Collaborative Research: Engineering Identity, its Predictors, and its Impact on Retention across Educational Stages

这个项目通过了解同一性如何在高中、本科生和研究生中发展，以及对于代表性不足的学生可能如何不同地发展，来支持工程学中的坚持不懈。身份是指人们如何看待自己，或他们认同的“类型的人”。从逻辑上讲，如果个人对某一特定领域有强烈的认同感，他们就更有可能追求并留在该领域。然而，对这一想法进行检验的研究有限，尤其是在工程领域。该项目正在对不同高中和大学的数千名工程专业学生进行调查，以建立一个证据基础。研究结果被用来理解工程师的身份和早期的工程经验如何预示着对毕业的执着和对职业的执着。这些信息正被用来更好地设计和评估早期工程推广和干预的影响。这项研究中学校和学生的多样性使得对性别和种族差异的检查成为可能，这为扩大未被充分代表的群体参与工程学的干预措施提供了信息。结果正在广泛传播给教师、教授、管理人员和其他人，以便他们可以利用这些结果来改进工程类学生的招生和留住计划。研究人员使用问卷开发和多元回归模型来检验工程认同感的预测因子及其在不同教育阶段对持续性的影响。对于坚持工程的人来说，认同感正在成为一个有吸引力的解释，但很少有研究将认同感与坚持性直接联系起来，也没有深入研究塑造认同感的众多因素。这个项目是在数学和科学认同感工作的基础上进行的，以及对专业经验的重要性的研究，以审查这些问题。这项研究在检查一系列教育阶段的工程身份方面是独一无二的，包括高中、本科生、研究生和最近毕业的学士水平的工程学毕业生。通过正在进行的纵向研究和使用多元回归的横断面设计，本研究描述了从高中到研究生学习或专业就业的工程认同轨迹。研究地点包括100所高中，每年招收约5000名学生参加工程课程，以及五所机构的机械、土木和生物医学工程工程系，总共招收5000名本科生和2000名研究生。这些结果提供了对工程认同感如何发展以及这种认同感如何影响持久性的理解。

This project supports persistence in engineering by understanding how identity develops in high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and how it may develop differently for underrepresented students. Identity refers to how people see themselves, or the "kind of person" that they identify with. Logically speaking, if individuals strongly identify themselves with a particular field, they are more likely to pursue and remain in that field. Yet there is limited research testing this idea, particularly in engineering. This project is surveying thousands of students in engineering programs at a variety of different high schools and colleges to build an evidence base. The results are being used to understand how engineering identity and early engineering experiences predict persistence to graduation and persistence in the profession. This information is being used to better design and evaluate the impact of early engineering outreach and interventions. The variety of schools and students in this study is enabling examination of differences by gender and ethnicity, which is informing interventions to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering. The results are being disseminated widely to teachers, professors, administrators and others so that they can use the results to improve programs for engineering student recruitment and retention. The investigators are employing survey scale development and multivariate regression modeling to examine the predictors of engineering identity and its impact on persistence at different educational stages. Identity is emerging as an attractive explanation for who persists in engineering, yet few studies have directly linked identity to persistence, nor thoroughly examined the host of factors that shape identity. This project is building on work on math and science identity, as well as research on the importance of professional experiences, to examine these issues. The study is unique in its examination of engineering identity across a range of educational stages, including high school, undergraduate, graduate, and recent bachelor's-level engineering graduates. Through ongoing longitudinal work and a cross-sectional design using multivariate regression, this study is describing engineering identity trajectories from high school through graduate study or professional employment. Study sites include 100 high schools enrolling approximately 5000 students per year in engineering courses and engineering departments of mechanical, civil and biomedical engineering at five institutions enrolling a total of 5000 undergraduate and 2000 graduate engineering students. The results are providing an understanding of how engineering identity develops and how that identity impacts persistence.