Contribution: This study examined the role of the engineering and smartness identities of three women as they made decisions about their participation in engineering majors. In addressing the under-representation of women in engineering, particularly in electrical engineering and computer science fields where they have been extremely under-represented, it is important to consider engineering identity as it has been shown to be an important component of major selection and persistence. Background: Smartness is inextricably linked to engineering and prior work has shown that identifying as smart is salient to students who choose engineering majors. However, the relative roles of students' engineering and smartness identities as they relate to academic decision making and persistence in engineering is not well understood. Research Question: How do engineering identity and smartness identity relate to women's decisions about choosing engineering majors in the instances of joining engineering, changing engineering major, and leaving engineering? Methodology: Data were collected from a series of three interviews with three different women. Data condensation techniques, including writing participant summary memos and analytic memos, focused on detailing participants' academic decisions, engineering identity, and smartness identity were used for analysis. Data visualization was used to map the women's engineering identity and smartness identity to their academic decisions related to their majors. Findings: The findings indicate the participants' smartness identity was salient in the initial decision to matriculate into engineering, both their engineering and smartness identities remained stable as they persisted in or left engineering. And reveal complex interactions between these identities and decision making. © 1963-2012 IEEE.

Common discourse conveys that to be an engineer, one must be smart. Our individual and collective beliefs about what constitutes smart behavior are shaped by our participation in the complex cultural practice of smartness. From the literature, we know that the criteria for being considered smart in our educational systems are biased. The emphasis on selecting and retaining only those who are deemed smart enough to be engineers perpetuates inequity in undergraduate engineering education. Less is known about what undergraduate students explicitly believe are the different ways of being smart in engineering or how those different ways of being a smart engineer are valued in introductory engineering classrooms. In this study, we explored the common beliefs of undergraduate engineering students regarding what it means to be smart in engineering. We also explored how the students personally valued those ways of being smart versus what they perceived as being valued in introductory engineering classrooms. Through our multi-phase, multi-method approach, we initially qualitatively characterized their beliefs into 11 different ways to be smart in engineering, based on a sample of 36 engineering students enrolled in first-year engineering courses. We then employed quantitative methods to uncover significant differences, with a 95% confidence interval, in six of the 11 ways of being smart between the values personally held by engineering students and what they perceived to be valued in their classrooms. Additionally, we qualitatively found that 1) students described grades as central to their classroom experience, 2) students described the classroom as a context where effortless achievement is associated with being smart, and 3) students described a lack of reward in the classroom for showing initiative and for considerations of social impact or helping others. As engineering educators strive to be more inclusive, it is essential to have a clear understanding and reflect on how students value different ways of being smart in engineering as well as consider how these values are embedded into teaching praxis.

Background: Those who participate in engineering are often assumed to be smart by others. At the same time, the cultural construction of what counts as “smart” is biased and therefore functions as a barrier to broadening participation in engineering. While considerable work has been done to understand engineering identity, how students understand themselves as smart is rarely made explicit in engineering identity research. Purpose: This paper is a theoretical discussion which highlights the need for engineering identity research to integrate students’ understanding of themselves as smart. By not incorporating students’ understanding of themselves as smart explicitly in work on engineering identity, we allow the bias in what gets recognized as smart to remain implicit and oppressive. Scope: In this paper, we argue that the idea of smart is very salient in engineering contexts and contributes to inequity. Then, we demonstrate how three different framings of identity allow for the explicit integration of how students are understanding themselves as smart. We also present selected examples from our empirical data to illustrate the concrete ways in which students’ understandings of themselves as smart manifest in an engineering context. Conclusions: We provided explicit opportunities for researchers to integrate students’ understandings of themselves as smart across three different framings of identity and how such understanding has shown up in our empirical research. In doing so, we conclude that making “smart” explicit in engineering identity provides a way to understand the exclusionary nature of engineering, and a new lens to apply when considering efforts to broaden participation in engineering.

Background Modern engineering culture is rooted in assumptions of intellectual superiority. Scholars have demonstrated that smartness functions as an oppressive cultural practice in educational settings. However, the shared ways in which undergraduate engineering students understand what it means to be smart remain largely implicit and unexamined. Purpose/Hypothesis We investigated the beliefs held by students about what it means to be smart and the role of smartness in their undergraduate education. Design/Method We conducted one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 20 students at a predominately White institution. Our team utilized open, descriptive coding to iteratively condense our data into categories, codes, and subcodes, followed by analysis to identify and characterize the participants' commonly held beliefs. Results Students believed that being smart is working efficiently or maximizing outcomes while minimizing effort. Determining smartness as efficiency included social comparison and assumptions about effort, which introduced ambiguity into students' judgments of smartness. The resulting social hierarchy (relative positioning as smart) was commonly believed to enable or restrict access to necessary resources. Conclusions Students' belief that smartness is an individual capacity to work more efficiently than others obfuscates the reality of smartness as a cultural practice that is baked into our systems and perpetuates inequity. Without action to reveal and disrupt smartness as a structural and oppressive practice, the status quo of inequitable participation in engineering will persist.

A well-developed interview protocol is an essential data collection tool in qualitative research. An established process to refine interview protocols can help build quality and consistency into data collection. However, despite the importance placed on interview protocols by academic texts, there is little guidance regarding how to systematically develop and refine interview protocols, particularly when exploring complex constructs, such as beliefs and identity. In this special session, attendees will learn and practice an approach for refining interview protocols for investigating complex constructs in engineering education. We share this interview refinement approach as it enabled us to determine if our interview questions prompted participants to provide data essential to answering our research questions for a pilot study investigating students' beliefs and identities. This special session will also include conversations around best practices related to data collection to access complex constructs and how these practices can impact and shape future research. We welcome attendees of all experience levels (novice to expert) with regard to designing interview protocols. The session will be facilitated by Dr. Emily Dringenberg, Dr. Rachel Kajfez, and their graduate students. Dr. Dringenberg is a qualitative researcher well versed in beliefs. Dr. Kajfez is a mixed methods researcher well versed in identity. Both have multiple NSF grants exploring these complex constructs.

The underrepresentation of non-male and non-White individuals in engineering continues to be a persistent and critical problem [1-3]. A widespread and commonly accepted approach to recruit and retain diverse individuals in engineering is to provide multiple pathways into engineering degree programs, such as offering introductory courses at community colleges or regional campuses. Although these pathways are intended to promote diversity, they are similar in structure to the educational tracking practices common within the K-12 context, which extant research has shown perpetuate social inequalities [4]. Specifically, students in less prestigious tracks have lower educational aspirations and less favorable self-beliefs [5]. As such, the objective of this research is to understand the beliefs and identities with respect to smartness and engineering of undergraduate engineering students from different institutionalized pathways into engineering. Each pathway is a trajectory to earning an engineering degree from a large, public, research-intensive university in the Midwest, which enrolls just over 1600 new first-year undergraduates in engineering each year on the main campus alone. Specifically, this project is designed to address the following research questions: 1) What do students from different institutionalized pathways into engineering believe about smartness and engineering? 2) How do these students express their personal identities related to being smart and being an engineer? In order to answer our research questions over the scope of the full, three-year project, we will collect and analyze a series of three interviews with 30 participants across six different first-year institutionalized pathways into engineering: main campus-honors program, main campus-residential cohorts, main campus-standard program, main campus-alternative math starting point, regional campuses, and community college. The first interview is to establish the participants' beliefs and identities related to smartness and engineering. The two follow up interviews, conducted approximately six months and one year after the initial interview, will provide additional insight by looking back at what aspects of the individuals' beliefs and identities have changed or remained the same during their degree progress. During the time span of the data collection, it is expected that participants will move between institutions, pathways, and perhaps even out of engineering. To date, we have completed the pilot phase of this multi-year, qualitative study. During the pilot, we conducted semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with nine first-year engineering students across three different institutionalized pathways into engineering. The main objective of the pilot was to develop and refine the interview protocol. As a constructivist study, we are interested in how each participant assigns meaning through their subjective experiences [6]. As such, the one-on-one interviews are the primary means of data collection, and it is essential that the protocol elicits responses from the participants that allow us to answer our research questions. The methods utilized during the pilot, the interview protocol development and refinement, and future work will be discussed in the following sections of this executive summary. © American Society for Engineering Education 2020.