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This work-in-progress research paper describes the development and pilot administration of a survey to assess students’ perceptions about sociotechnical issues in engineering. After refining the survey through iterative rounds of review, we piloted it in an “Introduction to Circuits” course at a large, public university in the Midwestern USA in which we deployed a short module addressing technical and social issues. In this paper we document our instrument development process and present descriptive statistics and results of paired t-tests used to analyze the pilot data. We also describe ways our instrument can be implemented by instructors and researchers in multiple contexts. 

This Innovative Practice work-in-progress describes the use of collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a methodology to explore the centrality of Whiteness (as an ideology) in engineering and how it informs the culture, climate, and discourse of engineering education. We began the first year of our project by conducting a CAE on our own experiences in engineering spaces. CAE takes a collaborative approach to the process of critical self-reflection and can be conducted in many forms, such as collecting personal memory data (e.g., journaling), interviewing each other, facilitating intentional dialogue, or observing each other (e.g., in the classroom). Our team’s diverse viewpoints facilitated rich conversations that let us interrogate the ways in which Whiteness reveals its form differently depending on one’s positionality and ontology. In this paper, we describe our approach, experiences, and challenges with using CAE to explore our engineering journeys. Future steps include using our findings to create a faculty development program to help engineering faculty further their development of critical consciousness. For movement towards racial equity in engineering to be effective and sustainable, we believe change must begin with action in the classroom, where engineering faculty have direct interactions and influence over students’ beliefs, attitudes, and value systems. 

Multiple stakeholders are interested in measuring undergraduate student success in college across academic fields. Different metrics might appeal to different stakeholders. Some metrics such as the fraction of first-time, full-time students who start in the fall who graduate within six years, the graduation rate, are federally mandated by the U.S. Department of Education, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). We argue that this calculation of graduation rate is inherently problematic because it excludes up to 60% of students who transfer into an institution, enroll part-time, or enroll in terms other than the fall. By expanding the starters definition, we propose a graduation rate definition that includes conventionally excluded students and provides information on progression in a specific program. Stickiness is an even more-inclusive alternative, measuring a program’s success in graduating all undergraduates ever enrolled in the program. In this work, programs are grouped into six academic fields: Arts and Humanities, Business, Engineering, Other, Social Sciences, and STM (Science, Technology, and Mathematics. Stickiness is the percentage of students who ever enroll in an academic field that graduate in the same field. We use the Multiple Institution Dataset for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) 2023 which contains unit-record data for over 2 million individual students at 19 institutions. For the academic fields studied, Engineering has the highest graduation rate and third highest stickiness. Social Sciences and Business also have higher graduation rates and stickiness than the other fields. We also track the relative fraction of students migrating to and from each academic field. This paper continues our work to derive better metrics for understanding student success. 

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Racial Equity in STEM Education Program, this project aims to deeply interrogate the influence and pervasiveness of Whiteness in engineering culture. While there has been substantial research into the masculinity of engineering, Whiteness has received far less attention. We claim the centrality of Whiteness in engineering curricula informs the culture, climate, and discourse of engineering education, leading to an exclusionary culture within engineering as reflected by the lack of diversity and lower retention of students and faculty of color, and contributes to systemic barriers negatively impacting racial equity. Moving towards racial equity in engineering education requires a fundamental shift in thinking in two important ways: 1) we must reframe how we think about underserved populations from minority to minoritized by a dominant discourse, and 2) to begin to dismantle the impacts of Whiteness, we must first make this barrier visible. In the first year of this project, the diverse team of PIs began to explore scripts of Whiteness in engineering education by conducting a collaborative autoethnography through documenting and analyzing their own experiences facing, enacting, and challenging scripts of Whiteness in engineering spaces. A collaborative autoethnography (CAE) takes a collaborative approach to the process of critical self reflection and can be conducted in many forms, such as such as collecting personal memory data (e.g., journaling), interviewing each other, facilitating intentional dialogue, or observing each other (e.g., in the classroom). CAE is not a linear process, but requires an ongoing dialogue (conversations, negotiations, or even arguments) between researcher team members over a long period (at least months, if not years). Our diverse viewpoints and years-long experience working together facilitated rich conversations that let us interrogate the ways in which Whiteness reveals its form differently depending on one’s positionality. In the later years of the project, we will create a faculty development program intended to help engineering faculty develop their critical consciousness and begin to decenter Whiteness from their ways of thinking and discourses (i.e., beliefs, attitudes, value systems, actions, etc.) so they can begin to critically think about promoting and enacting practices that move engineering education toward racial equity. Although the pathway to critical consciousness is not linear, it is a one-way street; once faculty begin to see the systemic barriers (such as those created by scripts of Whiteness) around them, there is no going back. In the long term, we hope to lay the groundwork for recognizing, interrogating, and eventually dismantling forces of systemic oppression in engineering higher education.