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

职业：实现潜在的多样性：通过工科学生的身份发展建立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，大多数从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，而不是在作为创新思想家的技能方面不同。不符合这种“工程师”模式的学生往往与工程学格格不入，没有形成工程学身份，离开了工程学，这降低了人类亟需的创新潜力。这个项目通过刻画和经验性地理解如何支持学生的创新思维和工程特性来应对这些挑战。这些潜在的差异被称为潜在多样性，这些属性是作为创新的潜在来源而存在的，但不是可见的或实现的。这项工作的成果将有助于创建更具包容性的大学课堂，接受更多的学生，并培养出能够采用各种视角创新问题解决方案的工程师。这些多元化的工程师将为应对21世纪的重大挑战做好更充分的准备。这个项目的主要目标是描述不同的学生如何体验工程文化，并就他们作为工程师的身份进行谈判。这项研究可以实现学生的另类思维和思维方式的力量，在工程解决方案中进行更大的创新。它还以互补和变革性的方式扩展了传统的工程多样性研究思路。这个项目使用混合的方法来确定：1)工科学生在思维、创新思维和态度上存在什么样的多样性；2)随着时间的推移，具有潜在多样性的本科生如何在工程实践社区内形成工程学身份；以及3)课堂内外可以提供什么支持，以促进具有潜在多样性的学生融入工程学。为了获得这一见解，将收集来自一年级工科学生的全国调查数据，并将使用拓扑数据分析来表征潜在多样性。根据这些结果，对潜在不同学生的纵向叙述性访谈将被用来了解学生的同一性发展，以及他们的课堂经验和制度结构如何支持或阻碍这种同一性发展。我们将对这些叙事进行演绎分析(根据身份轨迹理论)和归纳分析(基于个人经验)，以提出一个新的潜在多样性理论框架，该框架可纳入研究者和实践者对如何教育工科学生的理解中。综合教育计划将实施教学，以支持潜在多样化的学生在第一年工程课程(一个关键的时间点，许多有才华的学生从工程课程中流失)的发展。将为教育工作者、联合课程支持计划工作人员、工程管理人员和政策制定者举办研讨会，以重新构建对工科学生的思维方式，并制定基于证据的实践，以便在课堂内外为学生提供支持。这一方法将为重点工程教育人员提供培养新一代创新者的新工具。综合研究和教育计划将直接影响数千名工科学生的教育体验，以培养创新的、而不是同质化的工程师。

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.