Constructing Engineers: A Participant-Observation Study of Undergraduate Engineering Education

这个为期三年的项目的主要目标是进行一项参与式观察研究，以调查工科本科生从新生转变为准备就业或高级培训的毕业生时身份的变化。主要产品是由研究小组的三位成员共同撰写的一本书长度的手稿。在咨询顾问小组的指导下，作者将逐步介绍工程专业学生如何理解和体验他们的教育，作为他们在工程课程中进行的一系列价值选择和判断。一个指导性的假设是，高价值的工程课程将基于微积分的工程科学作为解决工程问题的基础，这与工程身份的其他社会维度的建立以及女性和少数民族学生的代表性不足有关。第二个目标是向其他研究人员提供大约2500页的索引抄本，这些抄本来自焦点小组会议的录音和对一所大型赠地大学工程专业本科生的采访。最后，通过提供基于成绩单、参与者观察、调查和文件收集数据的纵向描述，本研究将为我们对工程课程的特征和问题的分析理解做出独特而急需的贡献。

The principal objective of this three-year project is to conduct a participant observation study that examines the changing identities of undergraduate engineering students as they transform themselves from novice freshmen into graduating seniors prepared for employment or advanced training. The major product is a book length manuscript co-authored by the three members of the research team. With guidance from a panel of consulting advisers, the authors will provide a step-by-step account of how engineering students understand and experience their education as a sequence of value choices and judgments to be made as they move through their engineering curricula. A guiding hypothesis is that the high value engineering curricula place on the calculus based engineering sciences as the foundation of engineering problem solving is linked to the establishment of other social dimensions of engineering identities, and to under-representation of women and minority students. A second objective is to make available to other researchers approximately 2,500 pages of indexed transcriptions from taped focus group meetings and interviews with undergraduate engineering students at a large land-grant university. Finally, by providing a longitudinal account built upon data from transcriptions, participant observation, surveys, and document collection, this study will make a unique and much-needed contribution to our analytic understanding of the character and problems of engineering curricula.