About

Dr. Mark Huerta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Education Systems & Design from Arizona State University, along with a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the same institution. His research focuses on investigating and understanding the experiences and perspectives of students and faculty in undergraduate and graduate engineering teaching and learning environments through qualitative and mixed-methods research study designs. Dr. Huerta works toward developing and assessing innovative pedagogical approaches that foster professional skills and establish safe, inclusive educational environments conducive to learning, mental health, well-being, and innovation. Prior to his current role, Dr. Huerta was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech and a Lecturer at Arizona State University’s Fulton Schools of Engineering, where he was recognized with a Top 5% Teaching Award in 2020. He has a strong passion for humanitarian engineering and community service, serving as a co-founder and board member of 33 Buckets, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing sustainable clean water solutions in underserved rural communities in the Global South. His leadership in this organization has earned him several awards, including the Pritzker Prize Top 5 Finalist for Emerging Environmental Genuis and the Tempe Sister Cities 'Making a World of Difference' Award. Dr. Huerta’s teaching philosophy emphasizes experiential, authentic, and project-based learning, shaped by his experiences co-directing community service engineering programs and leading global initiatives during his time at ASU.

Research topics

• Engineering management
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Medical education
• Sociology
• Psychotherapist
• Medicine
• Applied psychology
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Management
• Pedagogy
• Social psychology
• Marketing
• Business
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• A Year of IDPro: Lessons Learned

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• WIP: Building Buy-In for a Campus Wide Interdisciplinary Projects Class

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• BOARD # 411: NSF RFE Project Update: An exploration of how faculty advising influences doctoral student psychological safety and the impact on work-related outcomes

  2025-08-21

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A Critical Evaluation of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention Integrated into First-year Engineering Classrooms

  2025-10-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Engineering learners must develop skills to design holistic solutions that take competing and complex economic, environmental, and social factors into account. Yet, these skills are not simply cognitive in nature. To develop holistic solutions, engineering learners must develop their affective attitudes so that they can gain an awareness of inequities and injustices in the

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Brief: Development of Feedback Literacy Through Reflections in Project-Based Learning Teams

  2025-08-21

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Special Session: Fostering Psychological Safety in Doctoral Advising Relationships

  2025-11-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Psychological safety is a relatively understudied concept in graduate education, especially in engineering. Despite this, psychological safety may provide a lens through which to better support graduate students' success by fostering creativity, innovation, self-advocacy, and supporting mental health. Advisors play a crucial role in the development of psychological safety for engineering doctoral students, as research shows that leaders can play a mediating role in building psychologically safe environments. This special session draws from a narrative analysis to illustrate to participants how psychological safety evolves in engineering advising relationships and encourages participants to reflect on steps they can take to foster psychologically safe environments in their own advising relationships.

  PublisherDOI

• Expanding possibilities for generative <scp>AI</scp> in qualitative analysis: Fostering student feedback literacy through the application of a feedback quality rubric

  Journal of Engineering Education · 2025-07-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Background Courses in engineering often use peer evaluation to monitor teamwork behaviors and team dynamics. The qualitative peer comments written for peer evaluations hold potential as a valuable source of formative feedback for students, yet little is known about their content and quality. Purpose This study uses a large language model (LLM) to apply a previously tested feedback quality rubric to peer feedback comments. Our research questions interrogate the reliability of LLMs for qualitative analysis with a rubric and use Bandura's self‐regulated learning theory to assess peer feedback quality of first‐year engineering students' comments. Method An open‐source, local LLM was used to score each comment according to four rubric criteria. Inter‐rater reliability (IRR) with human raters using Cohen's quadratic weighted kappa was the primary metric of reliability. Our assessment of peer feedback quality utilized descriptive statistics. Results The LLM achieved lower IRR than human raters, but the model's challenges mimic those of human raters. The model did achieve an excellent quadratic weighted kappa of 0.80 for one rubric criterion, which shows promise for LLM capability. For feedback quality, students generally wrote low‐ to medium‐quality comments that were infrequently grounded in specific teamwork behaviors. We identified five types of peer feedback that inform how students perceive the feedback process. Conclusions Our implementation of GAI suggests that LLMs can be helpful for rapid iteration of research designs, but consistent and reliable analysis with generative artificial intelligence (GAI) requires significant effort and testing. To develop feedback literacy, students must understand how to provide high‐quality feedback.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding First-Year Engineering Students' Perceptions of AI-Generated Performance Feedback Reviews

  2025-08-21

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Using a scenario-based learning approach with instructional technology to teach conflict management to engineering students

  2024-02-07 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract This evidence-based practice paper shares the methodology and findings of a workshop on conflict management that was piloted in three interdisciplinary engineering design courses that include first through fourth-year students. The workshop was designed to collect real-time student reflection data through Mentimeter, an instructional technology designed to promote class engagement. Background: Emerging literature from Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology has highlighted the importance of effective conflict management on team performance. Teaching students how to effectively manage conflict and establish inclusive, psychologically safe team environments are essential skills for effectively working on teams in preparation for the workplace, as emphasized by ABET and professional engineering organizations. Despite this, literature suggests that many engineering instructors have limited training and confidence in facilitating learning experiences that help students develop teamwork skills, including conflict management skills. While conflict management is a large field of research, there has been minimal research on instructional strategies for teaching conflict management skills to engineering students. The purpose of this paper is to share the methodology and findings of a conflict management workshop that was delivered to engineering students in three different project-based learning courses involving year-long design projects: a first-year foundations of engineering course, an interdisciplinary design course for first through four-year students from multiple majors, and a senior interdisciplinary engineering capstone course. Students' primary conflict management strategies are understood using the Dual Concern Model, which aligns conflict along two dimensions of concern for self (assertiveness) and concern for others (cooperativeness) with five conflict management strategies: Forcing, Problem-Solving, Compromising, Avoiding, and Yielding. Methods: The workshop leveraged scenario-based learning and Mentimeter to foster engagement and collect real-time reflection data. Before each class, students took the Dutch Test for Conflict Handling, which identified the extent to which students use the five different conflict management approaches. At the beginning of the workshop, students were introduced to conflict management approaches and encouraged to reflect on how they typically handle conflict. Next, students were introduced to two scenarios involving task, relationship, and process conflict. The scenarios were developed and specifically related to an engineering context with real-world situations students may encounter as a design team. During each scenario, students assumed a randomly assigned role and then role-played the scenario in groups of four to five. Mentimeter was used to collect student reactions to each scenario, reflections about their experience in their assigned role, solutions their team came up with, and key takeaways from the workshop, all in real-time. Findings: This paper shares the methodology for creating a scenario-based workshop and collecting data using Mentimeter. The quantitative results indicated that students aim to use a Problem Solving approach as their primary conflict management strategy. The qualitative responses from student reflections about the workshop showed that many students expressed a desire to move along the cooperative and assertive spectrum of the Dual Concern Model. Students discussed the importance of communication, indicating movement along the cooperation dimension. Additionally, students discussed movement along the assertive spectrum and were surprised that Forcing can be used as an effective conflict management strategy. Students also recognized the trade-offs involved when using different conflict management approaches and the importance of empathy when managing conflict. The implications of these findings are discussed in the paper along with directions for future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring Students’ Experiences with Mindfulness Meditations in a First-Year General Engineering Course

  Education Sciences · 2024-05-29 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  With growing mental health concerns among college students, they need to effectively develop skills to alleviate stress amidst the demands of university life. Teaching mindfulness skills to engineering students early in their programs, such as during introductory courses, may provide students with the tools they need to effectively cope with academic stressors, support well-being, and mitigate mental health concerns. This study aimed to understand the variation in experiences of engineering students who participated in weekly mindfulness meditation during a first-year cornerstone engineering course. This study used a thematic analysis approach to analyze students’ in-class, weekly reflections from eight meditation exercises across two course sections. The frequency of codes and themes were then analyzed across meditation types to identify trends in student experiences. Our results show that the most common student experience from engaging in mindfulness meditation was feeling less stressed, calmer, and more relaxed. Other positive experiences include feeling more energized and focused. Some students, however, did report some negative experiences, such as distress and tiredness. The Dynamic Breathing exercise, in particular, showed higher rates of negative experiences than other meditation types. The results also demonstrate that different types of meditations produce different student experiences. Meditation exercises with open monitoring components showed higher rates of insight/awareness and difficulty focusing attention than focused attention meditations. These findings indicate that utilizing weekly mindfulness exercises in introductory engineering courses can benefit students’ overall mental health and well-being when adequately implemented.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Larkin Martini

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  14 shared

• Dorian Bobbett

  Virginia Tech

  10 shared

• Karin Jensen

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  10 shared

• Jeanne Sanders

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  8 shared

• Ann McKenna

  University of Iowa

  6 shared

• Jeremi London

  Vanderbilt University

  4 shared

• Jennifer Bekki

  Universidade Federal de Campina Grande

  4 shared

• Adam Carberry

  Arizona State University

  4 shared

Labs

• Engineering EducationPI

Education

• Engineering Education Systems & Design

  Arizona State University Polytechnic School

  2019

Awards & honors

• Top 5% Teaching Award, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering,…
• Best Paper Award, Multidisciplinary Division, American Socie…
• Best Research Paper Award, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Div…
• Best Teaching Paper Award, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Div…
• Barrett Early Career Achievement Award, Arizona State Univer…