Title: Development and Refinement of Interview Protocol to Study Engineering Students' Beliefs and Identities
Despite decades of research, the underrepresentation of non-male, and non-white individuals in engineering continues to be a critical problem. A widespread and commonly accepted approach to recruit and retain diverse individuals 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 that extant research has shown often work to perpetuate social inequalities. Students in less prestigious tracks have lower educational aspirations and less favorable self-beliefs. As such, the objective of this research is to understand undergraduate engineering students’ beliefs and identities with respect to smartness and engineering from different institutionalized educational pathways. In our executive summary and poster, we report on the pilot phase of the project consisting of nine semi-structured one-on-one interviews with first-year engineering students across three different institutionalized educational pathways as well as the development and refinement of the interview protocol. The pilot interview protocol was initially development to access the main constructs of interest for this research, beliefs about engineering and smartness as well as identity with respect to engineering and smartness. After the pilot interviews were completed, we utilized an interview protocol refinement approach and determined that the most insufficient portion of our initial protocol was the portion designed to have participants relate their engineering identity to their identity as smart (or not). As such, follow up questions were added to the protocol to provide clarity. The refined interview protocol will be used during the next phase of the study. The full study will include interviews with 30 participants across six different pathways to understand how participation in different institutionalized pathways relates to students’ experiences, beliefs, and identities. These participants will be interviewed up to three times to follow their development as they transition beyond introductory engineering courses regardless of if they continue with the engineering or not. Our work will provide valuable insights into the complex beliefs and identities about engineering and smartness of students participating in different institutionalized pathways into engineering. Ultimately, we believe our findings will inform the ways in which this common structural approach to broadening participation is enacted in engineering. more »« less
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.
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.
Abstract BackgroundStudents' identification with engineering is intertwined culturally with being smart. Broadly, engineering students are often considered to be smart by others and by themselves, and these beliefs about smartness—what it is and who has enough of it to be an engineer—are a fundamental and limiting aspect of students' experiences. PurposeThe purpose of this study was to explore how undergraduate engineering students describe themselves as smart enough to be engineers. We aimed to develop rich descriptions of the complex ways they articulate their identities as smart before coming to college and during the first two years of their undergraduate degrees. Design/MethodWe collected data through a series of interviews with 25 participants. We iteratively and collaboratively analyzed the data to determine the predominant ways the participants articulated their identities as smart enough to be engineers. We generated a qualitative data display to check for patterns related to pathways into engineering programs and privileged social identities. ResultsWe found that engineering students have three different ways to articulate that they are smart enough to be engineers: (1) they have innate abilities, (2) they are hardworking and dedicated to learning, and (3) they have skills and experience related to engineering. Additionally, we provide qualitative evidence that the innate abilities articulation relates to privilege. Discussion/ConclusionThe study participants engaged in identity work that produced the three articulations. As engineering educators, we need to take responsibility for the ways in which our participation in the cultural practice of smartness reproduces inequity.
The purpose of this poster paper is to present progress toward reaching the third research aim of an NSF CAREER-funded study, using qualitative methods to explore the intersection of LGBTQ and STEM identities. The overall project purpose is to explore LGBTQ students’ engagement in STEM disciplines. LGBTQ students often leave engineering and other STEM fields at a higher rate than their peers due to unwelcoming environments, and engineering educators should tackle issues like heteronormativity and cissexism in the learning environment to promote diversity among future practicing engineers. The past year of the project has been focused on finishing data collection for the first research aim, investigating the influence of LGBTQ students' social networks on non-cognitive STEM outcomes, and securing data access agreements for the second research aim, comparing STEM degree completion rates between LGBTQ students and cisgender, heterosexual peers. For this poster, we focus on the process of developing a qualitative, narrative study exploring how LGBTQ STEM students experience discipline-based identities. Our poster presents the development of our interview protocol, grounded in engineering identity and possible selves, as well as our methods for collecting and analyzing qualitative data elicited through interviews. We use possible selves as an identity-based motivation framework in developing the interview protocol that focuses on students' anticipated career paths helping to understand how students are motivated to act in ways that are congruent to who they wish to become and wish to avoid becoming with respect to their decision to enter STEM. Development of the instrument began with a review of the literature to find key concepts that need to be covered in the interviews as well as example interview questions to be adapted for this study. In particular, the research team reviewed instruments used in prior research on possible selves to understand how existing procedures could be adapted to fit the purposes of this project. Following IRB approval, the interview protocol was refined through pilot testing with people who meet the study’s criteria for inclusion. Our next step is to recruit students for participation in this phase of the research. Many of these students will be identified through the survey from the first research aim of the project which gathered contact information for participants interested in participating in follow-up research. Others will be identified through recruitment nationally with organizations such as oSTEM. We expect to have preliminary data to discuss at the ASEE 2024 poster session, but data collection is expected to last through much of the coming year. Once these data are collected and analyzed, the overall project will move into a phase focused on completing the project’s educational aims and broad dissemination of findings across all three research aims.
Delpech, Dira; Dringenberg, Emily
(, ASEE Conferences)
Engineering educators in many contexts are increasingly being called to contribute to equity. The focus of our CAREER project is to investigate the ways in which engineering faculty, staff and administrators think about the cause of gender- and race-based minoritization in engineering. Specifically, we investigate the beliefs they express about why women and people of color remain minoritized in engineering and how they arrive at those beliefs. Long term goals of the work include designing evidence-based professional development that can support faculty at any stage in their development as change agents for equity in engineering. The overarching project design includes a series of four one-on-one interviews with participants. The first two interviews are focused on their beliefs about gender- and race-based minoritization, respectively. The third interview will explore their narrative, and the fourth interview (or some type of interaction) will be designed based on how the project evolves and what we learn. We are currently in the second year of the project. To start, our research team used crowdsourcing as a method of recruiting our participants. We asked students to identify engineering educators that they considered to be inclusive based on their lived experience. We oversampled for students from minoritized groups (non-male, non-white). We also allowed those nominated by students to refer to any peers that they felt were inclusive. This resulted in the following participant pool with at least one majority identity (race or gender): 11 white men, 11 white women, and 5 men of color. After piloting our initial interview protocol, we completed gender beliefs interviews with all 27 participants during the 2020-2021 academic year. We had the interviews transcribed, and members of our research checked them for accuracy and de-identified them. The clean transcripts were then sent back to the participants for review. We began data condensation by generating a summary sheet for each participant, which includes the main concepts captured in each section of their gender beliefs interview. We are currently (2021-2022) conducting race beliefs interviews with those same participants. We published the results of piloting the use of our methodological framework, Thinking as Argument (TaA) in the 2021 ASEE proceedings. In short, we believe the framework shows promise for studying beliefs at a deeper level by inviting participants to work through the types of evidence they draw on to commit to their beliefs about the cause of minoritization in engineering. In this paper, we offer some insights that are emerging at this early stage of the project: Different participants draw on diverse ways of knowing to commit to their beliefs, including lived experience and scholarship. These ways of knowing seem potentially related to their own identities. For example, several participants who identify as men of color leverage their own experiences with racism to explain the cause of sexism. This insight has given us pause on the ways in which our framework, TaA, privileges academic or argumentative ways of knowing. We are gaining awareness of the incredible complexity that exists within trying to characterize or evaluate someone's contributions to equity as they relate to their ways of thinking. This finding has given us a pause about the ways in which we, as researchers, assign value to ways of being or acting. At this current stage, we are exploring further by engaging ourselves in reflection of other ways in which beliefs in this context are formed and we are inviting others to do the same. Future work will include ongoing analysis and sensemaking. With the race beliefs completed, we will be able to use data display techniques to explore any patterns between the participants’ beliefs and positionalities. We look forward to honing our protocol for the narrative interviews and are soliciting feedback in terms of how to use the fourth and final interaction of the project in a more participatory way to encourage and give back to our participants.
Kramer, Amy, Dringenberg, Emily, and Kajfez, Rachel. Development and Refinement of Interview Protocol to Study Engineering Students' Beliefs and Identities. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10252155. Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual . Web. doi:10.18260/1-2--34443.
Kramer, Amy, Dringenberg, Emily, & Kajfez, Rachel. Development and Refinement of Interview Protocol to Study Engineering Students' Beliefs and Identities. Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual, (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10252155. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34443
Kramer, Amy, Dringenberg, Emily, and Kajfez, Rachel.
"Development and Refinement of Interview Protocol to Study Engineering Students' Beliefs and Identities". Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual (). Country unknown/Code not available. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34443.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10252155.
@article{osti_10252155,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Development and Refinement of Interview Protocol to Study Engineering Students' Beliefs and Identities},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10252155},
DOI = {10.18260/1-2--34443},
abstractNote = {Despite decades of research, the underrepresentation of non-male, and non-white individuals in engineering continues to be a critical problem. A widespread and commonly accepted approach to recruit and retain diverse individuals 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 that extant research has shown often work to perpetuate social inequalities. Students in less prestigious tracks have lower educational aspirations and less favorable self-beliefs. As such, the objective of this research is to understand undergraduate engineering students’ beliefs and identities with respect to smartness and engineering from different institutionalized educational pathways. In our executive summary and poster, we report on the pilot phase of the project consisting of nine semi-structured one-on-one interviews with first-year engineering students across three different institutionalized educational pathways as well as the development and refinement of the interview protocol. The pilot interview protocol was initially development to access the main constructs of interest for this research, beliefs about engineering and smartness as well as identity with respect to engineering and smartness. After the pilot interviews were completed, we utilized an interview protocol refinement approach and determined that the most insufficient portion of our initial protocol was the portion designed to have participants relate their engineering identity to their identity as smart (or not). As such, follow up questions were added to the protocol to provide clarity. The refined interview protocol will be used during the next phase of the study. The full study will include interviews with 30 participants across six different pathways to understand how participation in different institutionalized pathways relates to students’ experiences, beliefs, and identities. These participants will be interviewed up to three times to follow their development as they transition beyond introductory engineering courses regardless of if they continue with the engineering or not. Our work will provide valuable insights into the complex beliefs and identities about engineering and smartness of students participating in different institutionalized pathways into engineering. Ultimately, we believe our findings will inform the ways in which this common structural approach to broadening participation is enacted in engineering.},
journal = {Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual},
author = {Kramer, Amy and Dringenberg, Emily and Kajfez, Rachel},
editor = {null}
}
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