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One of the pivotal goals in engineering education is to broaden participation of different minorities. An overlooked barrier yet to be explored is how hidden curriculum and its connected constructs may impede this goal. Hidden curriculum (HC) refers to the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended assumptions, lessons, values, beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives in engineering. This paper will present the development and assessment of a mixed-method vignette survey instrument to evaluate the responses of current engineering students and faculty when exposed to several examples of hidden curriculum. Results from 153 engineering students and faculty across the United States and Puerto Rico were used to assess the survey sub-subscales (HC awareness, emotions, self-efficacy, and self-advocacy). Findings revealed Cronbach alpha coefficients of 0.70 (HC awareness), 0.73 (emotions), 0.91 (self-efficacy), and 0.91 (self-advocacy). The overall instrument had a reliability of 0.74. Alongside HC awareness, we found that among different axes of inequity, gender, role, and institution type are important elements that shaped the responses of these engineering populations. 

The purpose of this Work In Progress (WIP) qualitative study was to explore how underrepresented women graduate students and faculty in Science and Engineering understand and perceive what constitutes ethical behavior in a mentoring research relationship centered around the six ethical principles of Beneficence, Nonmaleficence, Autonomy, Fidelity, Fairness, and Privacy. This WIP paper focuses on the responses of eight graduate students and four faculty to six case studies that targeted a specific ethical mentoring principle, and it represents an expansion of a larger study currently under review. The goals of this WIP paper are to: (a) explore participant understanding of each ethical mentoring principle; (b) elucidate participant perceptions of ethical issues in six case studies; and (c) reveal what ethical behaviors participants expect from their respective mentor/mentee if they placed themselves in the situation of the case studies.