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1. Post-graduation Plans of Undergraduate BME Students: Gender, Self-efficacy, Value, and Identity Beliefs

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-020-02693-9  

   Patrick, Anita; Borrego, Maura; Riegle-Crumb, Catherine (January 2021, Annals of Biomedical Engineering)

   null (Ed.)

   This study investigates career intentions and students’ engineering attitudes in BME, with a focus on gender differences. Data from n = 716 undergraduate biomedical engineering students at a large public research institution in the United States were analyzed using hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. Results revealed five clusters of intended post-graduation plans: Engineering Job and Graduate School, Any Job, Non-Engineering Job and Graduate School, Any Option, and Any Graduate School. Women were evenly distributed across clusters; there was no evidence of gendered career preferences. The main findings in regard to engineering attitudes reveal significant differences by cluster in interest, attainment value, utility value, and professional identity, but not in academic self-efficacy. Yet, within clusters the only gender differences were women’s lower engineering academic self-efficacy, interest and professional identity compared to men. Implications and areas of future research are discussed. 

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2. Academic Trajectories of Black Men and Women in Electrical, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering

   Orr, Marisa; Brawner, Catherine; Mobley, Catherine; Brent, Rebecca; Layton, Richard (June 2019, American Society for Engineering Education)

   Abstract We present a visual, quantitative analysis of the academic pathways of Black men and women who enroll in Electrical Engineering (EE) or Mechanical Engineering (ME) at any point during their undergraduate experience (N=4816). Our research provides evidence that more Black students choose EE than ME, in contrast to national data for all races that show that more students major in ME than EE. While more Black students initially enroll in EE overall, ME attracts a larger proportion of its Black students from other majors and retains a larger fraction. Black women are particularly persistent in ME (58%). Most Black students who leave EE or ME leave the institution without a degree. Seventy-eight percent of Black men and 65% of Black women who leave ME leave the institution without a degree. Of those leaving EE, 74% of Black men and 64% of Black women leave the institution without a degree. This examination of quantitative differences between disciplines lays a foundation for qualitative study through in depth student interviews of Black students in these majors. 

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3. Finding Meaning in Makerspaces: Exploring How Gender Influences Makerspace Definition Among First-Year Engineering Students

   Bushra, J.; Budinoff, H.D.; Shivers-McNair, A.; Berger, E. (June 2024, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   Makerspaces, intended for open and collaborative learning, often struggle to attract a diverse group of users, particularly concerning gender diversity. These issues include makerspaces becoming associated primarily with white male students, gendered connotations of machines and materials, and women’s perceived lack of self-efficacy in using makerspace tools. As a result, women may view makerspaces as unwelcoming, and societal stereotypes can affect their engagement in these spaces. Efforts to create more inclusive makerspaces are essential to fully realize the potential of makerspaces, encourage and boost confidence in marginalized groups to pursue careers in different engineering areas, and promote a diverse and collaborative maker culture. Moreover, defining makerspaces is challenging due to conflicting perceptions, the uniqueness of spaces, and the abstract elements in these environments, revealing a gap between academic definitions and the diverse voices of people interested in utilizing makerspaces. Our goal is to see if there are differences in the fundamental academic makerspace definition and makerspace definition by different genders, providing insights into how inclusive our makerspace is. We focus on gender because our interviewees focused more on gender than other identity markers in our conversations, but we also report additional demographic data that likely impacted participants’ experiences, namely, their racial and ethnic identities. Our corpus is drawn from semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in an introductory first-year engineering course. Out of 28 students interviewed, 10 identified as women, 16 as men, one as both women and questioning or unsure, and one as women and nonbinary and transgender. In terms of racial/ethnic identifications, nine participants identified as White or Caucasian; six identified as Latinx or Hispanic; five identified as Latinx or Hispanic, White or Caucasian; three identified as Black or African American; two identified as Asian, Desi, or Asian American; one identified as Latinx or Hispanic, Native American or Alaska Native; one identified as Southwest Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African, White or Caucasian; and one identified as Native African. In this ongoing study, from interview transcripts, we extracted participant responses to questions regarding their definitions of and impressions of makerspaces to identify commonalities and differences. Specifically, we use natural language processing techniques to extract word frequency and centrality and synthesize commonalities into a shared definition of a makerspace. We also separated responses from participants by gender identities to evaluate how definitions varied with gender. These emergent definitions are compared with commonly accepted definitions derived from research papers. Additionally, we conduct a complementary discourse analysis of students’ definitions and impressions of makerspaces, qualitatively examining how diverse students characterize ways of being and doing in the makerspace. 

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4. How Latiné engineering students resist White male engineering culture: A multi‐institution analysis of academic engagement

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20536  

   Garriott, Patton O.; Carrero Pinedo, Ayli; Hunt, Heather K.; Navarro, Rachel L.; Flores, Lisa Y.; Desjarlais, Cerynn D.; Diaz, David; Brionez, Julio; Lee, Bo Hyun; Ayala, Evelyn; et al (June 2023, Journal of Engineering Education)

   Abstract BackgroundAlthough participation rates vary by field, Latiné and women engineers continue to be underrepresented across most segments of the engineering workforce. Research has examined engagement and persistence of Latiné and White women in engineering; however, few studies have investigated how race, ethnicity, gender, and institutional setting interact to produce inequities in the field. PurposeTo address these limitations, we examined how Latina, Latino, and White women and men students' engagement in engineering was informed by their intersecting identities and within their institutional setting over the course of a year. MethodWe interviewed 32 Latina, Latino, and White women and men undergraduate engineering students attending 11 different predominantly White and Hispanic Serving Institutions. Thematic analysis was used to interpret themes from the data. ResultsOur findings illustrate how Latinas, Latinos, and White women developed a strong engineering identity, which was critical to their engagement in engineering. Students' engineering identity was grounded in their perceived fit within engineering culture, sense of purpose for pursuing their degree, and resistance to the dominance of White male culture in engineering. Latinas described unique forms of gendered, racialized marginalization in engineering, whereas Latinas and Latinos highlighted prosocial motivations for completing their degree. ConclusionsFindings suggest that institutional cultures, norms, and missions are critical to broadening participation of Latinas, Latinos, and White women in engineering. Disrupting White male culture, leveraging Latiné students' cultural wealth, and counter‐framing traditional recruitment pitches for engineering appear to be key in these efforts. 

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5. Explaining Choice, Persistence, and Attrition of Black Students in Electrical, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering: Award# EEC-1734347. Grantee Poster Session -Year 4

   Mobley, Catherine; Orr, Marisa; Brawner, Catherine Brent; Manning, Jessica; Tidwell, Michael L. (January 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   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. Our project builds on prior work that demonstrated the impacts of gender and race on academic trajectories in Electrical, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering (EE, CpE, and ME, respectively) to answer the following 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 Year 4 of our project, the research team has engaged in deeper analysis of our quantitative data from the Multi-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) database and our qualitative data from 79 in-depth interviews of students in the three study majors at our four study institutions. Expanding on findings presented in prior years, in this paper, we describe emergent results from three papers from Year 4 of our project: • Paper # 1: “Who Tells Your Story? Qualitative Methods for Establishing Connections and Eliciting Narratives” was published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methodology in 2021. It includes a description of the development of the card-sorting activity that students completed to describe their reasons for choosing to major in engineering and an exploration of different ways to analyze the data. Analysis of how frequently the factors influencing the major choice were chosen by interviewees has allowed us to identify those factors that carry the greatest importance for students and how they vary for persisters and switchers. • Paper # 2: “GPA Trends of Black Mechanical Engineering Students”: Our early qualitative work has led to questions about students who switch majors and those who leave the university. We are using the MIDFIELD database to better understand characteristics of students who switch majors and who leave the university. We will use functional cluster analysis to group the GPA trends to find clearly defined groups of students' GPA. Preliminary findings suggest that the students who switch majors have different GPA trends than the students who leave their institutions. This holds true for whether the student chooses to switch their major and stay within engineering and students who choose to leave engineering. • Paper # 3: “Pride and Prestige: Factors Influencing How and Why Black Students Choose to Attend a Predominantly White Institution or a Historically Black University”: In this paper, we explore the reasons that students in our study majors decided to attend either a HBCU or a PWI. Our early analysis revealed that students had diverse reasons for college choice, including affordability, location, familiarity with the institution, family encouragement and connections, and prestige of the university. Our paper will also describe the differences between students who attended a HBCU or PWI in their rationale for deciding to attend a particular university. 

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