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1. Native American engineering faculty: Insights into entry and persistence

   Authors: Jacobs, S. C. ; Johnson, S. B. ; Lee, K. ; Colston, N. ; Mason-Chagil, G. ; Turner, S. L. ; Presenters: Turner, S. L. ; Mason-Chagil, G. ( April 2019 , Keeping Our Faculty VIII: Recruiting, Retaining, Advancing American Indian Faculty and Faculty of Color)

   Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education initiatives in higher education increasingly call for career mentorship opportunities for underrepresented minorities (URM). Researchers (Johnson & Sheppard, 2004; Nelson & Brammer, 2010) note the importance of having faculty to mentor and act as role models for students, often assuming that mentors play a stronger role if they are also from the same cultural background. Native American (NA) faculty members are underrepresented in most fields in colleges and universities, and exceedingly so in engineering. Only 0.2% (N=68) of engineering faculty nationwide identify as Native American (Yoder, 2014). Likewise, NA students are underrepresented in undergraduate (0.6%; N=1853) and graduate (0.1%; N=173) engineering programs. The low percentage in graduate school is of even greater concern as they represent the primary potential pool of new faculty members. Advising and mentorship from those who identify as NA are often considered important components recruiting and retention in STEM fields. For example, Smith and colleagues (2014) found that factors such as communal goal orientation influenced NA engineering students’ motivation and academic performance. However, very few studies account for differences in NA identity or provide a nuanced account of successful NA STEM professional experiences (Page-Reeves et al., 2018). This researchmore »paper presents findings from an exploratory study aimed at pinpointing the factors that influence NA entry and persistence in engineering faculty positions.« less
2. Financial and Interdisciplinary Support Programs Differentially Support Low Income Scholars Through COVID

   Kling, Thomas ; King, Colby ; Solomon, Jibril ; Waratuke, Stephen ; Aizenman, Jennifer ( November 2022 , Transforming STEM Higher Education)

   Students Engaging In Scientific and Mathematical Interdisciplinary Collaboration (NSF 164375), supports low-income, academically talented Scholars with multiple components including scholarships, paid undergraduate research, service learning, social science and humanities courses, and career development. Scholars will graduate in STEM at a rate of 95%, higher than the rate of eligible, non-participants (62%). High percentages of Scholars attribute increased understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of STEM and growth in on-campus support networks to programming. However, they report variation in the components to which they attribute those gains, with most participants acknowledging the importance of engagement with different program components over time. Scholars report differences in off-campus work, which may have been impacted by the Covid pandemic. While all Scholars starting at the onset of the Covid pandemic were retained in STEM, retention of eligible, non-participants fell from 70% to 38%, indicating the importance of financial and communal support during challenging times.
3. Assessing Interdisciplinary Competency in the Disaster Resilience and Risk Management Graduate Program using Concept Maps

   Deters, J. R. ; Paretti, M. C. ; Zobel, C. ; Cowell, M. ; Irish, J. L. ( June 2019 , 2019 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition)

   Concept maps have emerged as a valid and reliable method for assessing deep conceptual understanding in engineering education within disciplines as well as interdisciplinary knowledge integration across disciplines. Most work on concept maps, however, focuses on undergraduates. In this paper, we use concept maps to examine changes in graduate students’ conceptual understanding and knowledge integration resulting from an interdisciplinary graduate program. Our study context is pair of foundational, team-taught courses in an interdisciplinary Disaster Resilience and Risk Management (DRRM) graduate program. The courses include a 3-hour research course and a 1-hour seminar that aim to build student understanding within and across Urban Affairs and Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geosciences, and Business Information Technology. The courses introduce core principles of DRRM and relevant research methods in these disciplines, and drive students to understand the intersections of these disciplines in the context of planning for and responding to natural and human-made disasters. To understand graduate student growth from disciplinary-based to interdisciplinary scholars, we pose the research questions: 1) In what ways do graduate students’ understandings of DRRM change as a result of their introduction to an interdisciplinary graduate research program? and 2) To what extent and in what ways do conceptmore »maps serve as a tool to capture interdisciplinary learning in this context? Data includes pre/post concept maps centered on disaster resilience and risk management, a one-page explanation of the post-concept map, and ethnographic field notes gathered from class and faculty meetings. Pre-concept maps were collected on the first day of class; post-concept maps will be collected as part of the final course assignment. We assess the students’ concept maps for depth of conceptual understanding within disciplines and interdisciplinary competency across disciplines, using the field notes to provide explanatory context. The results presented in this paper support the inclusion of an explanation component to concept maps, and also suggest that concept maps alone may not be the best measure of student understanding of concepts within and across disciplines in this specific context. If similar programs wish to use concept maps as an assessment method, we suggest the inclusion of an explanation component and suggest providing explicit instructions that specify the intended audience. We also suggest using a holistic scoring method, as it is more likely to capture nuances in the concept maps than traditional scoring methods, which focus solely on counting factors like hierarchies and number of cross-links.« less
4. Current Trends in Attrition Considerations of Graduate Engineering Students in the United States

   Bahnson, M. ; Berdanier, C.G.P ( January 2023 , International journal of engineering education)

   Available attrition statistics for graduate engineering students do not adequately inform current attrition research because they focus on degree completion rather than attrition or early departure; aggregate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students; and reflect out-of-date data. While recently some work has begun to explore doctoral attrition qualitatively, the purpose of this study is to describe current trends in graduate engineering students’ consideration of departure from their programs of study by capturing current numerical data specific to engineering about students’ recent attrition considerations. This is important because, since the last studies were conducted, higher education systems have experienced a global pandemic, economic downturn, and sociopolitical turmoil in the United States. Graduate students (n = 2204) in the U.S. completed a survey. The sample includes master’s (n = 535) and doctorate (n = 1646) degree-seeking students from 27 engineering disciplines and includes U.S. domestic and international populations. A majority of students considered leaving their degree program in the month before they took the survey: nearly 70% of Ph.D. and 39% of master’s students, while 31% of Ph.D. and 16% of master’s students seriously considered leaving their program without their degree. Descriptive statistics provide early departure considerations by engineering discipline, gendermore »identity, race/ethnicity, nationality, and year in program by degree sought. Comparisons between groups are presented for gender, nationality, and career stage. It is essential to have an updated and discipline-specific benchmark of attrition considerations for continued engineering education research purposes, for mentorship, and for administrative purposes. Early departure from graduate school remains a threat to innovation and broadening participation in engineering and the professoriate.« less
5. Championing Hispanic Student Success following Natural Disasters in Puerto Rico

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36790  

   López del Puerto, Carla ; Bellido, Carmen ; Suarez, Oscar ; Alfaro, Mónica ; Jimenez, Manuel ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   Natural disasters, such as 2017 hurricanes Irma and María, the 2020 earthquakes in Puerto Rico and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, affect students in many aspects including economic, socio-emotional, and academic performance progress. To ensure that students can cope with the aftermath of such searing events, it is necessary to develop initiatives that address these three aspects. Satisfying the financial need is essential, but a long-term solution is mandatory. Hence, providing socio-emotional and academic support and cultivating a sense of purpose are critical to prevent attrition. To secure continued STEM success among students affected by natural disasters, the National Science Foundation has funded several projects at the University of Puerto Rico, a Hispanic Serving Institution. This manuscript presents four NSF-funded projects sharing the common goal of providing support to STEM students to ensure that they succeed despite the said challenges. The first project, titled Nanotechnology Center for Biomedical, Environmental and Sustainability Application, leans heavily on research teams dedicated to design new Nanotechnology platforms to address biomedical and environmental challenges and simultaneously trains a new generation of nanoengineers and nanoscientists throughout the educational echelon starting from public intermediate schools through doctoral programs. The second project, entitled Ecosystem to Expand Capabilities and Opportunitiesmore »for STEM-Scholars (EECOS), developed an integrated framework that provides support to 62 low-income, talented, STEM students who were severely affected by Hurricane María and 2019-2020 earthquakes (58 undergraduate and 4 graduate). The project provided participants with financial, academic, socio-emotional, and career motivation support needed to complete their programs. The third project, Program for Engineering Access, Retention, and LIATS Success (PEARLS) addresses college access and economic hardships of Low-Income Academically Talented Students (LIATS). It aims at increasing the retention and academic success of talented engineering students coming from economically disadvantaged families. The fourth project, Resilient Infrastructure and Sustainability Education – Undergraduate Program (RISE-UP), has developed an interdisciplinary curriculum to educate cadres of Hispanic students on infrastructure resilience to temper and to overcome the effects of such natural disasters. Three campuses of this institution system collaborate in this interdisciplinary undertaking. Participating students are pursuing undergraduate degrees in engineering, architecture, and surveying who take the entailed courses together and participate in co-curricular activities (both online and in-person through site visits). The new curricular endeavor prepares them to design infrastructure that can withstand the impact of natural events. The expect outcome is to form cohorts of graduates ready to take on real-life infrastructure failures caused by disasters and provide them with an edge in their future professions. The present work provides a range of scalable and portable strategies that universities with underrepresented minorities in STEM programs could deploy to address the immediate and continued needs of students affected by natural disasters to secure academic success. These strategies can contribute to the development of professionals with the skills and experience to deal with severe circumstances such as those effected by natural disasters as well as the preparation to solve infrastructure challenges.« less