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1. Exploring professional identity development in undergraduate civil engineering students who experience disabilities

   Groen, C. J.; Paretti, M. C.; McNair, L. D.; Simmons, D. R.; Shew, A. (April 2018, 2018 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference)

   While recent calls throughout the engineering education community have focused on increasing diversity and broadening participation in STEM, these conversations typically center on race and gender with little to no work addressing disability. But research in higher education broadly suggests that cognitive, physical, and learning disabilities can markedly impact the ways in which students perceive and experience school, develop professional identities, and move into the engineering workforce. To address this gap, we build on emerging conversations that explore the ways in which students experience disability within the context of engineering education. In particular, we conducted an initial grounded theory analysis of interviews examining professional identity formation in undergraduate civil engineering students who experience disabilities. From our analysis, we observed three themes that begin to highlight ways in which the experience of students with disabilities may contribute to their development as emerging civil engineers. 

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2. Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Race/Ethnicity, Gender, First-generation Student Status, and Engineering Identity at Hispanic-serving Institutions

   Arnett, Stephanie M.; Way, Sandra M.; Ortiz, David G.; Humble, Lorissa B.B.; Martinez, Analyssa D. (July 2021, ASEE annual conference proceedings)

   This research paper investigates the relationship between race/ ethnicity, gender, first-generation college student status, and engineering identity using cross-sectional data from early-career engineering majors. Measures of engineering identity are increasingly used in models of engineering education to evaluate how identity contributes to success and persistence of engineering students. Engineering identity is generally assumed to contribute to educational success, with stronger engineering identity leading to persistence. At the same time, data clearly shows that persistence of engineering students varies by race/ethnicity and gender. Given these previous findings, we would expect to find that engineering identity will vary by race/ ethnicity, gender, and first generation status. Yet, relatively little work has quantitatively compared how engineering identity differs across racial/ ethnic groups and gender. While researchers are increasingly trying to gain a better understanding of engineering identity among Latina students, for example, the literature has not yet adequately accounted for how Latina students differ from their non-Hispanic white peers. This works seeks to address that gap in the literature with an exploration of the ways that race/ethnicity, gender, and first generation status work together to impact engineering identity among early-career engineering students at four public Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the Southwestern United States. We conducted surveys as part of a longitudinal study on STEM education. Data discussed here comes from baseline surveys of three cohorts of engineering students (N=475). Approximately two-thirds of the respondents were attending a traditional 4-year university while the remainder (N=159) were attending community college at the time of the survey. Approximately two-thirds of the respondents identified as Latinx, 27% identified as female, and 26.5% reported that they were first-generation college students. While expectations were that engineering identity would vary by race/ethnicity and gender, preliminary analyses of our data unexpectedly reveal no significant differences between Latinx and White students in terms of their engineering identity and no significant differences in engineering identity between male and female students. Interactions between race/ethnicity and gender were also tested and yielded no significant differences between early-career Latinx and White students in terms of their engineering identity. Finally, students who reported that they will be the first in their family to get a college degree had significantly lower engineering identity scores (=-.422; p=.001). These results lead us to conclude that first generation status at HSIs may be more important than gender and race/ ethnicity in the development of engineering identity for early career students. 

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3. The Double Bind of Race and Gender: A Look into the Experiences of Women of Color in Engineering

   Cross, K; Mendenhal, R; Clancy, K.B.H.; Amos, J.R. (June 2017, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   African Americans, Latinos/Latinas, and other traditionally underserved ethnic/racial groups are needed for the next generation of engineers, scientists, and STEM educators. Women of color (WOC), in particular, represent a tremendous untapped human capital that could further provide a much-needed diversity of perspective essential to sustain technological advantages and to promote positive academic climate. Recently engineering educators have questioned the STEM community commitment towards increasing the participation of WOC. Indeed, national reports of domestic students studying and completing STEM degrees show marginal improvement in broadening participation with significant lag in engineering, despite the known benefits of diversity. Therefore, more must be done by the STEM community to attract and retain WOC. For students of color, campus climate issues around race, class, and gender are critical components shaping their higher education learning environment. Research suggests hostile campus climates are associated with students of color leaving STEM fields before graduating. Such barriers can be more pronounced for WOC who often experience a “double bind” of race and gender marginalization when navigating the STEM culture. Therefore, it is important that educators understand experiences of WOC and what is needed to improve students’ experiences in order to minimize the performance gap in key indicators (e.g., retention, achievement, and persistence). We seek to address this STEM need through the guiding research question: “How does the double bind of race and gender impact the experience of women of color in engineering?” The data reported here is part of a larger, sequential mixed-methods study that is informed by the Womanist and intersectionality theoretical frameworks. For the first time, we introduce the Womanist Identity Attitude scale to engineering education research, which provides an efficient way to understand gender and racial identity development of WOC along with the intersection of identities. Intersectionality provides a means to produce scholarship that investigates the connection between social identity dimensions and educational conditions. Social identity models that adhere to intersectionality concepts acknowledge that multiple oppressed identities have a cumulative, not additive, impact. Although intersectionality is used to understand the experiences of students of color in higher education, few engineering education studies apply an intersectionality framework, particularly for WOC. After a short pilot study, we anticipate the survey results will generate three outcomes. First, the survey results will show what intersecting identities most impact the experience of WOC in engineering. Second, interview question and potential themes will be created by grouping results into clusters of intersectionality types or exemplars of intersecting identities. Finally, we will generate strategies to overcome the challenge of the double bind for WOC in engineering by examining the context and scope of intersecting identities emphasized by participants in the survey to. Overall, the results presented here will provide the foundation for a larger study that will lead to a deeper understanding of the challenges WOC face in the engineering culture and expose areas to improve inclusion efforts that target WOC. 

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4. The Double Bind of Race and Gender: A Look into the Experiences of Women of Color in Engineering

   Cross, Kelly J.; Clancy, Kathryn B.H.; Mendenhall, Ruby; Imoukhuede, Princess; Amos, Jennifer R. (June 2017, Proceedings – American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition (ASEE), Columbus, OH. June 24-28, 2017)

   African Americans, Latinos/Latinas, and other traditionally underserved ethnic/racial groups are needed for the next generation of engineers, scientists, and STEM educators. Women of color (WOC), in particular, represent a tremendous untapped human capital that could further provide a much-needed diversity of perspective essential to sustain technological advantages and to promote positive academic climate. Recently engineering educators have questioned the STEM community commitment towards increasing the participation of WOC. Indeed, national reports of domestic students studying and completing STEM degrees show marginal improvement in broadening participation with significant lag in engineering, despite the known benefits of diversity. Therefore, more must be done by the STEM community to attract and retain WOC. For students of color, campus climate issues around race, class, and gender are critical components shaping their higher education learning environment. Research suggests hostile campus climates are associated with students of color leaving STEM fields before graduating. Such barriers can be more pronounced for WOC who often experience a “double bind” of race and gender marginalization when navigating the STEM culture. Therefore, it is important that educators understand experiences of WOC and what is needed to improve students’ experiences in order to minimize the performance gap in key indicators (e.g., retention, achievement, and persistence). We seek to address this STEM need through the guiding research question: “How does the double bind of race and gender impact the experience of women of color in engineering?” The data reported here is part of a larger, sequential mixed-methods study that is informed by the Womanist and intersectionality theoretical frameworks. For the first time, we introduce the Womanist Identity Attitude scale to engineering education research, which provides an efficient way to understand gender and racial identity development of WOC along with the intersection of identities. Intersectionality provides a means to produce scholarship that investigates the connection between social identity dimensions and educational conditions. Social identity models that adhere to intersectionality concepts acknowledge that multiple oppressed identities have a cumulative, not additive, impact. Although intersectionality is used to understand the experiences of students of color in higher education, few engineering education studies apply an intersectionality framework, particularly for WOC. After a short pilot study, we anticipate the survey results will generate three outcomes. First, the survey results will show what intersecting identities most impact the experience of WOC in engineering. Second, interview question and potential themes will be created by grouping results into clusters of intersectionality types or exemplars of intersecting identities. Finally, we will generate strategies to overcome the challenge of the double bind for WOC in engineering by examining the context and scope of intersecting identities emphasized by participants in the survey to. Overall, the results presented here will provide the foundation for a larger study that will lead to a deeper understanding of the challenges WOC face in the engineering culture and expose areas to improve inclusion efforts that target WOC. 

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5. Engineering doctoral student retention from an organizational climate and intersectional perspective: A targeted literature review of engineering education literature.

   Aldridge, JL; Else-Quest, N M; Yoon, S Y; Roy, J (June 2023, American Society for Engineering Education)

   The National Science Board has declared that the long-term vitality of the U.S. workforce relies on the full range of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career pathways being available to all Americans. This declaration was premised on the increasing diversity in the U.S. population [1] and the need for multiple perspectives on the complex problems faced by society [2]. Thus, the National Science Foundation, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the American Institutes of Research, and the Council of Graduate Schools have stated that the increased participation of women and members of racially minoritized and marginalized (RMM, including Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous) groups in STEM is imperative to maintain the U.S. standing as a global leader in innovation. Because engineering doctoral graduates account for a large share of the innovation workforce [3], the ongoing lack of diversity in the engineering doctoral workforce remains a problem with far-reaching implications for the U.S. economy. The ‘mold’ for an engineering doctoral student was created by graduate education's earliest beneficiaries: young, White, and single men. Students who fall outside this mold, including women, people of color, older people, people with children, and people with disabilities are more likely than their traditional graduate student counterparts to report climate-related issues [4]. While some studies of university or campus-level climate for students have included doctoral students in general, few studies disaggregate findings by discipline or by demographic categories beyond gender identity and race/ethnicity. In engineering, Riley, Slaton, and Pawley’s [5] observed that the engineering education research community tends to take up issues of diversity focused on “women and [racial and ethnic] minorities while queerness, class, nationality, disability, age, and other forms of difference are, for the most part, not seen as requiring address”. This literature review was conducted as a preliminary assessment of the available research literature produced by the engineering education community on organizational climate affecting the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. We seek to understand this specific student group’s retention as an organizational climate issue and use an intersectional approach to consider the meaning and relevance of students’ belonging, simultaneously to multiple social categories, such as gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, race/ethnicity, and disability status within the context of engineering doctoral education as a first step to building a climate survey instrument. Searches on February 2, 2023, for existing scoping reviews and systematic reviews on this topic conducted on JBI Evidence Synthesis, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and the Campbell Collaboration did not provide results [6]. The objective of this literature review is to explore how the concept of ‘climate’ is being used in the context of doctoral engineering student retention to degree completion and gather a body of evidence of climate factors. To do this, we conducted a targeted literature review and used intersectionality [7] [8] as our approach to interpreting the literature, as we aim to understand how climate affects the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. In this paper, we first briefly present our understanding of organizational climate and intersectionality, then we explain our methodology, followed by results and finally discuss our analysis of the climate literature in engineering. 

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