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Several studies have shown that underrepresented minorities (URM) (African Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latinos) are more likely to drop out of engineering doctorate programs before graduation compared to international and majority students. In addition, transitioning into the doctoral programs without having a good understanding of what it entails can make the PhD experience difficult. To address this issue, a team of researchers from four US universities developed a project called “the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI)’’. One of the research goals of this project is to better understand how factors in the academic system interact dynamically to influence (i.e., support or hinder) incoming URM students’ access, success, persistence, and retention in engineering doctoral programs. To accomplish this goal, we will use a comprehensive analysis approach known as System Dynamic Model (SDM). This work-In-Progress article represents the starting point to develop this model and its overall goal is to conduct a systematic literature review to identify the factors in the academic system that impact URM students’ experience in doctoral engineering programs. We followed a process suggested by Okoli and Schabram [1] which consists of four major steps. The first step is presenting the purpose of the literature review, protocol, and training. The second step consists of selecting the literature and practical screen. The next step is the quality appraisal and data extraction. Finally, the analysis of findings and writing the review. By identifying the factors and the relation between them, we could help ensure a more diverse and equitable STEM education. Although some external factors can affect students’ access, success, persistence and retention in engineering PhD programs, this study is limited to exploring the factors and interactions within the academic system that can potentially impact the successful experience of underrepresented minorities in PhD programs in engineering such as Advisor-Advisee Relationship, Student’s Experience, Academic Support and Faculty-Students Interaction
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The Quest for URM Doctoral Persistence: An Analysis of Feedback Loops in the Academic System
Studies have shown that the graduation rate for underrepresented minorities (URM) students enrolled in engineering doctorates is significantly lower than their peers. In response, we created the “Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI)”. This project aims to address issues that URM students encounter when transitioning into a Ph.D. in engineering and their decision to persist in the program. To suggest institutional policies that increase the likelihood of URM students to persist in their doctorate, we identify and analyze some factors in the academic system that reinforce or hinder the retention of URM students in doctoral education. Although the factors that influence persistence in URM students have been largely studied as direct causes of attrition or retention, there is a need for a system perspective that takes into account the complexity and dynamic interaction that exists between those factors. The academic system is a complex system that, by nature, is policy resistant. This means that a positive variation of a factor can incur unintended consequences that could lead to a negative variation in other factors and ultimately hinder the positive outcomes of that policy. In this work-in-progress article, we analyze the dynamics of the factors in the academic system that reinforce or hinder the retention of URM graduate students in engineering. The purpose is to build some of the causal loops that involve those factors, to improve the understanding of how the complex system works, and prevent unintended consequences of institutional policies. We used Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) to model the feedback loops of the system based on initial hypotheses of causal relationships between the factors. We followed a process that started with establishing hypotheses from a previous literature review, then using a different set of articles we identified the factors related to the hypotheses and the causal links between them. Next, we did axial coding to group the concepts into smaller categories and established the causal relations between categories. With these categories and relations, we created the CLDs for each hypothesis. For the CLDs that have connections missing to close the loop, we went to find additional literature to close them. Finally, we analyzed the implications of each CLD. In this article, we analyze and describe three major CLDs found in literature. The first one was built around the factor of having a positive relationship with the supervisor. The second centered on the student’s experience. The third focused on factors that relate to university initiatives
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- Award ID(s):
- 2029784
- PAR ID:
- 10481272
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings - ASEE Annual Conferences and Exposition. Baltimore, Maryland.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE Annual Conference proceedings
- ISSN:
- 1524-4644
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This literature review was conducted as a preliminary assessment of the available research literature produced by the engineering education community on climate affecting the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. We seek to understand this specific student group’s retention in context of organizational science--specifically as an organizational climate issue--- and use an intersectional approach to consider the meaning and relevance of students’ belonging, simultaneously, to multiple social categories such as gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, race/ethnicity, and disability status. We review the literature on engineering doctoral students produced by the engineering education community as a first step to building a climate survey instrument. The objective of this literature review is to explore how the concept of ‘climate’ is being used in context of doctoral engineering student retention to degree completion, and we gather a body of evidence of climate factors. To do this, we conducted a targeted literature review and used organizational climate and intersectionality as our approach to interpreting the literature, as we aim to understand how climate affects the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. In this paper, we first briefly present our understanding of climate as grounded in organizational science and intersectional theory. We then explain our methodology and finally discuss our analysis of the doctoral engineering student literature in engineering.more » « less
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