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1. Building a Leadership Toolkit: Underrepresented Students' Development of Leadership-Enabling Competencies through a Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Engineering Education

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43054  

   Volpe, Elizabeth; Simmons, Denise; Rojas, Sara (June 2023, ASEE Conferences)

   The development of inclusive leaders is essential for the success of future engineering and our nation. Equipping students with vital leadership-enabling competencies is necessary to develop a workforce that is prepared to act ethically, and responsibly, and tackle unforeseen challenges in the future. Inclusive leaders, or leaders that are self-aware, empathetic, and prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in their decision-making, are essential for the forward progress of engineering. A growing body of literature highlights the numerous ways in which students may develop leadership skills outside of the classroom through involvement in out-of-class activities (e.g., internships, clubs, sports, and research experiences). Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) may provide students with a unique opportunity to develop leadership-enabling competencies that will prepare them for leadership in graduate school, the engineering industry, or academia. The goal of this research was to identify how students’ engagement in an engineering education virtual REU site contributed to their development of essential leadership-enabling competencies. The research question guiding this study was ‘What inclusive leadership-enabling competencies and skills did engineering students learn and develop during an engineering education Summer REU program?’ Qualitative data was collected via weekly open-ended surveys from 9 students (7 women, 2 men) participating in an REU over 9 weeks. Participants in this study consisted of students from underrepresented groups in engineering (e.g., Black, Latinx, women, students from low SES backgrounds, or first-generation students), attending large public research universities across the United States. This study implemented mixed methods to understand what leadership competencies were occurring most frequently and how students were learning and developing these competencies. A combination of text mining for frequency (quantitative analysis) and deductive and inductive coding (qualitative analysis) was used to analyze the data. A codebook was developed based on the leadership-coupled professional competencies that engineering industry leaders identified as essential for engineers entering the workforce. Researchers also allowed for other competencies and leadership-enabling skills to emerge from the data. Findings from this work indicate that students were developing a vast amount of inclusive leadership knowledge and skills from participating in the virtual REU site. This paper highlights, through the use of word clouds and text mining software, the many leadership-enabling competencies that participants developed throughout the summer research experience (e.g., learning, communication, adaptability, self-awareness, balance, networking, etc.). Further, students were able to develop digital literacy, increased communication skills, knowledge of career pathways, intrapersonal growth, and interpersonal relations. This work offers a novel contribution to the literature in understanding how students can develop technical engineering and research skills as well as professional and leadership skills in the same space. Findings from this work help to illuminate the benefits of this virtual REU site focused on engineering education research resulting in terms of developing inclusive leadership skills. Implications for future REU programs, students interested in developing leadership skills, engineering graduate programs, academia, and industry employers are outlined. 

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2. Exploring the Relationship Between Students’ Engineering Identity and Leadership Self-Efficacy

   Schell, William J.; Hughes, Bryce E.; Tallman, Brett; Annand, Emma; Beigel, Romy; Kwapisz, Monika B. (June 2019, American Society for Engineering Education)

   In order to lead the social process required to solve society’s grandest challenges and ensure that the capabilities of an expanded engineering workforce are successfully harnessed, new engineers must be more than just technical experts, they must also be technical leaders. Thankfully, greater numbers of engineering educators are recognizing this need and are consequently establishing engineering leadership certificates, minors, and even full degree programs through centers at universities throughout the country. However, for these programs to reach their full potential, engineering educators must be successful in integrating leadership into the very identity of engineers. This study seeks to better understand the relationship between engineering identity and leadership, so tools can be developed that enable engineering educators to more effectively integrate leadership into an engineering identity. This paper explores this relationship using a national sample of 918 engineering students who participated in the 2013 College Senior Survey (CSS). The CSS is administered by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA to college students at the end of their fourth year of college; data from the CSS are then matched to students’ prior responses on the 2009 Freshman Survey (TFS), which was administered when they first started college, to create a longitudinal sample. Using a leadership construct developed by HERI as the outcome variable, this work utilizes Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM) to examine the impact of engineering identity and a host of other factors shown to be important in college student development on leadership. HLM is especially appropriate since individual student cases are grouped by schools, and predictor variables include both student-level and institution-level variables. The leadership construct, referred to as leadership self-efficacy in this work, includes self-rated growth in leadership ability, self-rating of leadership ability relative to one’s peers, participation in a leadership role and/or leadership training, and perceived effectiveness leading an organization. The primary independent variable of interest was a factor measuring engineering identity comprised of items available on both the TFS and CSS instruments. Including this measure of engineering identity from two different time periods in the model provides the relationship between engineering identity in the fourth year and leadership self-efficacy, controlling for engineering identity in the first year as a pretest. Statistically significant results were found across each of the areas tested, including the fourth-year engineering identity factor as well as several collegiate experiences, pre-college experiences, major, and institutional variables. Taken together, these results present a nuanced picture of what matters to predicting leadership outcomes for undergraduate engineering students. For example, while engineering identity is a significant positive predictor of the leadership construct, computer engineers score lower than mechanical engineers on leadership, while interacting with faculty appears to enhance leadership self-efficacy. 

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3. An Approach to Understand the Role of Identity in Engineering Leadership

   Schell, Wiliam J; Hughes, Bryce E. (June 2017, ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   In order to most effectively contribute to the development of solutions to society’s greatest challenges, engineers must learn to lead the interdisciplinary teams required to develop these solutions. However, most undergraduate engineering programs do little to develop leadership skills in their students. Perhaps, one reason for this gap between needs and education is a conflict between the development of an engineering identity and a leadership identity. To date, the literature contains little work that illustrates the role leadership concepts play in the formation of an engineering identity. Therefore, more work is needed to understand the formation of a leadership identity within the formation of an engineering identity. Together, these development processes constitute the formation of engineering leaders. This paper presents the methods underway to validate and refine a proposed theoretical model of engineering leadership identity development. This model can be used to reshape existing engineering leadership education programs and integrate leadership into the engineering curriculum in an innovative manner. The model starts with a fundamental assumption that the engineering leadership formation process is, at its core, an identity development process. This assumption is also central to two established theoretical perspectives that informed the construction of this model. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice model argues that the development of a professional identity is the outcome of learning within a community of practice, and is frequently used to explain the process by which undergraduates develop a sense of engineering identity. The communities of practice model is then combined with Komives, Owen, Longerbeam, Mainella, and Osteen’s (2005) Leadership Identity Development Model to outline how engineering students might cultivate a self-concept as a leader. A key argument within this model is that college students develop a personal sense of leadership as an identity when they view leadership as a process, not merely a position. This paper first explains the development of this theoretical model of engineering leadership identity development combining the literature from engineering identity development, leadership identity development within collegiate populations, and engineering leadership. Following this explanation, this work focuses on the methods developed and currently being deployed to validate and refine the model, including initial findings from this research. 

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4. Intersection of Race and Gender on Leadership Formation of Undergraduate Engineering Students

   Lilley, Carmen M. (January 2021, American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) 2021 Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD))

   null (Ed.)

   This project explores the leadership beliefs, experiences, and knowledge/skills of undergraduate engineering students who have self-identified as having leadership experience at a Research I minority serving institution for Asian Americans and Native Americans, as well as a Hispanic Serving Institution. Thirty-two undergraduate engineering students with self-identified leadership experience were recruited from the College of Engineering across the various majors. In this paper, the perspective of how students described their self-identities and the emerging categories of negative leadership experiences that act as external stressors is presented and discussed specifically for the students that identified as belonging to an underrepresented minority group, including those that were multiracial. The research illustrates how nuances need to be explored to understand how intersectionality of critical race theory with feminist theory increases the complexity of creating an inclusive logic model that can be incorporated into a theory of change that increases academic and professional success of engineers as future leaders within an organization. 

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5. Intersection of Race and Gender on Experiences of Undergraduate Engineering Students in Leadership Roles

   Lilley, Carmen (January 2020, American Society of Engineering Education 2020 Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   This project explores the leadership beliefs, experiences, and knowledge/skills of undergraduate engineering students who have self-identified as having leadership experience at a Research I minority serving institution for Asian Americans and Native Americans, as well as a Hispanic Serving Institution. Thirty-two undergraduate engineering students with self-identified leadership experience were recruited from the College of Engineering across the various majors. In this paper, the perspective of how students described their self-identities and the emerging categories of negative leadership experiences that act as external stressors is presented and discussed specifically for the students that identified as belonging to an underrepresented minority group, including those that were multiracial. The research illustrates how nuances need to be explored to understand how intersectionality of critical race theory with feminist theory increases the complexity of creating an inclusive logic model that can be incorporated into a theory of change that increases academic and professional success of engineers as future leaders within an organization. 

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