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

这个项目通过了解认同感在高中生、本科生和研究生中是如何发展的，以及在代表性不足的学生中如何以不同的方式发展，来支持对工程的坚持。身份是指人们如何看待自己，或者他们认同的“那种人”。从逻辑上讲，如果个人强烈认同自己在某一特定领域，他们更有可能追求并留在该领域。然而，检验这一观点的研究有限，尤其是在工程领域。该项目调查了来自不同高中和大学工程专业的数千名学生，以建立一个证据基础。研究结果被用来了解工程师身份和早期的工程经验如何预测毕业后的坚持和专业的坚持。这些信息被用于更好地设计和评估早期工程推广和干预的影响。在这项研究中，学校和学生的多样性使性别和种族差异的检查成为可能，这为干预措施提供了信息，以扩大代表性不足的群体在工程领域的参与。这些结果正在向教师、教授、管理人员和其他人员广泛传播，以便他们可以利用这些结果来改进工程专业学生的招聘和保留计划。研究人员采用调查量表开发和多元回归模型来研究工程认同的预测因素及其对不同教育阶段持久性的影响。身份正在成为一个有吸引力的解释谁坚持从事工程，但很少有研究直接将身份与坚持联系起来，也没有彻底检查形成身份的众多因素。这个项目是建立在数学和科学认同的基础上，以及对专业经验重要性的研究，以检验这些问题。这项研究的独特之处在于它对不同教育阶段的工程身份进行了考察，包括高中、本科、研究生和最近的学士级工程毕业生。通过持续的纵向工作和使用多元回归的横截面设计，本研究描述了从高中到研究生学习或专业就业的工程身份轨迹。研究地点包括100所高中，每年招收约5000名学生学习工程课程，五所院校的机械、土木和生物医学工程工程系共招收5000名本科生和2000名研究生。结果提供了对工程标识如何发展以及该标识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.