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Co-curricular team projects in engineering – like design projects, experimental assignments, or national project-based competitions or challenges – can be key experiences for students in forming personal and professional skills and traits. Little concrete data is available about why students choose to participate or not participate in such activities though, and how their participation and perceptions of the activities may be influenced by factors such as their gender identity, race/ethnicity, and other facets of themselves and their experiences. Without this data, it is difficult to conceive of strategies to improve participation in certain activities among groups of people who are otherwise under-represented compared even to their representation at the College level. The research was devised to gather insight into why students chose to participate or not participate, and what they felt the benefits and detrimental effects of participation were. The pilot study was conducted at the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus, which is part of the California State University system - it has a student cohort that is not particularly diverse compared to the rest of the system or highly representative of state demographics, and it has an institutional focus on applied, hands- on learning that means that a high number of students participate in co-curricular engineering projects. A 70 question survey tool, adapted from an existing tool, garnered responses from nearly 500 students, with demographic and identity questions preceding sections about factors that led to participation or non- participation, and then perceptions of positive and negative outcomes that can come from involvement in co-curricular engineering projects.
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This content will become publicly available on July 14, 2026
Empowering Disabled Engineers through Accessible Co-Curricular Activities
The benefits of co-curricular activities are well-documented, with improvements in academic and professional development. Unfortunately, while U.S. laws mandate equal access to co- and extracurricular activities for disabled students, participation of disabled students in co-curricular activities is lower than the participation of their non-disabled peers, and this critical part of engineering education is often inaccessible to disabled students. In this paper we review the documented benefits of co-curriculars for all students and make the case for increasing the research focus on co-curricular inclusion specifically for disabled students, who are minimally represented in the overall body of work on co-curricular activities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2417014
- PAR ID:
- 10627641
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT 2025)
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- xxxx-xxxx
- ISBN:
- 979-8-4007-0626-4
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 98-105
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3704637.3734732
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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