CAREER: Actualizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students' Identity Development

职业：实现潜在的多样性：通过工程学生的身份发展建设创新美国需要新的和创新的工程解决方案，以满足我们不断增长的经济的全球需求。然而，大多数工程学位课程毕业的工程师在解决问题的方法，思维方式和工程身份方面更相似，而不是在创新思想家的技能方面有所不同。不符合这种“成为工程师”模式的学生往往与工程学疏远，不发展工程学身份，离开工程学，这降低了急需的人类创新潜力。该项目通过表征和经验理解如何支持学生的创新思维和工程身份来应对这些挑战。这些潜在的差异被称为潜在的多样性，作为创新的潜在来源，但不可见或实现的属性。这项工作的成果将有助于创建更具包容性的大学课堂，接受更广泛的学生，并培养能够采用各种观点来创新问题解决方案的工程师。这些多样化的工程师将更有准备地应对21世纪世纪的巨大挑战。这个项目的总体目标是描述不同的学生如何体验工程文化，并协商他们作为工程师的身份。这项研究可以实现学生的另类思维方式和思维方式的力量，为工程解决方案的更大创新。它还以互补和变革的方式扩展了对工程多样性的传统研究。该项目使用混合的方法来确定：1）什么样的思想，创新思维和态度的多样性是目前在工程专业的学生; 2）如何与潜在的多样性本科生形成工程身份的实践随着时间的推移，在工程社区;和3）什么样的支持，无论是在课堂内外，可以提供，以促进包容的学生与潜在的多样性工程。为了获得这种洞察力，将收集一年级工程专业学生的全国调查数据，并使用拓扑数据分析来表征潜在的多样性。从这些结果，纵向叙事访谈潜在的不同的学生将被用来了解学生的身份发展，以及这种身份发展是如何支持或阻碍他们的课堂经验和制度结构。这些叙述将被分析演绎（由身份轨迹理论告知）和归纳（基于个人经验），提出一个新的潜在多样性的理论框架，可以纳入研究人员和从业者的理解如何教育工程专业学生的方式。综合教育计划将实施教学法，以支持潜在的多样化学生在第一年的工程项目（一个关键的时间点，许多有才华的学生从工程项目中流失）的发展。将为教育工作者，课外支持计划工作人员，工程管理人员和政策制定者举办研讨会，以重新构建工程专业学生的思维方式，并制定基于证据的实践，以支持学生在课堂内外。这种方法将为关键的工程教育人员提供新的工具，以培养新一代的创新者。综合研究和教育计划将直接影响成千上万的工程专业学生的教育经验，以培养创新，而不是同质的工程师。

CAREER: Realizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students' Identity DevelopmentThe U.S. needs new and innovative engineering solutions to meet the global demands of our growing economy. However, most engineers graduating from engineering degree programs are more alike in their problem solving approaches, ways of thinking, and engineering identities than different in their skills as innovative thinkers. Students who do not conform to this mold of "being an engineer" are often alienated from engineering, do not develop engineering identities, and leave engineering, which reduces the much-needed human potential for innovation. This project responds to these challenges by characterizing and empirically understanding how to support students' innovative mindsets and engineering identities. These underlying differences are termed latent diversity, attributes that are present as potential sources for innovation, but are not visible or actualized. The outcomes of this work will help create more inclusive college classrooms that accept a wider set of students and produce engineers who can adopt various perspectives for innovative problem solutions. These diverse engineers will be more prepared to address the grand challenges of the 21st century. The overarching goal of this project is to characterize how diverse students experience the culture of engineering and negotiate their identities as engineers. This research can actualize the power of students' alternative mindsets and ways of thinking for greater innovation in engineering solutions. It also expands traditional strands of research on diversity in engineering in complementary and transformative ways. This project uses mixed methods to determine: 1) what kinds of diversity in thought, innovation mindsets, and attitudes are present in engineering students; 2) how undergraduate students with latent diversity form engineering identities within an engineering community of practice over time; and 3) what support, both inside and outside of the classroom, can be provided to promote inclusion of students with latent diversity in engineering. To garner this insight, national survey data from first-year engineering students will be collected and latent diversity will be characterized by using topological data analysis. From these results, longitudinal narrative interviews with latently diverse students will be use to understand students' identity development and how this identity development is supported or hindered by their classroom experiences and institutional structure. These narratives will be analyzed both deductively (informed by identity-trajectory theory) and inductively (based on individual experiences) to propose a new theoretical framework of latent diversity that can be incorporated into researchers' and practitioners' ways of understanding how to educate engineering students. The integrated education plan will implement pedagogies to support the development of latently diverse students in first-year engineering programs (a critical time point at which many talented students are lost from engineering programs). Workshops for educators, co-curricular support program staff, and engineering administrators and policy makers will be developed to reframe ways of thinking about engineering students and enact evidence-based practices that can support students both in and out of the classroom. This approach will provide key engineering education personnel with novel tools to develop a new generation of innovators. The integrated research and educational plan will directly impact the educational experiences of thousands of engineering students to develop innovative, rather than homogeneous, engineers.