Substantial research over the past few decades has documented the challenges women experience both as students in engineering programs and as professionals in engineering workplaces. Few studies, however, have followed women from one context to the other to explore the ways in which school experiences, and particularly capstone experiences designed explicitly to facilitate this transition, do and do not prepare women for their work as practicing engineers. To address this gap, we draw on data from a larger multi-institution study to address the question, “How do women engineers experience the transition from school to work?”
The sample for this study includes 23 participants from four different universities (three mechanical engineering programs and one engineering science program). All participants identified as “female” on a screen questionnaire that included options for transgender and gender-nonconforming, as well as an option to skip the question. The data set includes interviews with the participants conducted at the end of their capstone design course, responses to open-ended questions sent each week during their first 12 weeks of work, and interviews conducted after their first three months of work. The capstone interviews explored participants’ experiences in their capstone design course, including project role, significant challenges and accomplishments, and perceived learning, as well as their plans for and expectations of their post-graduation work. The weekly open-ended questions asked participants to describe their most significant challenge over the past week and to explain how they addressed the challenge. Finally, the three-month interviews explored participants’ work experiences, including significant challenges as well as similarities and differences between capstone experiences and work, along with their evolving definitions of engineering.
To answer the research question, we will employ thematic analysis to first identify emergent codes from the data set and subsequently synthesize those codes into themes. Preliminary review of the data suggests several potential themes that include overt experiences of gender discrimination, perceptions of (lack of) belonging or competence, and cultural shifts that may not have been effectively addresses in participants’ capstone courses or broader experiences.
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An Exploration of Course Design Heuristics Identified from Design Meetings, Design Artifacts, and Educator Interviews
This research paper investigates differences between course design heuristics that have been identified from three distinct data sources: course design team meetings, educator interviews, and course design papers. The study of heuristics used by experts in a discipline can have several practical benefits. They can (1) be employed as tools to scaffold expert behavior among novices, (2) be translated into processes to make challenging tasks more efficient, and (3) provide deeper insights into the nature of a domain, task, or discipline. While the study of heuristics remains robust across domains, they have demonstrated differences in format and have been identified through a variety of data types. The purpose of this study is to unpack differences in heuristics independently identified through different data types in order to better understand the role these types of data can play in understanding of heuristics for course design, especially as related to engineering courses.
We utilized thematic analysis to explore the patterns of differences between heuristics identified from the three settings in three related, but distinct studies. Datasets includes audio-recordings from a four-month team course redesign process, five approximately hour-long educator interviews, and 183 peer-reviewed course design papers.
We identified four themes representing differences across the datasets: (1) differences in volume/frequency of heuristics, (2) differences in breadth, specificity, and conceptualizations evidenced by categories of heuristics, (3) individual heuristic specificity, and (4) locus of clarity in heuristic examples. These results inform a set of four considerations for selecting data sources for studies of heuristics within engineering course design and other domains.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1623125
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10337950
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 ASEE Annual Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Heuristics are cognitive strategies used to efficiently achieve an outcome and are used in the daily practice of many disciplines. Understanding the heuristics used by experts can help researchers and practitioners to better understand an activity and develop systems to support the efficacy and development of novices. While heuristics have been well-documented in psychology, industrial design, and engineering disciplines, they are not as thoroughly understood in the field of instructional design, or engineering course design in particular. This study sought to address that gap by using thematic analysis to identify and group the heuristics used by nine educators redesigning a second-year embedded systems course for electrical, computer, and software engineering students. We collected a variety of data, including audio recordings and written notes from team meetings, design artifacts (including final course materials), interviews with team members, and semi-weekly reflections from the course instructor, to explore heuristics from multiple lenses. We identified 22 heuristics, which were further grouped into 6 categories. The paper describes these heuristics and provides concrete examples of how they were used in practice. These findings indicate the prevalence of heuristics for engineering course design and suggests that additional heuristics can be identified across different educational settings.more » « less
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According to the National Science Foundation, 50% of Black engineering students who have received a bachelor’s and master’s degree attended a community college at some point during their academic career. However, while research highlights the importance of supporting underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities (URMs) in STEM disciplines, there is a dearth of literature focusing on URMs in community colleges who pursue engineering and other science/math-based majors. Further, Black undergraduates in community colleges are often homogenized by area of study, with little regard for their specific major/discipline. Similarly, while engineering education research has begun to focus on the population of community college students, less attention has been paid to unpacking the experiences of racial subgroups of community college attendees. The engineering student transfer process has specific aspects related to it being a selective and challenging discipline (e.g., limited enrollment policies, engineering culture shock) that warrants a closer investigation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of a small population of students who have recently transferred from several community colleges to one four-year engineering school. Specifically, we will present preliminary findings derived from interviews with three Black students who started their academic careers at several community colleges in a Mid-Atlantic state, before transferring to the flagship institution of that same state. Interview transcripts will undergo a thorough analysis and will be coded to document rich themes. Multiple analyses of coded interview data will be performed by several members of the research team, as well as external evaluation members who are leading scholars in STEM and/or transfer education research. This research is part of a larger-scale, three year qualitative study, which will examine the academic trajectories of two distinct groups of Blacks in engineering majors: 1) Blacks born and educated in the United States and 2) Those born and educated in other countries. By looking at these populations distinctly, we will build upon past literature that disaggregates the experiences of Black STEM students who represent multiple identities across the African diaspora. Through this lens, we hope to highlight the impact that cultural background may have on the transfer experience. The theoretical framework guiding this study posits that the persistence of Black transfer students in engineering is a longitudinal process influenced by the intersection of both individual and institutional factors. We draw from the STEM transfer model, noting that the transfer process commences during a student’s community college education and continues through his/her transfer and enrollment in an engineering program at a four-year institution. The following factors contribute to our conceptualization of this process: pre-college background, community college prior to transfer, initial transfer to the four-year university, nearing 4-year degree completion.more » « less
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Our transformative mixed-methods project, funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers, responds to calls for more cross-institutional qualitative and longitudinal studies of minorities in engineering education. We seek to identify the factors that promote persistence and graduation as well as attrition for Black students in Electrical Engineering (EE), Computer Engineering (CpE), and Mechanical Engineering (ME). Our work combines quantitative exploration and qualitative interviews to better understand the nuanced and complex nature of retention and attrition in these fields. We are investigating the following overarching research questions: 1. Why do Black men and women choose and persist in, or leave, EE, CpE, and ME? 2. What are the academic trajectories of Black men and women in EE, CpE, and ME? 3. In what ways do these pathways vary by gender or institution? 4. What institutional policies and practices promote greater retention of Black engineering students? In this paper, we report on the results from 79 in-depth interviews with students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and a Historically Black University (HBCU [or HBU]). We describe emergent findings during Year 3 of our project, with a focus on four papers-in-progress: • Paper # 1: Our project utilized several innovative strategies for collecting narratives from our 79 interviewees. In particular, we developed a card-sorting activity to learn more about students’ reasons for choosing their engineering major. We have explored a variety of ways to analyze the data that illustrate the value of this type of data collection strategy and which will be of value to other researchers interested in decision making where there is a potentially complex set of factors, such as those found in deciding on a major. • Paper # 2: We summarized student responses to a pre-interview climate survey about three domains – Teaching and Learning, Faculty and Peer Interactions, and Belonging and Commitment. We investigated two questions: Are there differences between persisters and switchers? And, are there differences by study major? Results indicate substantial differences between persisters and switchers and some differences between ME and ECE students. • Paper # 3: Preliminary analysis of interviews of 10 HBCU Black students and 10 PWI Black students revealed that students enact several different types of community cultural wealth, particularly family, navigational, aspirational, social and resistant capital. Early results suggest that the HBCU students enacted a different form of family capital that resided in their “HBCU family” and the opportunities that their college-based networks afforded them to succeed in the major. PWI students described various forms of navigational capital and assets that were enacted in order to succeed at their study institutions. Our paper concludes with implications for university policies and practices aimed toward underrepresented students.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--32060
