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1. Board 207: ACCESS in STEM: An S-STEM Project Supporting Economically Disadvantaged STEM-Interested Students in Their First Two Years

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42618  

   Cline, Erica; Abraham, Menaka; Alaei, Sarah; Dillon, Heather; Dinglasan-Panlilio, Joyce; Heller, Jutta; Kmail, Zaher; Lee, Seung-Jin; Ma, Eva; Nahmani, Marc; et al (June 2023, ASEE Conferences)

   Achieving Change in our Communities for Equity and Student Success (ACCESS) in STEM at the University of Washington Tacoma started as a Track 1 S-STEM program in 2018 and has supported 69 students to date. This year we received Track 2 funding and welcomed our fifth cohort to campus, with funding to support ~32 additional students through 2026. University of Washington Tacoma is an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institution (AANAPISI), and we serve a high proportion of racial minority and first generation college students. Our ACCESS scholars are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics, Environmental Science, Biomedical Sciences, Information Technology, Computer Science and Systems, Computer Engineering and Systems, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Civil Engineering, with Computer Science and Engineering representing over 60% of ACCESS scholars to date. First-time college students and first-year transfer students receive full scholarships for their first two years, and partial scholarships for their third and fourth years. The project includes an optional Early Fall Math course to enhance entry into STEM majors, and participants are able to engage in a Research Experience or project-based Introduction to Engineering course in their first year. Coupled with individual faculty mentoring and an on-campus STEM living learning community, the quarterly Success in STEM seminar course helps scholars form a cohesive community through group mentoring, as well as develop a sense of belonging, identity, and empowerment to transform the culture of STEM. This program is distinguished by its focus on pre-STEM majors in their first and second years on campus, and includes mentor training for ~30-40 faculty in teaching and mentoring diverse student populations, thus impacting all students in our majors. Our goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of a program that focuses on the first two years of college and provides financial support, courses to introduce students to research and project-based engineering, and intensive mentoring in increasing retention and academic success for Computer Science and Engineering (CS+E) students, and whether this program helps to close equity gaps for CS+E students who are low socioeconomic status (SES), underrepresented minorities (URMs), female, and/or first generation in college (First Gen) students. We compared our student scholars to a comparison group of students who met eligibility requirements but did not participate in the program. Program scholars had higher first and second year retention, and had significantly higher GPAs. The pandemic resulted in significant social, emotional, and economic stresses for our program scholars, which may have heightened the impact of the ACCESS in STEM program. 

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2. Enhancing STEM Degree Completion: A Framework for the Civil and Mechanical Engineering (CAM) Scholarship Project

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47314  

   Jaafar, Israd; Jensen, Matthew; Tolman, Sean; Bordelon, Amanda; Willardson, Bennington; Raje, Janis (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   This paper presents the practical framework for implementing the Civil and Mechanical Engineering (CAM) Scholarship project, using a recently received grant from the NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (NSF-S-STEM) program. This project is focused on supporting the retention and degree completion of low-income, and high-achieving students with proven financial need in the Civil and Mechanical Engineering programs at the College of Engineering and Technology (CET) at the University. The University is an open-admissions public institution of higher education with a dual mission model that aims to combine the resources and rigor of a major university yet keep the accessibility of a community college. The institution’s student body is markedly different than those at research focused institutions: 37% are first generation, 80% work while enrolled, 30% are over 25 years old, and only 48% are full-time students. These circumstances create challenges in degree completion, leading to high attrition rates at the university level. The overall retention rate is 65%, the typical 4-year undergraduate graduation rate is only 13%, and the 6-year graduation rate is 29%. Specific to the Mechanical and Civil Engineering programs, the first-year retention rate for students starting in 2020 was 64%. Students cited several reasons for leaving, with 35% reporting that they are unable to afford college. Although a 2020 Institutional Research study found that scholarships are the most effective form of financial aid to increase persistence, CET has few dedicated scholarships to award students. Furthermore, the few scholarships available in the college are based on merit and do not factor in low-income and other factors that lead to attrition. This project aims to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income and high-achieving students. This project also seeks to advance understanding about the effect of evidence-based, context-specific interventions to ensure success for STEM program students in open-admissions universities. The framework of this project is to study and address several institutionally identified attrition points in the XXX that includes: (i) high attrition of first- and second-year students, (ii) slow pace of students to matriculation into the Civil and Mechanical Engineering programs, and (iii) low participation and completion rates of women, underrepresented minorities, and first-generation students. In addition to the scholarship award, several approaches have been identified for implementation to support scholarship recipients’ success: (i) Multi-layered Mentoring, (ii) Social and Academic Support via an active, collaborative, and inclusive cohorts, (iii) Professional Preparation, and (iv) High Impact Practices. This project can be used to inform other institutions with similar populations and/or concerns on impactful programs, practices, and interventions that are most impactful for students. This paper provides the framework of what will be implemented in the CAM Scholarship project. 

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3. Experiencing disability: A preliminary analysis of professional identity development in U.S. undergraduate civil engineering students

   Groen-McCall, Cassandra; McNair, Lisa D; Paretti, Marie C; Shew, Ashley; Simmons, Denise R (December 2018, 29th Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference 2018 (AAEE 2018))

   Context: Within higher education, reports show that approximately 6% of Australian college students and 13% of U.S. college students have identified as having a disability to their institution of higher education. Findings from research in K-12 education report that students with disabilities often leave secondary school with lower college aspirations and are discouraged from taking engineering-related courses. Those who do enrol are often not supported effectively and must navigate physical, cultural, and bureaucratic university systems in order to access resources necessary for success in school and work. This lack of support is problematic as cognitive, developmental, mental health, and physical disabilities can markedly shape the ways in which students perceive and experience school, form professional identities, and move into the engineering workforce. However, little work has explored professional identity development within this population, specifically within a single engineering discipline such as civil engineering. Purpose: To move beyond tolerance and actively embrace students with diverse perspectives in engineering higher education, the purpose of this study is to understand the ways in which undergraduate students who experience disability form professional identities as civil engineers. Approach: Drawing on the sensitizing concepts of identity saliency, intersectionality, and social identity theory, we utilize Constructivist Grounded Theory (GT) to explore the influences of and interactions among students' disability and professional identities within civil engineering. Semi-structured interviews, each lasting approximately 90 minutes, were conducted with undergraduate civil engineering students who identified as having a disability. Here, we present our findings from the initial and focused coding phases of our GT analysis. Results: Our analyses revealed two themes warranting further exploration: 1) varying levels of disability identity saliency in relation to the development of a professional identity; and 2) conflicting colloquial and individual conceptualizations of disability. Overall, it has been observed that students' experiences with and perceptions of these themes tend to vary based on characteristics of an experienced disability. Conclusions: Students with disabilities experience college - and form professional identities - in a variety of ways. While further research is required to delineate how disability shapes college students' professional identities and vice versa, gaining an understanding of student experiences can yield insights to help us create educational spaces that better allow students with disabilities to flourish in engineering and make engineering education more inclusive. 

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4. Experiencing disability: A preliminary analysis of professional identity development in U.S. undergraduate civil engineering students

   Groen-McCall, C.; McNair, L. D.; Paretti, M. C.; Shew, A.; Simmons, D. R. (December 2018, 29th Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference 2018 (AAEE 2018))

   Context: Within higher education, reports show that approximately 6% of Australian college students and 13% of U.S. college students have identified as having a disability to their institution of higher education. Findings from research in K-12 education report that students with disabilities often leave secondary school with lower college aspirations and are discouraged from taking engineering-related courses. Those who do enrol are often not supported effectively and must navigate physical, cultural, and bureaucratic university systems in order to access resources necessary for success in school and work. This lack of support is problematic as cognitive, developmental, mental health, and physical disabilities can markedly shape the ways in which students perceive and experience school, form professional identities, and move into the engineering workforce. However, little work has explored professional identity development within this population, specifically within a single engineering discipline such as civil engineering. Purpose: To move beyond tolerance and actively embrace students with diverse perspectives in engineering higher education, the purpose of this study is to understand the ways in which undergraduate students who experience disability form professional identities as civil engineers. Approach: Drawing on the sensitizing concepts of identity saliency, intersectionality, and social identity theory, we utilize Constructivist Grounded Theory (GT) to explore the influences of and interactions among students' disability and professional identities within civil engineering. Semi-structured interviews, each lasting approximately 90 minutes, were conducted with undergraduate civil engineering students who identified as having a disability. Here, we present our findings from the initial and focused coding phases of our GT analysis. Results: Our analyses revealed two themes warranting further exploration: 1) varying levels of disability identity saliency in relation to the development of a professional identity; and 2) conflicting colloquial and individual conceptualizations of disability. Overall, it has been observed that students' experiences with and perceptions of these themes tend to vary based on characteristics of an experienced disability. Conclusions: Students with disabilities experience college - and form professional identities - in a variety of ways. While further research is required to delineate how disability shapes college students' professional identities and vice versa, gaining an understanding of student experiences can yield insights to help us create educational spaces that better allow students with disabilities to flourish in engineering and make engineering education more inclusive. 

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5. Do I Think I’m an Engineer? Understanding the Impact of Engineering Identity on Retention

   Hughes, Bryce E.; Schell, William J.; Annand, Emma; Beigel, Romy; Kwapisz, Monika B.; Tallman, Brett (June 2019, American Society for Engineering Education)

   National reports have indicated colleges and universities need to increase the number of students graduating with engineering degrees to meet anticipated job openings in the near-term future. Fields like engineering are critical to the nation’s economic strength and competitiveness globally, and engineering expertise is needed to solve society’s most pressing problems. Yet only about 40% of students who aspire to an engineering degree follow the path to complete one, and an even smaller percentage of those students continue into an engineering career. Underlying students’ motivation to transform their engineering interest into an engineering career is the psychological construct of engineering identity. Engineering identity reflects the extent to which a person identifies with being an engineer. Previous research has focused on experiences or interventions that promote engineering identity, and some qualitative work has suggested students who are retained in engineering experience differences in engineering identity, but little research has tested the relationship between retention and engineering identity, especially modeling change in engineering identity over four years of college. The data for this study were taken from the 2013 College Senior Survey (CSS), administered to students at the end of their fourth year of college by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. Students’ responses to CSS items were then matched to their responses to the Freshman Survey (TFS), also administered by CIRP, at the very beginning of their first year of college. For this study, all students who indicated their intended major as engineering at the start of college constituted the sample, which included 1205 students at 72 universities. The dependent variable is a dichotomous variable indicating if students marked engineering as their major at the end of the fourth year of college. The main independent variable of interest in this study is engineering identity. Engineering identity was computed using exploratory factor analysis with three items from the CSS indicating the importance to students of becoming an authority in their chosen field, being recognized for contributions to their field, and making theoretical contributions to science. Hierarchical generalized linear modeling with robust standard errors was used to model engineering retention as the dependent variable was dichotomous in nature and the data were “nested” in structure (students nested within universities). Control variables include a pretest of engineering identity from the TFS, college experiences known to predict retention and other outcomes in engineering, demographic variables, precollege academic preparation, choice of engineering major, academic and social self-concept at college entry, and institutional characteristics. In the final model, engineering identity was a significant predictor of engineering retention, controlling for all other factors including the engineering identity pretest. 

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