The Formation of Engineers in Research Labs during the COVID-19 Crisis

Pedagogies of engagement in general, and authentic research experiences in particular, have shown benefits for STEM education. However, few studies have focused on STEM graduate students’ research experiences while working and learning in research laboratories. In this chapter, we discuss the preliminary findings of an ongoing cognitive-ethnographic study, in which we observed two engineering laboratories. The focus of our study has been on learning processes and on the formation of graduate students as professional engineers through research experiences in the lab. Originally, our study design included the participant observer embedded in engineering research labs, collecting data through field notes, photography, and informant interviews. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we shifted to online observation of lab meetings and to collection of reflections through autoethnographic journals. The COVID-19 pandemic has also created a unique opportunity to observe how disruptive events affect graduate students’ professional and social lives. While the sudden lockdowns created many adversities for the students, they developed resilience and, with the lab leadership’s help, adopted new strategies to continue their learning and research. Additionally, online lab meetings filled critical needs of students by becoming an intellectual, emotional, and social gathering holding the students together. Our observations also suggest that graduate students in the research lab are self-regulated learners, taking control of their own learning to conceptualize, design, and execute. Self-regulated learning facilitated by various forms of feedback (lab leadership, peers) appears to be the primary learning mechanism in the research lab. We conclude the chapter with implications from our study for educational strategies that enable effective adaptations to learning and research during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.