NSF Award
2408749
This NSF Track 4 Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE) project will establish the Nebraska Engineering Inclusive Excellence Center (NEIEC) within the College of Engineering (COE) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). NEIEC aims to cultivate a diverse engineering workforce by providing education to individuals from varied backgrounds, equipping them with essential technical, professional, and personal skills, and fostering their engineering identity. As the only engineering college in Nebraska, UNL COE is committed to ensuring that its resources and opportunities are accessible to all Nebraskans, including women, students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (UREGs), and students from rural areas. NEIEC's mission aligns with NSF’s goal of broadening participation in engineering by prioritizing student success across six core non-technical competencies through the Complete Engineer® program and our values of Community, Impact, and Inclusion in order to develop engineers capable of addressing complex global challenges.<br/><br/>The primary goals of NEIEC are to foster a culture of inclusive excellence, reinforce engineering identity, facilitate the development of complete engineers, emphasize inclusive excellence from K-12 recruitment to faculty mentoring, and to examine engineering identity development throughout K-12 education. NEIEC is structured around four pillars. Broadening Recruitment (Pillar I) will build upon and link existing community networks to collaborate with high school educators, inspire engineering mindsets, and bolster engineering identities to increase access to engineering career pathways for Nebraska youth. Enhancing Retention (Pillar II) will scrutinize and address institutional policies that may inadvertently create barriers to persistence toward an engineering degree, particularly among students from underserved groups. This pillar also includes refining and broadening access to the burgeoning suite of specialized student support programs currently offered by the college, while researching how these services contribute to supporting engineering identities and retention. The Complete Engineer® program (Pillar III) will establish pathways for engineering students to achieve the Engagement in within the Inclusive Excellence competency through student grants and faculty-led engagement projects. Research under this pillar will shed light on how student engagement projects focused on inclusive excellence impact undergraduate students’ engineering identity. Fostering Inclusive Faculty (Pillar IV) includes establishing an innovative faculty mentoring program to support faculty in inclusive teaching, student mentoring, and the scholarship of engagement, enhancing faculty capacity to promote inclusive excellence within engineering education. Guiding research questions for this pillar focus on understanding how a dynamic ecosystem promoting collaborative, experiential, and interactive activities can transform engineering culture into a partnership model and serve as a catalyst for shaping strong engineering identities, as informed by Cultural Transformation Theory. Mixed methods-based research data will include questionnaires on elements of engineering culture, student retention data analysis, first-year student surveys, course policy document analysis, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and analysis of written reflections. The evaluation plan for this project will span three levels, the central and integrative partnership level, the research and education practice (knowledge generation) level, and the participant (including faculty and students) leadership and scholarship level. This project will make significant contributions to the knowledgebase about inclusive excellence in engineering education and fostering a culture that strengthens engineering identity among undergraduate students. NEIEC will produce complete engineers equipped with technical and nontechnical skills who are poised to lead innovation and inclusivity in engineering fields. Its outcomes and best practices will serve as a model for institutions promoting diversity and innovation, thereby contributing to a globally competitive workforce.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
