As educators strive to broaden representation in engineering, it is important to take into account how youth perceive themselves in relation to engineering careers. Youth as young as ten years of age are assessing the appeal and achievability of engineering as a career. This study explores preadolescents’ perceptions of the desirability of engineering careers and the self-assessed characteristics which impact students’ interest in engineering. In particular, this work unpacks what attracts elementary students to engineering careers and what these students believe it takes to be an engineer. Drawing from a set of 56 student interviews, this work addresses the research question In what ways are elementary school students thinking about careers in engineering? Existing research indicates that students’ interest in engineering careers declines as students enter middle school; this study contributes to understanding influences on students’ interests when they are on the cusp of deciding whether to pursue engineering study and careers.
As part of a study of a university-led engineering education outreach program in elementary classrooms, 5th grade students participated in 15- to 30-minute semi-structured interviews near the end of the academic year. Participants represented four classrooms in two suburban schools in the northeastern United States that had each engaged in 16-18 weeks of hands-on engineering activities led by undergraduate engineering students. Interviews focused on the students’ experiences with engineering and the engineering intervention, students’ role models, and students’ career aspirations. We utilized open coding to analyze the interviews and identified the keywords and themes that students used to describe why an engineering career would be appealing or unappealing and possible or impossible for them. Two themes characterized the interview data; these students’ receptivity to pursuing engineering careers appeared to be mediated by conceptions of engineering careers as involving skill (in idea generation or in creation of technology) or desire (the will to do engineering).
This paper utilizes interview data to attend to students’ perspectives and expand our understanding of barriers and gateways to student interest in engineering study and careers. It also discusses the implications of the findings for teaching engineering with an eye on the messages conveyed about the nature of engineering practices, the characteristics of engineers, and how students’ interests intersect with engineering careers.
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Board 120: Development of an Engineering Identity and Career Aspirations Survey for Use with Elementary Students
nterest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) begins as early as elementary and middle school. As youth enter adolescence, they begin to shape their personal identities and start making decisions about who they are and could be in the future. Students form their career aspirations and interests related to STEM in elementary school, long before they choose STEM coursework in high school or college. Much of the literature examines either science or STEM identity and career aspirations without separating out individual sub-disciplines. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a survey instrument to specifically measure engineering identity and career aspirations in adolescents and preadolescents. When possible, we utilized existing measures of STEM identity and career aspirations, adapting them when necessary to the elementary school level and to fit the engineering context. The instrument was developed within the context of a multi-year, NSF-funded research project examining the dynamics between undergraduate outreach providers and elementary students to understand the impact of the program on students’ engineering identity and career aspirations. Three phases of survey development were conducted that involved 492 elementary students from diverse communities in the United States. Three sets of items were developed and/or adapted throughout the four phases. The first set of items assessed Engineering Identity. Recent research suggests that identity consists of three components: recognition, interest, and performance/competence. Items assessing each of these constructs were included in the survey. The second and third sets of items reflected Career Interests and Aspirations. Because elementary and middle school students often have a limited or nascent awareness of what engineers do or misconceptions about what a job in science or engineering entails, it is problematic to measure their engineering identity or career aspirations by directly asking them whether they want to be a scientist/engineer or by using a checklist of broad career categories. Therefore, similar to other researchers, the second set of items assessed the types of activities that students are interested in doing as part of a future career, including both non-STEM and STEM (general and engineering-specific) activities. These items were created by the research team or adapted from activity lists used in existing research. The third set of items drew from career counseling measures relying on Holland’s Career Codes. We adapted the format of these instruments by asking students to choose the activity they liked the most from a list of six activities that reflected each of the codes rather than responding to their interest about each activity. Preliminary findings for each set of items will be discussed. Results from the survey contribute to our understanding of engineering identities and career aspirations in preadolescent and adolescent youth. However, our instrument has the potential for broader application in non-engineering STEM environments (e.g., computer science) with minor wording changes to reflect the relevant science subject area. More research is needed in determining its usefulness in this capacity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657509
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10483960
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Tampa, Florida
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Informal STEM learning experiences (ISLEs), such as participating in science, computing, and engineering clubs and camps, have been associated with the development of youth’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics interests and career aspirations. However, research on ISLEs predominantly focuses on institutional settings such as museums and science centers, which are often discursively inaccessible to youth who identify with minoritized demographic groups. Using latent class analysis, we identify five general profiles (i.e., classes) of childhood participation in ISLEs from data reported by a nationally representative sample of college students (
N = 15,579). Results show that childhood participation in specific typologies of ISLEs (i.e., setting and activity type) is associated with youth's disciplinary interests at the end of high school. Participation in outdoor activities that invite observation is more often reported by female respondents and is negatively associated with interest in computing and mathematics. Participation in indoor activities that invite object manipulation is more often reported by male respondents and is positively associated with interest in computing and engineering. However, frequent participation in multiple ISLEs is positively associated with interest in “science.” These results elucidate stereotypical discourses that reinforce the exclusion of minoritized students and expose critical areas needing reform. -
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Background: The United States continues to invest considerable resources into developing the next generation of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent. Efforts to shore up interest in pursuing STEM careers span decades and have increasingly focused on boosting interest among diverse student populations. Policymakers have called for engaging students in a greater STEM ecology of support that extends beyond the traditional classroom environment to increase student STEM career interest. Yet, few robust studies exist exploring the efficacy of many programmatic efforts and initiatives outside the regular curriculum intended to foster STEM interest. To maximize STEM education investments, promote wise policies, and help achieve the aim of creating STEM learning ecosystems that benefit diverse student populations and meet the nation’s STEM goals, it is crucial to examine the effectiveness of these kinds of STEM education initiatives in promoting STEM career aspirations.
Purpose: The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the impact of one popular, yet understudied, STEM education initiative on students’ STEM career aspirations: participation in a university- or college-run STEM club or program activity (CPA) during high school. Specifically, we studied whether participation in a college-run STEM CPA at a postsecondary institution during high school was related to college-going students’ STEM career aspirations, and we examined whether that relationship differed depending on student characteristics and prior STEM interests.
Research Design: We conducted a quasi-experimental investigation to explore the impact of participation in university- or college-run STEM CPAs on college-going students’ STEM career aspirations. We administered a retrospective cohort survey to students at 27 colleges and universities nationwide resulting in a sample of 15,847 respondents. An inverse probability of treatment weighted logistic regression model with a robust set of controls was computed to estimate the odds of expressing STEM career aspirations among those who participated in college-run STEM CPAs compared with the odds expressed among students who did not participate. Our weighting accounted for self-selection effects.
Results: Quasi-experimental modeling results indicated that participation in university- or college-run STEM CPAs had a significant impact on the odds that college-going students would express STEM career aspirations relative to students who did not participate. The odds of expressing interest in a STEM career among participants in STEM CPAs were 1.49 times those of the control group. Robustness checks confirmed our results. The result held true for students whether or not they expressed interest in STEM careers prior to participation in STEM CPAs, and it held true across a diverse range of student characteristics (e.g., race, parental education, gender, standardized test scores, and family/school encouragement).
Conclusions: Results suggest that university- and college-run STEM CPAs play an important role in the STEM education ecology, serving the national goal of expanding the pool of college-going students who aspire to STEM careers. Moreover, results showed that participation in university- and college-run STEM CPAs during high school is equally effective across diverse student characteristics. Policymakers, educators, and those charged with making investment decisions in STEM education should seriously consider university- and college-run STEM CPAs as a promising vehicle to promote diverse students’ STEM career aspirations in the broader STEM learning ecosystem and as an important complement to other STEM learning environments.
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Measures of subject-related role identities in physics and math have been developed from research on the underlying constructs of identity in science education. The items for these measures capture three constructs of identity: students’ interest in the subject, students’ feeling of recognition by others, and students’ beliefs about their performance/competence in the subject area. In prior studies with late secondary and early post-secondary students, participants did not distinguish between performance beliefs (e.g., believing that they can do well in a particular subject) and competence beliefs (e.g., believing that they can understand a particular subject); therefore, performance/competence beliefs are measured as a single construct. These validated measures have been successful in predicting STEM career choices including physics, math, and engineering. Based on these measures of identity, literature on engineering identity, and my prior work on understanding engineering choice and belongingness through students’ science and math identities at the transition from high school to college, I developed a set of new engineering identity measures that capture and overall identification as an engineer, future engineering career identification, and students’ engineering-related interest, recognition, and performance/competence beliefs. I conducted a pilot survey of 371 first-year engineering students at three institutions within the U.S. during the spring semester of 2015. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to examine the underlying structure of the piloted questions about students’ engineering identity. The measures loaded on three separate constructs that were consistent with the hypothesized constructs of interest, performance/competence and recognition. The developed items were used in a subsequent study deployed in the fall semester of 2015 that measured more than 2500 first-year engineering students’ attitudes and beliefs at four institutions within the U.S. The data on engineering identity measures from this second survey were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results indicated that the developed measures do extract a significant portion of the average variance in the latent constructs and the internal consistency of the measures (Cronbach’s α) falls within the acceptable and better range. The development of these items provides ways for engineering education researchers to more deeply explore the underlying self-beliefs in students’ engineering identity formation through quantitative measures with strong evidence for validity.more » « less
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Research shows that the LGBTQ climate in engineering, and other STEM, undergraduate degree programs is rife with heteronormativity and cissexism, leading LGBTQ students to leave STEM majors and careers at higher rates than their heterosexual, cisgender peers. In order to develop a diverse STEM workforce and adequately prepare the next generation of professionals in STEM, higher education, and especially engineering education, must address inequities such as these to ensure broad participation in STEM fields. This NSF CAREER-funded project helps meet this need by examining the participation of LGBTQ students in STEM fields. The project focuses on three primary research aims to address this purpose: test the relationships between the composition of LGBTQ students’ social networks and non-cognitive STEM outcomes, compare STEM degree completion rates between LGBTQ students and their cisgender, heterosexual peers, and explore the intersection of STEM discipline-based identity (e.g., engineering identity, science identity) with sexual and gender identity. This project stands to improve our understanding of how to broaden participation in STEM by pursuing robust research efforts that illuminate the ways sexual and gender identity shape trajectories into, through, and out of STEM. The purpose of this poster is to present preliminary outcomes from the first research aim of the project, which is to test the relationship between composition of students’ social networks and non-cognitive outcomes, and compare these relationships by sexual and gender identities. We hypothesize that homophily within students’ social networks, especially for heterosexual and cisgender students, will predict greater levels of identification with one’s STEM discipline, sense of belonging in STEM, and commitment to a STEM major. LGBTQ students whose LGBTQ connections are primarily outside STEM are hypothesized to feel more of a pull away from STEM. This poster focuses on the social network analysis phase of the project, including instrument development, data collection procedures, and preliminary analysis of the data. Data collection will commence in the spring 2022 semester. Social network analysis (SNA) is a method that measures and represents the patterns and information of contextually bound structural relationships to explain why the relationships occur and the outcomes of their existence, and SNA is only recently gaining ground in educational research. We developed a survey that incorporates generating an ego-centric social network, or the people an individual relies on most for support, with existing measures for sense of belonging, discipline-based identity, and commitment to field of study, adapted for this study’s purpose. The survey validation procedure included cognitive interviews with undergraduate students and expert reviews by engineering education and institutional research experts. Data collection will occur at five colleges and universities nation-wide, representing a range of institutional types, geographical diversity, and student body diversity. The poster will detail the theory and procedures that constitute SNA research, the survey development process for this phase of the project, and preliminary results from analysis of the data.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--32210
