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Background Nonbinary engineering students (i.e., engineering students that identify as outside of the gender binary) must navigate a cis- and heteronormative society, in addition to a male dominated engineering culture. Nonbinary students in higher education report high levels of minority threat, lower levels of persistence than cisgender peers and lessened feelings of belonging. One avenue for supporting nonbinary students’ persistence in engineering is to increase understanding of the types of individuals that support nonbinary students and the supports available to nonbinary engineering students. For this study, we are utilizing social capital theory and Devor’s witnessing and mirroring framework to explore the supports nonbinary engineering students access through their social networks and how those supports impact persistence. Social capital, the resources embedded into social relationships, has been used as both an indicator and outcome in relation to students’ well-being, belonging, academic success, and persistence. Devor’s witnessing and mirroring framework brings greater meaning to the value of transgender and cisgender alters in a nonbinary engineers’ network. Specifically, how cisgender alters witness a nonbinary person’s identity as an outsider to gender nonconformity and how transgender alters mirror a nonbinary person’s experience as an insider to gender nonconformity. Purpose: The purpose of this work in progress is to identify supports that are impactful on nonbinary engineering students’ persistence in their majors and careers. Specifically, we ask the questions: 1) What supports do alters, of differing genders, provide that witness and mirror nonbinary engineers; 2) to what extent are supports provided by alters impactful on students' success in their majors and careers? Methodology/approach: We purposely selected 4 nonbinary engineering students to interview from a larger study on engineering students’ social capital and professional skills. Nonbinary engineering students were asked about their experiences of being nonbinary in engineering spaces, the support they received from cisgender and transgender alters and the impact of that support on their persistence in engineering. We analyzed the themes in the interviews by coding the alters mentioned, the types of supports provided (mirroring, witnessing, expressive and instrumental) and the impact of supports on persistence. Future Work and Implications: The finding of this study will contribute to a greater understanding of the social capital and social networks of nonbinary students, as there is dearth of research on their experiences in engineering spaces. This work can guide our understanding of the supports that nonbinary engineering students have available to them and perhaps more importantly, the supports they do not have available to them. The findings from this study will be used to inform organizational and institutional policies to support engineering students in accessing more social capital.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available June 26, 2025
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Background Nonbinary engineering students (i.e., engineering students that identify as outside of the gender binary) must navigate a cis- and heteronormative society, in addition to a male dominated engineering culture. Nonbinary students in higher education report high levels of minority threat, lower levels of persistence than cisgender peers and lessened feelings of belonging. One avenue for supporting nonbinary students’ persistence in engineering is to increase understanding of the types of individuals that support nonbinary students and the supports available to nonbinary engineering students. For this study, we are utilizing social capital theory and Devor’s witnessing and mirroring framework to explore the supports nonbinary engineering students access through their social networks and how those supports impact persistence. Social capital, the resources embedded into social relationships, has been used as both an indicator and outcome in relation to students’ well-being, belonging, academic success, and persistence. Devor’s witnessing and mirroring framework brings greater meaning to the value of transgender and cisgender alters in a nonbinary engineers’ network. Specifically, how cisgender alters witness a nonbinary person’s identity as an outsider to gender nonconformity and how transgender alters mirror a nonbinary person’s experience as an insider to gender nonconformity. Purpose: The purpose of this work in progress is to identify supports that are impactful on nonbinary engineering students’ persistence in their majors and careers. Specifically, we ask the questions: 1) What supports do alters, of differing genders, provide that witness and mirror nonbinary engineers; 2) to what extent are supports provided by alters impactful on students' success in their majors and careers? Methodology/approach: We purposely selected 4 nonbinary engineering students to interview from a larger study on engineering students’ social capital and professional skills. Nonbinary engineering students were asked about their experiences of being nonbinary in engineering spaces, the support they received from cisgender and transgender alters and the impact of that support on their persistence in engineering. We analyzed the themes in the interviews by coding the alters mentioned, the types of supports provided (mirroring, witnessing, expressive and instrumental) and the impact of supports on persistence. Future Work and Implications: The finding of this study will contribute to a greater understanding of the social capital and social networks of nonbinary students, as there is dearth of research on their experiences in engineering spaces. This work can guide our understanding of the supports that nonbinary engineering students have available to them and perhaps more importantly, the supports they do not have available to them. The findings from this study will be used to inform organizational and institutional policies to support engineering students in accessing more social capital.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available June 26, 2025
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Background Nonbinary engineering students (i.e., engineering students that identify as outside of the gender binary) must navigate a cis- and heteronormative society, in addition to a male dominated engineering culture. Nonbinary students in higher education report high levels of minority threat, lower levels of persistence than cisgender peers and lessened feelings of belonging. One avenue for supporting nonbinary students’ persistence in engineering is to increase understanding of the types of individuals that support nonbinary students and the supports available to nonbinary engineering students. For this study, we are utilizing social capital theory and Devor’s witnessing and mirroring framework to explore the supports nonbinary engineering students access through their social networks and how those supports impact persistence. Social capital, the resources embedded into social relationships, has been used as both an indicator and outcome in relation to students’ well-being, belonging, academic success, and persistence. Devor’s witnessing and mirroring framework brings greater meaning to the value of transgender and cisgender alters in a nonbinary engineers’ network. Specifically, how cisgender alters witness a nonbinary person’s identity as an outsider to gender nonconformity and how transgender alters mirror a nonbinary person’s experience as an insider to gender nonconformity. Purpose The purpose of this work in progress is to identify supports that are impactful on nonbinary engineering students’ persistence in their majors and careers. Specifically, we ask the questions: 1) What supports do alters, of differing genders, provide that witness and mirror nonbinary engineers; 2) to what extent are supports provided by alters impactful on students' success in their majors and careers? Methodology/approach We purposely selected 4 nonbinary engineering students to interview from a larger study on engineering students’ social capital and professional skills. Nonbinary engineering students were asked about their experiences of being nonbinary in engineering spaces, the support they received from cisgender and transgender alters and the impact of that support on their persistence in engineering. We analyzed the themes in the interviews by coding the alters mentioned, the types of supports provided (mirroring, witnessing, expressive and instrumental) and the impact of supports on persistence. Future Work & Implications The finding of this study will contribute to a greater understanding of the social capital and social networks of nonbinary students, as there is dearth of research on their experiences in engineering spaces. This work can guide our understanding of the supports that nonbinary engineering students have available to them and perhaps more importantly, the supports they do not have available to them. The findings from this study will be used to inform organizational and institutional policies to support engineering students in accessing more social capital.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available June 24, 2025
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Abstract Background The National Science Foundation Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) program aims to increase research capacity in the field by providing funding for technical engineering faculty to learn to conduct engineering education research through mentorship by an experienced social science researcher. We use collaborative autoethnography to study the tripartite RIEF mentoring relationship between Julie, an experienced engineering education researcher, and two novice education researchers who have backgrounds in biomedical engineering—Paul, a biomedical engineering faculty member and major professor to the second novice, Deepthi, a graduate student. We ground our work in the cognitive apprenticeship model and Eby and colleagues’ mentoring model.
Results Using data from written reflections and interviews, we explored the role of instrumental and psychosocial supports in our mentoring relationship. In particular, we noted how elements of cognitive apprenticeship such as scaffolding and gradual fading of instrumental supports helped Paul and Deepthi learn qualitative research skills that differed drastically from their biomedical engineering research expertise. We initially conceptualized our tripartite relationship as one where Julie mentored Paul and Paul subsequently mentored Deepthi. Ultimately, we realized that this model was unrealistic because Paul did not yet possess the social science research expertise to mentor another novice. As a result, we changed our model so that Julie mentored both Paul and Deepthi directly. While our mentoring relationship was overall very positive, it has included many moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding. We draw on Lent and Lopez’s idea of relation-inferred self-efficacy to explain some of these missed opportunities for communication and understanding.
Conclusions This paper contributes to the literature on engineering education capacity building by studying mentoring as a mechanism to support technically trained researchers in learning to conduct engineering education research. Our initial mentoring model failed to take into account how challenging it is for mentees to make the paradigm shift from technical engineering to social science research and how that would affect Paul’s ability to mentor Deepthi. Our experiences have implications for expanding research capacity because they raise practical and conceptual issues for experienced and novice engineering education researchers to consider as they form mentoring relationships.
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This full research paper presents the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) results for the Professional Skill Opportunities survey (PSO) we designed to measure undergraduate engineering students’ opportunities to develop and practice important nontechnical professional skills. We use Dall’alba’s “ways of being” as the theoretical framework for the survey development and generated construct definitions based on past literature, expert review, and cognitive think-aloud interviews. We administered the survey in an engineering class at the beginning of the Spring 2022 semester. After comparing the three EFA models based on goodness-of-fit indices and model interpretability aligned to the theoretical model, the researchers selected a five-factor model. The EFA result and literature on leadership and teamwork showed these two skills are highly interrelated and could be combined into one construct to stress the “sharedness” of leadership responsibilities in teams. The result allowed our team to refine our item pool, revise construct definitions, and generate new items. In future work, we will administer the revised PSO survey to the same population at the end of the same semester as further validation. We also plan to explore the relationship between professional skill development opportunities and students’ social support. We hope the PSO survey can provide educators and institutions a means to offer scaffoldings and more opportunities for professional skill development and better prepare students for the engineering workforce.more » « less
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As the need for interdisciplinary collaboration increases, industry needs engineers who are not only affluent in technical engineering skills but also efficient in skills such as communication, problem-solving, engineering ethics, and business management. As a result, engineering programs are tasked with providing students with sufficient opportunities to develop non-technical professional skills to better prepare them for the workforce. Previous research has focused on exploring how and where students tend to develop profession skills and assessments have been established to measure the level of professional skills. However, without a means to measure whether students are getting sufficient opportunities for development, it is hard for educators and engineering programs to determine whether or where scaffolding are needed. We developed an instrument to assess undergraduate engineering students’ opportunities for professional skill development. To increase content validity, we conducted 20 think-aloud interviews with students from a large Midwestern university. The aim of this WIP is two-fold. We present the preliminary results of the think-aloud interview to determine what changes need to be made to existing items and what emerging themes appear regarding to participants’ professional skill development opportunities. After thematic analysis of the interview transcripts, we revised 10 items by simplifying the grammar or altering certain words that tend to confuse participants or carry negative connotations. We found that, compared to students who have only been involved in class projects, those with co-curricular experiences tend to report more opportunities in skills related to business management principles and problem-solving skills. Co-curricular activities were also the most referenced in building communication skills. Our next step will be piloting the instrument across multiple institutions and conducting validation analysis.more » « less