An official website of the United States government
Abstract BackgroundThis systematic review of the literature on Latiné/x/a/o students in engineering was motivated by the recent increase in interest and thus scholarship about this population and the need for a nuanced understanding of the population's diversity. PurposeThis article's purpose is to provide a basis for critically exploring how heterogeneity within the Latiné/x/a/o engineering student population—and across the spectrum of pre‐college to graduate school—is used in engineering educational scholarship. The following research question is addressed: “How is the diversity within Latiné engineering students exemplified in the engineering education literature?” Scope/MethodThis work was guided by a liberative approach as the driving framework to review and synthesize literature published in peer‐reviewed journal articles from 2005 to 2018 that met the following inclusion criteria: (i) population of interest included Latinés; (ii) focused on engineering or included engineering within the larger STEM; and (iii) studied K–20 education. ResultsSixty‐nine studies were reviewed and synthesized. Key findings include an insufficient focus on Latiné students, an increased use of purposeful and critical theoretical frameworks, and a lack of demographics used to present a nuanced understanding of Latiné students in engineering. ConclusionsWe conclude that contextualized demographics should be included which enable analysis that provides nuanced understandings of Latiné students in engineering. While there is increased interest within engineering education to work with Latiné students, our findings point to the need of ensuring that research is conducted with cultural sensitivity, accuracy, and a nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of Latiné individuals.
more »
« less
Latiné, Latinx, Latina, Latino, or Hispanic: Problematizing terms often used in engineering education
In this guest editorial, we problematize the terms Latiné, Latinx, Latina, Latino, and Hispanic used to describe people with Latin American ancestry in the United States to better inform engineering education scholarship and practice. As members of communities that have been classified as Latiné/x/a/o or Hispanic, we are always challenged with the questions: What term should be used in our research, and why? As scholars who are also members of these communities, we bridge the contradictions emerging from our lived experiences and imposed realities while seeking to engage in a critical conversation emerging from our “theory in the flesh” (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1981). While we situate the terms historically in this guest editorial, as an act of resistance, our title places the most recent term (Latiné) first to continue to challenge historical terminologies that demoralize and oppress our communities (Revelo et al., 2022). At the same time, we recognize that for some cultures, choosing to identify by one term over another has real-life implications and consequences, such as being the targets of discrimination and oppression and being seen as transgressors (Mejiaet al., 2022), or being perceived as insiders or outsiders.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10357965
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Engineering Education
- ISSN:
- 1069-4730
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
We develop theory to understand an intriguing property of diffusion models for image generation that we term critical windows. Empirically, it has been observed that there are narrow time intervals in sampling during which particular features of the final image emerge, e.g. the image class or background color (Ho et al., 2020b; Meng et al., 2022; Choi et al., 2022; Raya & Ambrogioni, 2023; Georgiev et al., 2023; Sclocchi et al., 2024; Biroli et al., 2024). While this is advantageous for interpretability as it implies one can localize properties of the generation to a small segment of the trajectory, it seems at odds with the continuous nature of the diffusion. We propose a formal framework for studying these windows and show that for data coming from a mixture of strongly log-concave densities, these windows can be provably bounded in terms of certain measures of inter- and intra-group separation. We also instantiate these bounds for concrete examples like well-conditioned Gaussian mixtures. Finally, we use our bounds to give a rigorous interpretation of diffusion models as hierarchical samplers that progressively "decide" output features over a discrete sequence of times. We validate our bounds with synthetic experiments. Additionally, preliminary experiments on Stable Diffusion suggest critical windows may serve as a useful tool for diagnosing fairness and privacy violations in real-world diffusion models.more » « less
-
Across the United States, there is increasing concern about the poor performance of American students in science and our country’s position as a world leader in innovation (National Science Board, 2022). Furthermore, young people are inequitably prepared to fulfill our nation's workforce needs as educational resources and achievement disparities are magnified in youth from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who live in poverty (National Science Board, 2022). Science test scores for students of color who reside in low socioeconomic status communities lag far behind those of Caucasian students and students from more affluent areas (Irwin et al., 2022). These students are also less likely to pursue the higher education necessary for science- and technology-based careers (Fry et al., 2021). As a result, the United States’ scientific workforce does not reflect the population of the nation as a whole; for example, Hispanic individuals represent 18.9% of the US population, but only 8% of jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields (Fry et al., 2021). The Ocean Discovery Institute, a 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1999 to address this problem. Here, we describe Ocean Discovery’s unique model for empowering underrepresented students. It includes (1) embedding students within the community served, (2) reaching all students in a single cluster of schools (a “school-shed”), and (3) a program structure that emphasizes science identity (“belief”) and reinforces it through intentional mentorship.more » « less
-
While there is evidence to support the existence of identity-based disparities, inequities, and biases in the academic journal peer-review process, little research supports the presence of this bias in the peer-review process for academic journals in science education. Through an analysis of six leading journals in science education, we aimed to investigate the extent to which diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), as well as the presence of bias in the peer-review process, are addressed by these journals. We analyzed trends in the gender/sex, geographical affiliation, race/ethnicity, and the presence of equity-centered research focus for members of these journals' editors and editorial boards. We found that although gender/sex is well-balanced in these journals' editors and editorial boards, they are typically North American centric, and White individuals are overwhelmingly represented. Four journals had a quarter or more of individuals who pursue equity-centered research. Only two journals provided detailed information on how manuscripts are reviewed in their author submission guidelines. All used a double-blind approach to peer-review. One of the journals includes an explicit position on DEI. Based on the analyses and reflections on our own experiences, we recommend science education journals consider ways to probe whether bias does exist in their peer-review process, diversify their board to be more inclusive of scholars from communities historically marginalized, and move to a triple-blind approach to their peer-review process as mechanisms to mitigate bias in the journal peer review.more » « less
-
Local‐scale environmental justice studies of freshwaters have found that marginalized populations are more likely than others to be burdened with poor‐quality waters. However, studies have yet to examine whether monitoring data are sufficient to determine the generality of such results at the national scale. We analyzed racial and ethnic community composition surrounding lakes and the presence of one‐time and long‐term (≥15 years) water‐quality data across the conterminous US. Relative to lakes in White and non‐Hispanic communities, lakes in communities of color and Hispanic communities were three times less likely to be monitored at least once. Moreover, as compared to lakes in White communities, lakes in communities of color were seven times less likely to have long‐term monitoring data; similarly, as compared to lakes in non‐Hispanic communities, lakes in Hispanic communities were nineteen times less likely to have long‐term monitoring data. Given this evidence, assessing the current water quality of and temporal changes in lakes in communities of color and Hispanic communities is extremely difficult. To achieve equitable management outcomes for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, freshwater monitoring programs must expand their sampling and revise their designs.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20486
