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The purpose of this NSF CAREER project is to advance understanding of the navigational strategies used by undergraduate engineering students from marginalized groups. Our poster will present an overview of our results from complete data collection at one site and a snapshot of the tool we developed to assess students’ navigation strategies. Over the past year, we concluded data collection at our first site. We interviewed upper division undergraduate students, talking to them about their experiences as engineering students and the opportunities and obstacles they encountered in engineering education. We then analyzed this data using two different approaches. First, we took an emotions-centered approach, investigating the contexts in which emotion words naturally surfaced in students as they talked about navigating engineering. Then we took a person-centered approach, uncovering how personal characteristics simplify or complicate navigating through the engineering learning environment. We looked at a subset of the interviews to understand the experiences of Women of Color (WOC) investigating how WOC thrive in engineering. Further analysis to understand the role of personhood in navigating is ongoing. We also finalized a situational judgment inventory (SJI), piloting the instrument we developed in the previous year and fine tuning based on pilot results. Our SJI is a multiple choice scenario assessment tool that contains one sentence scenarios with one sentence response options. Our final SJI contains 19 scenarios with 5 response options for each scenario. The scenarios are within the following domains: academic performance, faculty and staff interactions, extracurricular involvement, peer-group interactions, professional development, and special circumstances. We will share details about the instrument development process, final instrument, and preliminary results from instrument dissemination with undergraduate engineering students. Moving forward, we will interview undergraduate students at institutions beyond our primary data collection site to better understand how institutional context plays a role in student navigation of the engineering learning environment.
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Work in Progress: Development of a Situational Judgment Inventory for Marginalized Student Support
We are developing a Situational Judgment Inventory (SJI) to reveal student strategies for navigating the undergraduate engineering learning environment. In this paper, we discuss the development of the SJI. As part of our development process, we identify nine categories that capture students' typical responses. Implementation of the SJI will a) allow students to become familiar with common scenarios they may encounter in engineering; and b) aid support practitioners, such as instructors and advisors, and administrators, such as associate deans and department heads, in better understanding common student navigation strategies for navigating their respective learning environment.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1943811
- PAR ID:
- 10493893
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-3642-9
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- College Station, TX, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343415
