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1. Board 105: The Redshirt in Engineering Consortium: Progress and Early Insights

   Riskin, Eve ; Milford, Jana ; Callahan, Janet ; Cosman, Pamela ; Schneider, John ; Pitts, Kevin ; Knaphaus-Soran, Emily ; Llewellyn, Donna ; Delaney, Ann ; Myers, Beth ; et al ( June 2018 , ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   The NSF-funded Redshirt in Engineering Consortium was formed in 2016 with the goal of enhancing the ability of academically talented but underprepared students coming from low-income backgrounds to successfully graduate with engineering degrees. The Consortium takes its name from the practice of redshirting in college athletics, with the idea of providing an extra year and support to help promising engineering students complete a bachelor’s degree. The Consortium builds on the success of three existing “academic redshirt” programs and expands the model to three new schools. The Existing Redshirt Institutions (ERIs) help mentor and train the new Student Success Partners (SSP), and SSPs contribute their unique expertise to help ERIs improve existing redshirt programs. The redshirt model is comprised of seven main programmatic components aimed at improving the engagement, retention, and graduation of students underrepresented in engineering. These components include: “intrusive” academic advising and support services, an intensive first-year academic curriculum, community-building (including pre-matriculation summer programs), career awareness and vision, faculty mentorship, NSF S-STEM scholarships, and second-year support. Successful implementation of these activities is intended to produce two main long-term outcomes: a six-year graduation rate of 60%-75% for redshirt students, and increased rates of enrollment and graduation of Pell-eligible, URM, and women students in engineering at participating universities. In the first year of the grant (AY 16-17), SSPs developed their own redshirt programs, hired and trained staff, and got their programs off the ground. ERIs implemented faculty mentorship programs and expanded support to redshirt students into their sophomore year. In the second year (AY 17-18), redshirt programs were expanded at the ERIs while SSPs welcomed their first cohorts of redshirt students. This Work in Progress paper describes the redshirt programs at each of the six Consortium institutions, identifying distinctions between them in addition to highlighting common elements. First-year assessment results are presented for the ERIs based on student surveys, performance, and retention outcomes. Ongoing research into faculty experiences is investigating how participation as mentors for redshirt students changes faculty mindsets and instructional practices. Ongoing research into student experiences is investigating how the varied curricula, advising, and cohort models used across the six institutions influence student retention and sense of identity as engineering students. 

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2. Work in Progress: Institutional Context and the Implementation of the Redshirt in Engineering Model at Six Universities

   Knaphaus-Soran, Emily ; Delaney, Ann ; Tetrick, Katherine ; Cunningham, Sonya ; Cosman, Pamela ; Ennis, Tanya ; Myers, Beth ; Milford, Jana ; Llewellyn, Donna ; Riskin, Eve ; et al ( June 2018 , ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   Low-income students are underrepresented in engineering and are more likely to struggle in engineering programs. Such students may be academically talented and perform well in high school, but may have relatively weak academic preparation for college compared to students who attended better-resourced schools. Four-year engineering and computer science curricula are designed for students who are calculus-ready, but many students who are eager to become engineers or computer scientists need additional time and support to succeed. The NSF-funded Redshirt in Engineering Consortium was formed in 2016 as a collaborative effort to build on the success of three existing “academic redshirt” programs and expand the model to three new schools. The Consortium takes its name from the practice of redshirting in college athletics, with the idea of providing an extra year and support to promising engineering students from low-income backgrounds. The goal of the program is to enhance the students’ ability to successfully graduate with engineering or computer science degrees. This Work in Progress paper describes the redshirt programs at each of the six Consortium institutions, providing a variety of models for how an extra preparatory year or other intensive academic preparatory programs can be accommodated. This paper will pay particular attention to the ways that institutional context shapes the implementation of the redshirt model. For instance, what do the redshirt admissions and selection processes look like at schools with direct-to-college admissions versus schools with post-general education admissions? What substantive elements of the first-year curriculum are consistent across the consortium? Where variation in curriculum occurs, what are the institutional factors that produce this variation? How does the redshirt program fit with other pre-existing academic support services on campus, and what impact does this have on the redshirt program’s areas of focus? Program elements covered include first-year curricula, pre-matriculation summer programs, academic advising and support services, admissions and selection processes, and financial aid. Ongoing assessment efforts and research designed to investigate how the various redshirt models influence faculty and student experiences will be described. 

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3. Board 103: EAGER: Barriers to Participation in Intensive Professional Development Opportunities

   Jarek, Stephanie ; McCord, Rachel ; Hixson, Cory ; Ingram, Ella Lee ; Williams, Julia M. ( June 2019 , 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   The Rising Engineering Education Faculty Experience program (REEFE) is a professional development program that connects graduate students in engineering education with faculty members at teaching-focused institutions. The program goal is to simultaneously support faculty growth in engineering education and graduate student growth as academic change agents. Our program has transitioned from a partnership between one engineering education graduate program and one engineering institution to a consortium of engineering education graduate programs that sends students to multiple institutions across the country. The REEFE Consortium also developed a unique partnership with the Making Academic Change Happen initiative to offer continuous training to graduate students during their REEFE experience. Many positive outcomes have come from the development of the REEFE Consortium, including better graduate training in research at the coordinating institution, a better understanding of program logistics, and new and strengthened professional relationships. We discovered a number of challenges associated with providing intensive professional development opportunities to graduate students, including timing of experiences relative to degree progress, loss of connection to the home research community, and financial impact, especially as it relates to travel and housing. While a search of existing literature in professional development in higher education has provided best practices for existing programs, there is little to no available research highlighting barriers that exist to offering different types of professional development opportunities to graduate student populations. These barriers are important to highlight as they provide critical information needed in the design and decision making for those seeking to create useful professional development opportunities for graduate populations. This paper provides an updated description of the Rising Engineering Education Faculty Experience program as we attempt to scale the program. We summarize the existing literature on barriers to participation in professional development opportunities for graduate students. Finally, we describe how REEFE both addresses and fails to address these barriers. 

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4. Systems Engineering Initiative for Student Success (SEISS) Framework for Transforming Organizational Designs

   Pennathur, Arunkumar ; Pennathur, Priyadarshini ; Blosser, Emily ; Bowman, Nicholas ( June 2023 , ASEE 2023 Annual Conference and Exposition)

   In this paper, we present the Systems Engineering Initiative for Student Success (SEISS) framework we are developing for enabling educational organizations to scan, evaluate and transform their operations to achieve their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals in student recruitment, retention, and graduation. The underlying structure and logic in our SEISS framework is that an organization such as a college of engineering is a sociotechnical system (STS) consisting of a social subsystem and a technical subsystem. The social subsystem consists of people, their roles and is a model of who talks to whom about what. The technical subsystem consists of all the activities, programs, policies, and operations that help the organization achieve its goals. In a sociotechnical system, the social and technical subsystems are interdependent in their functioning, and they must be jointly optimized from an organizational design perspective. Our SEISS framework which views a college or a similar organizational unit as a sociotechnical system lends the organizational designer a unique systems lens with which to view, analyze and design the operations and organize the capacities and resources in the college. The systems lens views an organizational unit, its sub-systems, components, and its corresponding capacities not in isolation, but as entities that interact with each other. With support from an NSF IUSE grant, we have been developing the SEISS framework and have piloted the framework in a predominantly white college of engineering to identify existing and potential technical and social system capacities for underrepresented minority (URM) students to succeed in the college. Preliminary results from our qualitative analyses of URM student interviews reveal the utility of the SEISS framework and the STS lens in unearthing the barriers and enablers for these students in the social and technical subsystems in the college. We also model the interactions between the social and technical subsystem elements in the SEISS framework, revealing latent opportunities for leveraging the connections between the social and technical subsystem capacities and resources. 

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5. Lived Experiences of African American Engineering Students at a PWI Through the Lens of Navigational Capital

   Damas, S. ; Benson, L. ( February 2022 , 2022 CoNECD (Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity))

   There are significant disparities between the conferring of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) bachelor’s degrees to minoritized groups and the number of STEM faculty that represent minoritized groups at four-year predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Studies show that as of 2019, African American faculty at PWIs have increased by only 2.3% in the last 20 years. This study explores the ways in which this imbalance affects minoritized students in engineering majors. Our research objective is to describe the ways in which African American students navigate their way to success in an engineering program at a PWI where the minoritized faculty representation is less than 10%. In this study, we define success as completion of an undergraduate degree and matriculation into a Ph.D. program. Research shows that African American students struggle with feeling like the “outsider within” in graduate programs and that the engineering culture can permeate from undergraduate to graduate programs. We address our research objective by conducting interviews using navigational capital as our theoretical framework, which can be defined as resilience, academic invulnerability, and skills. These three concepts come together to denote the journey of an individual as they achieve success in an environment not created with them in mind. Navigational capital has been applied in education contexts to study minoritized groups, and specifically in engineering education to study the persistence of students of color. Research on navigational capital often focuses on how participants acquire resources from others. There is a limited focus on the experience of the student as the individual agent exercising their own navigational capital. Drawing from and adapting the framework of navigational capital, this study provides rich descriptions of the lived experiences of African American students in an engineering program at a PWI as they navigated their way to academic success in a system that was not designed with them in mind. This pilot study took place at a research-intensive, land grant PWI in the southeastern United States. We recruited two students who identify as African American and are in the first year of their Ph.D. program in an engineering major. Our interview protocol was adapted from a related study about student motivation, identity, and sense of belonging in engineering. After transcribing interviews with these participants, we began our qualitative analysis with a priori coding, drawing from the framework of navigational capital, to identify the experiences, connections, involvement, and resources the participants tapped into as they maneuvered their way to success in an undergraduate engineering program at a PWI. To identify other aspects of the participants’ experiences that were not reflected in that framework, we also used open coding. The results showed that the participants tapped into their navigational capital when they used experiences, connections, involvement, and resources to be resilient, academically invulnerable, and skillful. They learned from experiences (theirs or others’), capitalized on their connections, positioned themselves through involvement, and used their resources to achieve success in their engineering program. The participants identified their experiences, connections, and involvement. For example, one participant who came from a blended family (African American and White) drew from the experiences she had with her blended family. Her experiences helped her to understand the cultures of Black and White people. She was able to turn that into a skill to connect with others at her PWI. The point at which she took her familial experiences to use as a skill to maneuver her way to success at a PWI was an example of her navigational capital. Another participant capitalized on his connections to develop academic invulnerability. He was able to build his connections by making meaningful relationships with his classmates. He knew the importance of having reliable people to be there for him when he encountered a topic he did not understand. He cultivated an environment through relationships with classmates that set him up to achieve academic invulnerability in his classes. The participants spoke least about how they used their resources. The few mentions of resources were not distinct enough to make any substantial connection to the factors that denote navigational capital. The participants spoke explicitly about the PWI culture in their engineering department. From open coding, we identified the theme that participants did not expect to have role models in their major that looked like them and went into their undergraduate experience with the understanding that they will be the distinct minority in their classes. They did not make notable mention of how a lack of minority faculty affected their success. Upon acceptance, they took on the challenge of being a racial minority in exchange for a well-recognized degree they felt would have more value compared to engineering programs at other universities. They identified ways they maneuvered around their expectation that they would not have representative role models through their use of navigational capital. Integrating knowledge from the framework of navigational capital and its existing applications in engineering and education allows us the opportunity to learn from African American students that have succeeded in engineering programs with low minority faculty representation. The future directions of this work are to outline strategies that could enhance the path of minoritized engineering students towards success and to lay a foundation for understanding the use of navigational capital by minoritized students in engineering at PWIs. Students at PWIs can benefit from understanding their own navigational capital to help them identify ways to successfully navigate educational institutions. Students’ awareness of their capacity to maintain high levels of achievement, their connections to networks that facilitate navigation, and their ability to draw from experiences to enhance resilience provide them with the agency to unleash the invisible factors of their potential to be innovators in their collegiate and work environments. 

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