STEM Workforce Development   STEM Learning and Learning Environments  

Broadening Participation in STEM

Am I Smart Enough to be an Engineer? Study of Engineering Students' Beliefs and Identities Across Institutionalized Educational Pathways

Effective Years: 2019-2024

This EHR Core Research project involves a qualitative, exploratory study that will collect interview data to capture the beliefs and identities of first-year engineering students with respect to intelligence and engineering. Participants will be enrolled in the same introductory engineering courses across six distinct institutionalized pathways. Despite significant efforts to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in engineering, those who earn engineering undergraduate degrees remain predominately male, white, and middle- or upper-middle class. While this problem is complex and persistent, for students who are interested in engineering, the beliefs they hold about their own "ability" is critical to their participation. These beliefs are tied to the cultural construction of "intelligence" in educational systems, which is often biased towards the values of dominant groups. In addition to programmatic efforts to directly increase diversity (e.g. women or minority in engineering programs), providing multiple introductory pathways into engineering degree programs is a wide-spread and institutionalized structure that is often assumed to recruit and retain diverse individuals. Such pathways commonly aim to do so through increasing options (e.g., honors or residential versions of introductory courses), access and affordability (e.g., introductory courses at community colleges or regional campuses), and support (e.g., an alternative math starting point). Upon implementation, these pathways may be similar in structure to educational tracking; students with higher previous academic achievement end up in the more prestigious pathways. Prior research in the K-12 context has concluded that such educational tracking perpetuates social inequities; students who participate in less prestigious tracks often hold lower educational aspirations and less positive beliefs about their own ability. As a result, this research seeks to investigate how multiple pathways intended to increase diversity in engineering may fail to achieve this intended goal due to unintended influences on students' beliefs and identities. Through iterative, qualitative analyses the researchers will investigate if and how students' beliefs and identities vary as a function of their participation in a given pathway. Understanding the dynamics of student beliefs and identities across these pathways has the potential for translation into policy recommendations locally and nationally to address the use of multiple pathways to recruit students and promote their persistence in engineering.

The study addresses two research questions: 1) What do students on different educational pathways believe about intelligence and engineering? 2) How do these students express their personal identities related to being smart and being an engineer? Based on theories of belief and identity, the researchers will recruit students from six different pathways with varying degrees of competitive entrance, geographic location, class size, and enrollment: 1) an honors program; 2) a living-learning or residential program; 3) a general engineering enrollment program; 4) an alternative mathematics starting point program, 5) a regional campus program; and 6) a community college pathway. Students from all six pathways will supply survey data and 30 will be recruited for in depth interviews conducted three times during the research study. Researchers will code the data giving consideration to each individual's experiences as well as search for patterns in the data from individuals within and across each pathway to determine whether there are between-pathway variations. The research will bring in the voices of individuals who pursue engineering degrees following different pathways, including those who may not be retained in their initial pursuit of an engineering degree. This work may reveal some hidden limitations of multiple pathways as a way to diversify engineering graduates in the US. In addition, the research contributions may advance the field of engineering education by taking a systematic and critical look at potentially problematic differences in students' beliefs and identities as a function of their educational pathway.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.