Dr. Matt Ohland leads the MIDFIELD project, a multi-institution research study involving a dataset that includes academic records of more than 200,000 engineering undergraduate students and more than 800,000 non-engineering students. Through rigorous analysis of this longitudinal data, Dr. Ohland and his team have studied the effects of race, class, gender, institution, and discipline on student persistence, performance, and disciplinary pathways. At this session, Dr. Ohland will introduce the MIDFIELD project, describe the research methods used in the efforts, and present some important findings.

 

This session is part of the Engineering Education Research Day. 

 

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Matthew W. Ohland is Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He has degrees from Swarthmore College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Florida. He is known particularly for his research on managing student teams and longitudinal studies of engineering students using institutional data. He directed the development of the Comprehensive Assessment of Team-Member Effectiveness, a project that has grown into the System for the Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for Teamwork (SMARTER Teamwork). The system is used by 200,000 students of 4350 faculty at 835 institutions in 54 countries. Dr. Ohland is a Fellow of ASEE and IEEE, and with collaborators, he has received best paper awards from the Journal of Education (2008 and 2011) and the IEEE Transactions on Education.