Despite efforts to diversify the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, engineering remains a White, male-dominated profession. Often, women and underrepresented students do not identify with STEM careers and many opt out of STEM pathways prior to entering high school or college. In order to broaden participation in engineering, new methods of engaging and retaining those who are traditionally underrepresented in engineering are needed.
This work is based on a promising approach for encouraging and supporting diverse participation in engineering: disciplinary literacy instruction (DLI). Generally, teachers use DLI to provide K-12 students with a framework for interpreting, evaluating, and generating discipline-specific texts. This instruction provides students with an understanding of how experts in the discipline read, engage, and generate texts used to solve problems or communicate information. While models of disciplinary literacy have been developed and disseminated in several humanities and science fields, there is a lack of empirical and theoretical research that examines the use of DLI within the engineering domain. It is thought that DLI can be used to foster diverse student interest in engineering from a young age by removing literacy-based barriers that often discourage underrepresented students from entering and pursuing careers in STEM fields.
This work-in-progress paper describes a new study underway to develop and disseminate a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. During this project, researchers will observe, interview, and collect written artifacts from engineers working across four sub-disciplines of engineering: aerospace/mechanical, biological, civil/environmental, and electrical/computer. Data that will be collected include interview transcripts, observation field notes, engineer logs of literacy practices, and photographs of texts that the engineers read and write. Data will be analyzed using constant comparative analytic (CCA) methods. CCA will be used to generate theoretical codes from the data that will form the basis for a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. As a primary outcome of this research, the engineering DLI model will promote the use of DLI practices within K-12 engineering instruction in order to assist and encourage diverse, underrepresented students to engage in engineering courses of study and pursue STEM careers.
Thus far, the research team has begun collecting and analyzing data from two electrical engineers. This work in progress paper will report on preliminary findings, as well as implications for K-12 classroom instruction. For instance, this study has shed insights on how engineers use texts as part of the process of conducting failure analysis, and the research team has begun to conceptualize how these types of texts might be used with K-12 students to help them conduct failure analyses during design testing. Ultimately, this project will result in a list of grade-appropriate texts, evaluative frameworks, and activities (e.g., failure analysis in testing) that K-12 engineering teachers can use to prepare their diverse students to think, act, read, and write like engineers.
more »
« less
When Am I (N)ever Going to Use This? How Engineers Use Algebra
Mathematics is an important tool in engineering practice, as mathematical rules govern many designed systems (e.g., Nathan et al., 2013; Nathan et al., 2017). Investigations of structural engineers suggest that mathematical modelling is ubiquitous in their work, but the nature of the tasks they confront is not well-represented in the K-12 classroom (e.g., Gainsburg, 2006). This follows a larger literature base suggesting that school mathematics is often inauthentic and does represent how mathematics is used in practice. At the same time, algebra is a persistent gatekeeper to careers in engineering (e.g., Harackiewicz et al., 2012; Olson & Riordan, 2012).
In the present study, we interviewed 12 engineers, asking them a series of questions about how they use specific kinds of algebraic function (e.g., linear, exponential, quadratic) in their work. The purpose of these interviews was to use the responses to create mathematical scenarios for College Algebra activities that would be personalized to community college students’ career interests. This curriculum would represent how algebra is used in practice by STEM professionals. However, our results were not what we expected. In this paper, we discuss three major themes that arose from qualitative analyses of the interviews.
First, we found that engineers resoundingly endorsed the importance of College Algebra concepts for their day-to-day work, and uniformly stated that math was vital to engineering. However, the second theme was that the engineers struggled to describe how they used functions more complex than linear (i.e., y=mx+b) in their work. Students typically learn about linear functions prior to College Algebra, and in College Algebra explore more complex functions like polynomial, logarithmic, and exponential. Third, we found that engineers rarely use the explicit algebraic form of an algebraic function (e.g., y=3x+5), and instead rely on tables, graphs, informal arithmetic, and computerized computation systems where the equation is invisible. This was surprising, given that the bulk of the College Algebra course involves learning how to use and manipulate these formal expressions, learning skills like factoring, simplifying, solving, and interpreting parameters. We also found that these trends for engineers followed trends we saw in our larger sample where we interviewed professionals from across STEM fields.
This study calls into question the gatekeeping role of formal algebraic courses like College Algebra for STEM careers. If engineers don’t actually use 75% of the content in these courses, why are they required? One reason might be that the courses are simply outdated, or arguments might be made that learning mathematics builds more general modelling and problem-solving skills. However, research from educational psychology on the difficulty of transfer would strongly refute this point – people tend to learn things that are very specific. Another reason to consider is that formal mathematics courses like advanced algebra have emerged as a very convenient mechanism to filter people by race, gender, and socioeconomic background, and to promote the maintenance of the “status quo” inequality in STEM fields. This is a critical issue to investigate for the future of the field of engineering as a whole.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1759195
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10377486
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The Bureau of Statistics identified an urgent demand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals in the coming years. In order to meet this demand, the number of students graduating with STEM degrees in the United States needs to increase by 34% annually [1]. Engineering for US All (E4USA): A National Pilot Program for High School Engineering Course and Database is a NSF-funded first-of-its-kind initiative designed to address this national need. The E4USA project aims to make engineering more inclusive and accessible to underrepresented minorities, while increasing racial, ethnic, and gender representation in higher education and the workforce. The “for us all” mission of E4USA encompasses both students and educators. The demand for engineering educators has increased, but relying on practicing engineers to switch careers and enter teacher preparation programs has been insufficient [2, 3, 4]. This has led schools to turn to educators with limited training in engineering, which could potentially have a significant national impact on student engineering education [5, 6, 7]. Part of the E4USA pilot year mission has been to welcome educators with varying degrees of experience in industry and teaching. Paramount to E4USA was the construction of professional development (PD) experiences and a community of practice that would prepare and support teachers with varying degrees of engineering training instruction as they implemented the yearlong course. The perspectives of four out of nine educators were examined during a weeklong, intensive E4USA PD. Two of four educators were considered ‘novices’; one with a background in music and the other in history. The remaining two educators were deemed ‘veterans’ with a total of 15 years of experience as engineers and more than 20 years as engineering educators. Data sources consist of focus groups, surveys, and artifacts created during the PD (e.g., educators’ responses to reflection prompts and letters written to welcome the next cohort). Focus group data is currently being analyzed using inductive coding and the constant comparative method in order to identify emergent themes that speak to the past experience or inexperience of educators with engineering. Artifacts were used to: 1) Triangulate the findings generated from the analysis of focus group, and 2) Further understand how the veteran educators supported the novice educators. We will also use quantitative survey data to examine descriptive statistics, observed score bivariate correlations, and differences in mean scores across novices and veterans to further examine potential common and unique experiences for these educators. The results aim to highlight how the inclusion of educators with a broad spectrum of past experiences with engineering and engineering education can increase educators’ empathy towards students who may be equally hesitant about engineering. The findings from this study are expected to result in implications for how PD and a community of practice may be developed to allow for reciprocal support and mentoring. Results will inform future efforts of E4USA and aim to change the structure of high school engineering education nationwide.more » « less
-
As the field of engineering faces looming societal issues, it becomes particularly important to foster more “holistic engineers” with systems-thinking skills and an understanding of the macro-ethical impacts of their work (Canny and Bielefeldt, 2015) Macro-ethics here refers to the collective social responsibility of engineers as a profession, as opposed to micro-ethics, which concern activities within the profession (Herkert, 2005). However, college students studying engineering in the United States exhibit a decline in concern for public welfare over the course of their education (Cech, 2014) as well as a tendency to orient to micro-ethical issues over macro-ethical issues (Schiff et al, 2020). Scholars attribute these trends to ideologies pervasive in engineering spaces, such as depoliticization of engineering practice, technocracy, and meritocracy (Cech, 2014; Slaton, 2015). While Cech (2014) argues these status quo ideologies in engineering are maintained by a “culture of disengagement” that decreases interest in public welfare, Radoff et al. (2022) find indications that additional factors contribute to engaged students’ reproduction of such ideologies. They find, for example, instances of students in reproducing dehumanizing narratives regarding low-income communities, despite their enrollment in a voluntary program premised on cultivating socially responsible STEM professionals. This finding suggests that even students who remain “engaged” to some degree can reproduce status quo ideologies which Cech (2014) attributes to disengagement. One explanation as to why a macro-ethically “engaged” student may fail to attend to the social aspects of design follows a deficit narrative: a lack of knowledge or ability. We see this assumption in comparisons of students’ and experts’ design processes, where the areas in which students behave differently than experts are interpreted as areas that require additional instruction on how to behave more like the experts (Atman et al., 2008). This presupposition of students’ lacking knowledge or skills, however, backgrounds contextual or interactional factors. Philip et al. (2018) challenges such assumptions in their analysis of a classroom discussion on the ethics of drone warfare, which exemplifies students’ convergence to American nationalism, but with the framing that this convergence is interactionally created, rather than the result of individual students’ stable, dogmatic beliefs. However, because their analysis is limited to the scope of a single class discussion, the extent to which students’ performance is situated in said class remains unclear. In this paper, we attempt to understand the ways in which students reproduce ideologies dominant in engineering, as well as the situated nature of students’ ideological orientations in collaborative work. We consider a case study focus group from Radoff et al. (2022) where students reasoned through a hypothetical design scenario about a grocery store. We show how, despite many opportunities where problematic status-quo narratives are momentarily challenged, the students generally reject the challenges, not by arguing against them, but by positioning them outside the scope of their work. Further, we show how these moments of rejection are tightly coupled with attempts to emulate the multinational technology company Amazon. Finally, we use additional data to illustrate the situatedness of one student’s performance, and theorize the influence of Amazon as a “strange attractor” in this student’s situated reasoning.more » « less
-
more » « less
Abstract Background Undergraduate STEM instructors want to help students learn and retain knowledge for their future courses and careers. One promising evidence-based technique that is thought to increase long-term memory is spaced retrieval practice, or repeated testing over time. The beneficial effect of spacing has repeatedly been demonstrated in the laboratory as well as in undergraduate mathematics courses, but its generalizability across diverse STEM courses is unknown. We investigated the effect of spaced retrieval practice in nine introductory STEM courses. Retrieval practice opportunities were embedded in bi-weekly quizzes, either massed on a single quiz or spaced over multiple quizzes. Student performance on practice opportunities and a criterial test at the end of each course were examined as a function of massed or spaced practice. We also conducted a single-paper meta-analysis on criterial test scores to assess the generalizability of the effectiveness of spaced retrieval practice across introductory STEM courses.
Results Significant positive effects of spacing on the criterial test were found in only two courses (Calculus I for Engineers and Chemistry for Health Professionals), although small positive effect sizes were observed in two other courses (General Chemistry and Diversity of Life). Meta-analyses revealed a significant spacing effect when all courses were included, but not when calculus was excluded. The generalizability of the spacing effect across STEM courses therefore remains unclear.
Conclusions Although we could not clearly determine the generalizability of the benefits of spacing in STEM courses, our findings indicate that spaced retrieval practice could be a low-cost method of improving student performance in at least some STEM courses. More work is needed to determine when, how, and for whom spaced retrieval practice is most beneficial. The effect of spacing in classroom settings may depend on some design features such as the nature of retrieval practice activities (multiple-choice versus short answer) and/or feedback settings, as well as student actions (e.g., whether they look at feedback or study outside of practice opportunities). The evidence is promising, and further pragmatic research is encouraged.
-
Prior research suggests various reasons for the paucity of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) people in engineering fields, including academic deficiencies, lack of role models, and minimal financial support to pursue a college education. One potential reason that has yet to be explored relates to the cultural and spiritual barriers that could deter AI/AN people from feeling a sense of belonging in engineering fields. These barriers may create obstacles to progressing through engineering career pathways. Our research investigates the range and variation of cultural/spiritual/ethical issues that may be affecting AI/AN people’s success in engineering and other science, technology, and mathematics fields. The work reported here focuses on findings from students and professionals in engineering fields specifically. The study seeks to answer two research questions: (1) What ethical issues do AI/AN students and professionals in engineering fields experience, and how do they navigate these issues?, and (2) Do ethical issues impede AI/AN students from pursuing engineering careers, and if so, how? We distributed an online survey to AI/AN college students (undergraduate and graduate) and professionals in STEM fields, including engineers, in the western United States region. Our results indicate strong connections to AI/AN culture by the participants in the study as well as some cultural, ethical, and/or spiritual barriers that exist for AI/AN individuals in the engineering field. The AI/AN professionals had less concerns with respect to activities that may conflict with AI/AN cultural customs compared to the students, which may be a result of the professionals having gained experiences that allow them to navigate these situations. Overall, our research offers insights for policy and practice within higher education institutions with engineering majors and/or graduate programs and organizations that employ engineering professionals.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
