NSF Award
2405679
Electrical and computer engineers make significant contributions to society and help maintain a robust economy. They design a wide range of products and systems that are crucial to modern life, working in a variety of sectors such as consumer electronic devices, telecommunications, healthcare, industrial automation, information technology, and aerospace and defense, among others. In order for the US to maintain its globally competitive workforce, it is important for universities to attract and graduate a diverse group of engineering students. This project contributes to NSF’s goal of broadening participation by exploring new ways that electrical and computer engineering programs can support students during their engineering training. Specifically, the research team will explore how students view their family backgrounds and life experiences as contributing to their success in engineering. The team will also determine the extent to which university faculty, staff, and administrators recognize the value of these experiences in the students’ professional development as an engineer. The results can be used to improve the way we train engineers to meet complex challenges in the 21st century. <br/><br/>The project will use a qualitative research design to expand the use of asset-based thinking in electrical and computer engineering undergraduate education. The research team will conduct 25-30 interviews with a cross-section of undergraduate electrical and computer engineering students, faculty, staff, and administrators at a large public university. Using qualitative analysis techniques, the research team will compare these perspectives to determine what possible alignments – or misalignments – exist in how these groups perceive the value of the different experiences that students bring to their undergraduate engineering education. Interviews will focus on the various aspects of student’s community cultural wealth and to what extent they feel these linguistic, resistant, navigational, familial, social, and aspirational capitals have been leveraged in their undergraduate electrical and computer engineering program. Researchers will employ inductive and deductive thematic analysis techniques in combination with narrative analysis to help elevate the experiences of diverse engineering students. The results of this research will generate knowledge about how to best leverage the diversity of student assets in electrical and computer engineering and other engineering disciplines. These results will also be used to inform transformative leadership strategies to integrate asset-based thinking into the day-to-day operations of an electrical and computer engineering department led by the principal investigator. This positions the principal investigator to make significant positive impact on 30 electrical and computer engineering faculty and staff and more than 480 students per year. The advisory board of electrical and computer engineering department heads will support the research team in interpreting findings and tailoring dissemination to other leaders who aspire to adopt asset-based perspectives in their organizations. The project supports NSF’s significant investment in research initiation grants in the last 10+ years by studying the mechanisms by which research mentoring relationships succeed. The research team will conduct a collaborative autoethnographic study of this project. The findings will expand the knowledge of how mentorship of engineering faculty can build research capacity in engineering education and will have implications for NSF research initiation programs such as the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) and Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (BCSER) programs. The autoethnographic findings will also offer the potential to improve other peer-to-peer or hierarchical mentor training.<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.
