More Like this

1. Reflections on a paradigm shift: An autoethnographic exploration of program implementation

   Hennessey, N. K. ( April 2023 , ASEE Pacific Southwest)

   Research and evidence-based practices that center sense of belonging and engineering identity development drive strong outcomes for undergraduate students in engineering—especially those who are first-generation college students, from low-income families, and identify as other underrepresented groups in engineering (Deil-Amen, 2011; Hurtado, Cabrera, Lin, & Arellano, 2009; Patrick & Prybutok, 2018). The process from ideation to organizational implementation is not well-documented in the literature on student success, leaving a gap in practitioners’ understanding of how to bring strong, research-informed practices to fruition in their institutions. Implementation is arguably as important as the design of a student intervention and knowing how to implement a good idea is an art and a science. This paper explores the various people and processes that take theory to practice for a National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education funded program. In this paper, I invoke an autoethnographic approach to reflect on the experience of designing a student-facing program while managing the organizational systems that empower or restrain transformative organizational change for students. Autoethnography as a methodology can be a helpful mode to understanding practice, as the researcher can move more fluidly between their lived experience and the organizational, sociological, or psychosocial theory that it mirrors (Berry & Hodges, 2015). The proposed paper discusses my team’s approaches to working with stakeholders and gatekeepers in our organization and in our community to execute a program designed to build sense of belonging and engineering identity while supporting academic attainment of underserved student populations using Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) and Street-Level Bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980) as theoretical lenses. A small, summer-intensive program required the cooperation and capital of gatekeepers across the campus of our large, research university in the southwestern United States. This program, which serves students from marginalized ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds in engineering disciplines, became the basis for an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education award. Students spent part of their summer (six weeks during the pilot program, which evolved to ten weeks for the second cohort) taking summer classes that helped them advance into their sophomore year of an engineering degree. They also took a career development class, which featured regular field trips to various regional engineering employers. Outcomes from the pilot program and subsequent year are promising, and include high rates of persistence, strong academic performance, and increased sense of engineering identity, but this paper focuses on the structure of the program, the need for collaborators, and the way that the team implemented an initiative which challenges the assumptions of stakeholders from within and outside of the institution. Major themes discussed are personal reflections of the process of coalition-building, gaining buy-in from critical partners on-campus and in the community, and co-investing in programmatic improvement with early cohorts of participating students. 

   more » « less
2. Internship Prevalence and Factors Related to Participation

   Atwood, S. A. ; Gilmartin, S. K. ; Mostoller, A. M. ; Chen, H. L. ; Sheppard, S. ( January 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   The value of internship experiences for engineering students is widely discussed in the literature. With this analysis, we seek to contribute knowledge addressing 1) the prevalence of internship experiences amongst engineering students drawn from a large, multi-institutional, nationally-representative sample, 2) if the likelihood of having an engineering internship experiences is equitable amongst various student identities, and 3) what additional factors influence the likelihood of a student having an internship experience, such as field of study and institution type. Data were drawn from a 2015 multi-institutional nationally representative survey of engineering juniors and seniors, excluding one institution with a mandatory co-op program (n = 5530 from 26 institutions). A z-test was used to analyze differences in internship participation rates related to academic cohort (e.g., junior, senior), gender, underrepresented minority (URM) status, first-generation, and low-income status, as well as a subset of identities at the intersection of these groups (gender + URM; first-generation + low-income). A logistic regression model further examined factors such as GPA, engineering task self-efficacy, field of engineering, and institution type. We found that amongst the students in our dataset, 64.7% of the seniors had “worked in a professional engineering environment as an intern/co-op” (41.1% of juniors, 64.7% of 5th years). Significantly less likely (p<0.05) to have internship experiences were men compared to women (52.9% vs 58.3%), URM students compared to their majority counterparts (41.5% vs 56.8%), first-generation students compared to continuing (47.6% vs 57.2%), and low-income students compared to higher-income peers (46.2% vs 57.4%). Examined intersectional identities significantly less likely to have an internship were URM men (37.5%) and first-generation low-income students (42.0%), while non-URM women (60.5%) and continuing high-income students (58.2%) were most likely to report having an internship. Results from the logistic regression model indicate that significant factors are cohort (junior vs senior), GPA, engineering task self-efficacy, and engineering field. When controlling for the other variables in the model, gender, URM, first-generation, and low-income status remain significant; however, the interaction effect between these identities is not significant in the full model. Institution type did not have much impact. Having a research experience was not a significant factor in predicting the likelihood of having an internship experience, although studying abroad significantly increased the odds. Amongst engineering fields, industrial and civil engineering students were the most likely to have an internship, while aerospace and materials engineering students were the least likely. Full results and discussion will be presented in the paper. This analysis provides valuable information for a variety of stakeholders. For engineering programs, it is useful to benchmark historic students’ rates of internship participation against a multi-institutional, nationally representative dataset. For academic advisors and career services professionals, it is useful to understand in which fields an internship is common to be competitive on the job market, and which fields have fewer opportunities or prioritize research experiences. Ultimately, for those in higher education and workforce development it is vital to understand which identities, and intersectional identities, are accessing internship experiences as a pathway into the engineering workforce. 

   more » « less
3. An Integrated Supplemental Program to Enhance the First-year Engineering Experience

   Brown, Ordel ; Morris, Melissa ; Hensel, Robin ; Dygert, Joseph ( June 2018 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Student retention in STEM disciplines, especially engineering, continues to be a challenge for higher education institutions. Poor retention rates have been attributed to academic and institutional isolation, exclusion from social and professional networks, unsupportive peer and family communities, a lack of knowledge about the academic community and financial obstacles. The importance of retention in engineering has attracted increasing attention from many stakeholders in academia including faculty, staff, administrators and students. Its significance goes beyond the benefits for the academic institutions to encompass national concerns. At a large land-grant university in the mid-Atlantic region, between 2003 and 2012, an average thirty percent of first-year engineering students left engineering before their second year. A three-year study (2007-2010) done to gain insight into this attrition rate, showed that students mainly left because of low self-efficacy, lack of interest in and knowledge about engineering and the institution, disconnection from the engineering profession and academic difficulty. To address these issues, an integrated supplemental program was implemented in the first-year engineering program. Students must be in first-time, first-year standing to enroll in the program, which includes a professional development and academic success course beginning with a pre-fall bridge component. The program also provides direct pathways to academic enrichment activities such as undergraduate research. It helps students to develop strategies for academic success, explore engineering careers and start building a professional network through a multi-level peer, faculty and alumni mentoring system. Students are systematically and deliberately immersed in curricular and co-curricular activities with their peer, faculty and alumni mentors. The program was piloted with a NASA Space Grant in 2012 and funded by NSF in 2016. The goal of this evidence-based practice paper is to share the challenges, logistics and results of the implementation of this program in our standard first-year engineering experience. 

   more » « less
4. Comparative Study of the Intersection of Engineering Identify and Black Identity of African-American Engineering Students at a PWI and an HBCU

   Berhan, L. ; Kumar, R. ; Goodloe, M. ; Jones, J. ; Adams, A. ( June 2018 , ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   This interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research initiation project is motivated by the need to develop practical strategies for broadening the participation of African American students in engineering. The central objective of the project is to conduct a comparative study of the factors affecting the success and pathways to engineering careers of African American students at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), the University of Toledo, and a Historically Black University (Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University). Through this research we hope to gain insight into the factors affecting the social and academic well-being of students at PWIs and HBCUs from a psychological and anthropological perspective. For students from underrepresented groups in STEM at both HBCUs and PWIs it is generally recognized that social capital in the form of familial, peer and mentor support is critical to persistence in their major field of study. However, the role that embedded networks within student groups in general, and minority engineering affinity groups in particular, play in engineering students’ identity formation and academic success is not well understood. It is also not clear how other factors including institutional support and the attitudes and beliefs of faculty and staff toward underrepresented minority students affect the ability of these students to integrate into the social and academic systems at their institutions and how these factors influence the formation and development of their identities as engineers. Here we report on the role of membership in organizations for underrepresented minority engineering students such as the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) in contributing to the interlinking of personal and professional identities, and to the career pathways of African American students enrolled in PWI and HBCU, respectively. 

   more » « less
5. Building a Networked Improvement Community: Lessons in Organizing to Promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.732347  

   Noble, Chelsea E. ; Amey, Marilyn J. ; Colón, Luis A. ; Conroy, Jacqueline ; De Cheke Qualls, Anna ; Deonauth, Kamla ; Franke, Jeffrey ; Gardner, Alex ; Goldberg, Bennett ; Harding, Thelma ; et al ( November 2021 , Frontiers in Psychology)

   null (Ed.)

   In 2016, 10 universities launched a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) aimed at increasing the number of scholars from Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) populations entering science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty careers. NICs bring together stakeholders focused on a common goal to accelerate innovation through structured, ongoing intervention development, implementation, and refinement. We theorized a NIC organizational structure would aid understandings of a complex problem in different contexts and accelerate opportunities to develop and improve interventions to address the problem. A distinctive feature of this NIC is its diverse institutional composition of public and private, predominantly white institutions, a historically Black university, a Hispanic-serving institution, and land grant institutions located across eight states and Washington, DC, United States. NIC members hold different positions within their institutions and have access to varied levers of change. Among the many lessons learned through this community case study, analyzing and addressing failed strategies is as equally important to a healthy NIC as is sharing learning from successful interventions. We initially relied on pre-existing relationships and assumptions about how we would work together, rather than making explicit how the NIC would develop, establish norms, understand common processes, and manage changing relationships. We had varied understandings of the depth of campus differences, sometimes resulting in frustrations about the disparate progress on goals. NIC structures require significant engagement with the group, often more intensive than traditional multi-institution organizational structures. They require time to develop and ongoing maintenance in order to advance the work. We continue to reevaluate our model for leadership, climate, diversity, conflict resolution, engagement, decision-making, roles, and data, leading to increased investment in the success of all NIC institutions. Our NIC has evolved from the traditional NIC model to become the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) AGEP NIC model with five key characteristics: (1) A well-specified aim, (2) An understanding of systems, including a variety of contexts and different organizations, (3) A culture and practice of shared leadership and inclusivity, (4) The use of data reflecting different institutional contexts, and (5) The ability to accelerate infrastructure and interventions. We conclude with recommendations for those considering developing a NIC to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. 

   more » « less