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1. Work in Progress: Development of a Situational Judgment Inventory for Marginalized Student Support

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343415  

   Josiam, Malini; Turner, Artre; Lee, Walter C. (October 2023, 2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   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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2. Using a Summer Bridge Program to Develop a Situational Judgment Inventory: From Year 1 to Year 2

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--45493  

   Josiam, Malini; Lee, Walter (February 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   The College of Engineering at [University] offers a comprehensive five-week summer program known as a summer bridge program (SBP) for incoming students. The primary objective of this program is to familiarize first-time-in-college students with the university environment and community, setting them up for success in their academic journey. During this period, students engage in non-credit courses that cover subjects typically deemed challenging and necessary for first-year students, including calculus, chemistry, and engineering fundamentals. In addition to these courses, over the course of the program, students actively participate in informative seminars conducted by different campus offices, providing them with a comprehensive understanding of the wide array of opportunities and resources available to support their them during their academic journey. In the previous year, we organized a workshop during the SBP with a total of 60 participating students. The purpose of this workshop was to gauge students' reactions to a series of open-ended scenarios that reflected potential opportunities and constraints commonly encountered in the field of engineering. Students were given the opportunity to respond to these scenarios both individually and in groups, with each group assigned four unique scenarios. To further enhance our understanding, we also conducted interviews with 11 students. By analyzing the individual and group responses, along with the interview data, we developed a Situational Judgment Inventory (SJI), aggregating students’ open ended responses into closed-ended responses to the scenarios. The primary objective of this SJI is to promote better alignment between students' navigational tendencies and the expectations of professionals regarding students' navigational approaches within the learning environment. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a comprehensive overview of our instrument refinement process and present preliminary findings regarding the anticipated navigational approaches of incoming engineering students. To address this purpose, we conducted a 90-minute workshop with SBP students, where we administered the piloted SJI containing the closed-ended responses we developed earlier. The primary purpose of piloting the SJI was to understand how to enhance the instrument's accuracy in capturing the full spectrum of navigational tendencies that students possess and expect to employ prior to commencing their engineering studies. The quantitative analysis of the pilot results will not only identify areas of improvement for the instrument but also contribute to our understanding of how incoming students anticipate navigating the field of engineering. 

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3. Developing an Instrument to Measure Online Engineering Undergraduate Students’ Learning Experiences and Intentions to Persist

   Lee, E.; Brunhaver, S.; Bekki, J. (January 2020, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument to measure student perceptions about the learning experiences in their online undergraduate engineering courses. Online education continues to grow broadly in higher education, but the movement toward acceptance and comprehensive utilization of online learning has generally been slower in engineering. Recently, however, there have been indicators that this could be changing. For example, ABET has accredited online undergraduate engineering degrees at Stony Brook University and Arizona State University (ASU), and an increasing number of other undergraduate engineering programs also offer online courses. During this period of transition in engineering education, further investigation about the online modality in the context of engineering education is needed, and survey instrumentation can support such investigations. The instrument presented in this paper is grounded in a Model for Online Course-level Persistence in Engineering (MOCPE), which was developed by our research team by combining two motivational frameworks used to study student persistence: the Expectancy x Value Theory of Achievement Motivation (EVT), and the ARCS model of motivational design. The initial MOCPE instrument contained 79 items related to students’ perceptions about the characteristics of their courses (i.e., the online learning management system, instructor practices, and peer support), expectancies of course success, course task values, perceived course difficulties, and intention to persist in the course. Evidence of validity and reliability was collected using a three-step process. First, we tested face and content validity of the instrument with experts in online engineering education and online undergraduate engineering students. Next, the survey was administered to the online undergraduate engineering student population at a large, Southwestern public university, and an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on the responses. Lastly, evidence of reliability was obtained by computing the internal consistency of each resulting scale. The final instrument has seven scales with 67 items across 10 factors. The Cronbach alpha values for these scales range from 0.85 to 0.97. The full paper will provide complete details about the development and psychometric evaluation of the instrument, including evidence of and reliability. The instrument described in this paper will ultimately be used as part of a larger, National Science Foundation-funded project investigating the factors influencing online undergraduate engineering student persistence. It is currently being used in the context of this project to conduct a longitudinal study intended to understand the relationships between the experiences of online undergraduate engineering students in their courses and their intentions to persist in the course. We anticipate that the instrument will be of interest and use to other engineering education researchers who are also interested in studying the population of online students. 

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4. Intersecting Identities of Women in Engineering

   Cross, K. (June 2018, ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   Giving a voice to marginalized groups and understanding the double bind is critical, especially after the Charlotte, VA protests and the white supremacist discourse that has pervaded our country. The result of the discourse, more subtle beliefs about white superiority and institutional barriers is an overrepresentation of women of color (WOC) in the leaky STEM pipeline and thus the loss of their presence and expertise. The absence of WOC hinders knowledge production and innovation that is essential for societal advancements and scientific discovery. The “chilly climate” is often cited as an explanation for the loss of WOC from STEM. However, interactions that allow the “chilly climate” to persist have yet to be characterized. This lack of understanding can inhibit the professional engineering identity construction of WOC. Additionally, engineering education research typically focuses on a single identity dimension such as gender or socio-economic status. These studies connect an identity dimension to student outcomes and few studies clarify how the identity is situated within the social context of the engineering culture. Consequently, a need exist to examine how the engineering culture impacts multiple components of identity and intersecting identities of WOC. To address this gap, our study illuminates the intersections of identity of WOC and how they perceive the double bind of race and gender within the context of their engineering education. The data reported here are a part of a larger, sequential mixed-methods study (N=276) of undergraduate female engineering students at a large Midwestern research university. This project applies the framework of intersectionality with the following scales: Engineering Identity, Ethnic Identity, Womanist Identity, Microaggressions, and Depression. We use intersectionality to investigate the interaction between intersecting social identities and educational conditions. We introduce the Womanist Identity Attitude scale to engineering education research, which provides an efficient way to understand gender, racial, and intersecting identity development of WOC. We utilize the microaggressions scale, in order to develop quantitative measures of gender-racial discrimination in STEM and compare to previous research. We also included the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), an instrument for measuring depression, to assess health outcomes of respondents’ experiences of gender-racial microaggressions. Our three emergent findings suggest instrument accuracy and provide insight into the identity and depression subscales. Factor analysis established a basis to refine our quantitative survey instruments, and indicated that 23 items could offer greater accuracy than the original 54 items instrument. Second, the majority of participants report a high level of identification with engineering. This result rebuffs the long-held stereotypes that females are less interested in engineering. Third, a significant portion of female respondents self-reported PHQ-9 scores in the 15-19 range, which corresponds with a “major depression, moderately severe” provisional diagnosis, the second-highest in severity in the PHQ-9 provisional diagnosis scale. These elevated levels of depression correlated significantly to frequent instances of microaggressions. These preliminary findings are providing never-before seen insight into the experiences of WOC in engineering. Our results suggest a path to accurately describe the experiences of WOC in engineering, while revealing options for improving inclusion efforts. 

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5. Intersecting Identities of Women in Engineering

   Mendenhall, Ruby; Cross, Kelly J.; Amos, Jennifer R.; Clancy, Kathryn B.H.; Imoukhuede, Princess; Cromley, Jennifer Grace. (June 2018, ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   Giving a voice to marginalized groups and understanding the double bind is critical, especially after the Charlotte, VA protests and the white supremacist discourse that has pervaded our country. The result of the discourse, more subtle beliefs about white superiority and institutional barriers is an overrepresentation of women of color (WOC) in the leaky STEM pipeline and thus the loss of their presence and expertise. The absence of WOC hinders knowledge production and innovation that is essential for societal advancements and scientific discovery. The “chilly climate” is often cited as an explanation for the loss of WOC from STEM. However, interactions that allow the “chilly climate” to persist have yet to be characterized. This lack of understanding can inhibit the professional engineering identity construction of WOC. Additionally, engineering education research typically focuses on a single identity dimension such as gender or socio-economic status. These studies connect an identity dimension to student outcomes and few studies clarify how the identity is situated within the social context of the engineering culture. Consequently, a need exist to examine how the engineering culture impacts multiple components of identity and intersecting identities of WOC. To address this gap, our study illuminates the intersections of identity of WOC and how they perceive the double bind of race and gender within the context of their engineering education. The data reported here are a part of a larger, sequential mixed-methods study (N=276) of undergraduate female engineering students at a large Midwestern research university. This project applies the framework of intersectionality with the following scales: Engineering Identity, Ethnic Identity, Womanist Identity, Microaggressions, and Depression. We use intersectionality to investigate the interaction between intersecting social identities and educational conditions. We introduce the Womanist Identity Attitude scale to engineering education research, which provides an efficient way to understand gender, racial, and intersecting identity development of WOC. We utilize the microaggressions scale, in order to develop quantitative measures of gender-racial discrimination in STEM and compare to previous research. We also included the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), an instrument for measuring depression, to assess health outcomes of respondents’ experiences of gender-racial microaggressions. Our three emergent findings suggest instrument accuracy and provide insight into the identity and depression subscales. Factor analysis established a basis to refine our quantitative survey instruments, and indicated that 23 items could offer greater accuracy than the original 54 items instrument. Second, the majority of participants report a high level of identification with engineering. This result rebuffs the long-held stereotypes that females are less interested in engineering. Third, a significant portion of female respondents self-reported PHQ-9 scores in the 15-19 range, which corresponds with a “major depression, moderately severe” provisional diagnosis, the second-highest in severity in the PHQ-9 provisional diagnosis scale. These elevated levels of depression correlated significantly to frequent instances of microaggressions. These preliminary findings are providing never-before seen insight into the experiences of WOC in engineering. Our results suggest a path to accurately describe the experiences of WOC in engineering, while revealing options for improving inclusion efforts. 

   more » « less