NSF Award
2422010
Engineering design courses are a staple of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. These courses provide students with opportunities to tackle real-world problems before encountering them in the workplace. The courses require students to integrate their creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. Design courses are crucial aspects of the professional formation of engineers and, therefore, are essential to the competitiveness of the nation’s scientific workforce. The research team will conduct interviews and then develop and deploy a survey focusing on assets that minoritized students bring to the engineering design process. This project provides a perspective that is currently missing from the professional formation of engineers and will help educators improve the engineering curriculum by making it more inclusive for all students, ultimately helping strengthen the workforce.<br/><br/>The project will use an exploratory sequential mixed-methods research design to expand community cultural wealth theory for application in engineering design courses. Recruiting through design-based course instructors, the researchers will conduct two ethnographic interviews with approximately 12-15 minoritized undergraduate students at varying stages of their undergraduate studies. The interview series will focus on students’ linguistic, resistant, navigational, familial, social, and aspirational capital and how design experiences allow them to practice these strengths. Researchers will employ inductive and deductive thematic analysis as well as critical counternarrative analysis. We will publish critical counternarratives to elevate the lived experiences of minoritized engineering students in design-based courses from an asset perspective. The thematically analyzed interview results will include a framework of design-based community cultural wealth working definitions. The researchers will seek feedback from 10-12 faculty experts who teach engineering design courses. The researchers will use critical quantitative methods to design and validate a design-based community cultural wealth survey instrument with students at partnering ABET-accredited institutions. First, the team will deploy the survey to a large and diverse sample of 500-800 engineering students and conduct exploratory factor analysis. The following year, they will relaunch the survey with an additional 500-800 engineering students and conduct a confirmatory factor analysis. The final survey instrument and its accompanying ethical-use manual will provide a way for design-based course instructors to understand the extent to which their students believe they have had the opportunities to practice their design-based forms of capital and the impact of these opportunities on their engineering self-efficacy and identity development. Workshops facilitated by the project team provide an opportunity for educators at partnering institutions and others around the country to collaboratively develop plans to use the instrument and address equity gaps in how design courses are taught. The project will help to promote the integration of asset-based approaches into students’ professional formation to combat disparities in engineering education, a necessary step in building a diverse engineering workforce equipped to tackle the complex challenges of the 21st century.<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.
