for the Best Diversity Papers seeks to identify highly impactful efforts by ASEE authors that broaden participation in engineering and influence the inclusive, diverse future of engineering. Diversity dimensions addressed can include (but are not limited to): age, belief system, disability status, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and any other visible or non-visible differences.
The inaugural year, monetary awards were made possible by a generous donation from the Mechanical Engineering Division.
Nominated diversity papers will be assessed for a) novelty of approaches/ideas/ interventions, b) extent of inclusivity, c) demonstrated impact, and d) communication effectiveness. The ASEE Best Diversity Paper rubric (http://diversity.asee.org/DiversityPaperRubric) will be utilized by an ASEE Diversity Selection Committee to assess scholarship attributes of the manuscript.
Please note: The Best Diversity Paper is a completely separate process from the Best Paper selection process run by the PIC chairs at the Annual Conference. A division/section/zone may identify two separate papers for these entirely independent best paper competitions.
Individual reviewers are asked to nominate papers they review for the Best Diversity Paper Competition. Outstanding manuscripts that address any aspect of Diversity (see statement) may be nominated via the pull-down menu in the review window. This is encouraged at the draft stage, but will remain available at the final paper stage. The reviewers are asked to justify the basis for their nomination in their comments to the chair. Program chairs will compile the nominations for their division; each division has the latitude to select the best nomination from the division and forward to the ASEE Diversity Committee. Nominations by Program Chairs should include: division name, paper title, author(s), corresponding author email address and electronic copy of the paper. All manuscripts nominated for best diversity paper will be flagged in the final program.
Papers published within any section/zone conference proceedings between May 1 to April 30 for the year prior to the conference may be nominated. Section/Zones have the latitude to develop/use any evaluation procedure to identify suitable papers and to select the best nomination from the section/zone. A section/zone may nominate 2 manuscripts for consideration by the ASEE Diversity Committee selection committee provided the manuscripts address different, but critically important, diversity-related topics. Nominations by Section/Zone Conference Chairs should include: section/zone name, conference date, paper title, author(s), corresponding author email address and electronic copy of the paper.
Program Chairs, Section/Zone Leadership: All nominations must be submitted to the ASEE Diversity Committee via email (diversity@asee.org) by Friday, May 1st. Award notifications will be sent Friday, May 15th. Best Diversity Paper Awards will be presented in a special session at the ASEE Annual Conference.
Finalists for the 2016 Best Diversity Paper Award, listed below, presented their award winning papers at a Best Diversity Papers session at the annual meeting.
| Paper Title | Division/Zone |
|---|---|
| (WINNER) Mapping Assets of Diverse Groups for Chemical Engineering Design Problem Framing Ability by Vanessa Svihla, Abhaya K. Datye, Jamie R Gomez, Victor Law, and Sophia Bowers (University of New Mexico) |
Chemical Engineering Division |
| Instructional Strategies for Incorporating Empathy in Transdisciplinary Technology Education by Colin M. Gray, Luciana de Cresce El Debs, Marisa Exter, and Terri S. Krause (Purdue University, West Lafayette) |
Engineering Ethics Division |
| Where are they Now? Analyses of Alumnae Data by Andrea L Welker (Villanova University) |
Civil Engineering Division |
| 'Turning away' from the Struggling Individual Student: An Account of the Cultural Construction of Engineering Ability in an Undergraduate Programming Class by Stephen Douglas Secules, Andrew Elby, and Ayush Gupta (University of Maryland, College Park) |
Educational Research and Methods Division |
| The Effect of Financial Support on Academic Achievement and Retention of Female Engineering Students by Yang Lydia Yang and Bette Grauer (Kansas State University) | Women in Engineering Division |
| A Multi-Institutional Study of the Relationships between Nontraditional and Traditional Undergraduate Engineering Students by Tressa Kay Mikel, Frank Q. Hoang, Emi Okada, Pedro Sung Hoe Kim, Audrianna Rodriguez, Maria-Isabel Carnasciali, Shannon Ciston (University of California, Berkeley/ University of New Haven) |
Pacific Southwest Section |
