This poster reports on results to date of an ongoing NSF RFE Grant, entitled “Investigating the Formation of Engineers and the Future Professoriate: Linking Writing Approaches and Attitudes to Doctoral Socialization, Persistence, and Attrition.” The objective of this study is to investigate the linkage between engineering writing and disciplinary discourse with other mechanisms of engineering graduate socialization, such as identity formation, socialization, persistence, and desire to pursue academic careers. This study is designed as an embedded exploratory mixed methods study of current graduate engineering students and recent non-completers that seek to answer the following research questions:
1. How do graduate students at various stages in their PhD programs in engineering perceive the role of academic writing as it relates to academic socialization and success in future academic careers?
2. How are these perceptions different or similar for graduate students who are considering leaving or have left their PhD programs before graduating?
3. Can existing surveys of writing concepts, attitudes, and self-efficacies predict students’ risk for attrition?
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Correlations between graduate student writing concepts and processes and certainty of career trajectories
At the graduate level, most milestones are based on the ability to write for an academic audience, whether that be for dissertation proposals, publications, or funding opportunities. Writing scholars often discuss the process by which graduate students learn to join their academic “discourse communities” through academic literacies theory. Graduate attrition researchers relate the feeling of belonging with persistence in doctoral programs; however, there has not to date been any research that directly studies engineering writing attitudes and perceptions with student career trajectories, persistence, or attrition. To meet this need, this paper presents research from a larger study analyzing graduate level engineering writing and attrition. The explicit objective of this paper is to present quantitative data relating current graduate engineering students' attitudes, processes, and concepts of academic writing with the certainty of their career trajectory. Five scales measuring aspects of writing were deployed to engineering programs at ten research intensive universities across the United States, with a final total of n=621 graduate student respondents that represent early-career, mid-career, and late-career stages of the graduate timeline. Results indicate that graduate student processes and conceptions of engineering writing correlate with the likelihood of pursuing careers in various engineering sectors after completing their graduate degree programs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1733594
- PAR ID:
- 10094077
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2018.8658678
