HBCU-DCL EAGER: Virtually Preparing Underrepresented Students for the Engineering and Computer Science Professoriate Using Embodied Conversational Agents

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Across the U. S. higher education landscape, African Americans and Hispanics are significantly underrepresented among the engineering and computer science faculty. Because of this trend, many African American and Hispanic students are frequently not afforded the opportunity to develop meaningful mentoring relationships with African Americans and Hispanics among their engineering and computer science faculty. The overall goal of this research project is to develop and evaluate a virtual mentoring system that uses a group of embodied conversational agents (i.e., think avatars) to mentor underrepresented doctoral students, majoring in engineering and computer science and who are pursuing a career as a college professor. The virtual mentoring system will be designed to expose underrepresented, undergraduate and graduate students in engineering and computer science to the many opportunities available in the professoriate by educating them about the professoriate in general and the engineering and computer professoriate specifically. It will offer concrete guidance on the different routes to the engineering and computer science professoriate. In the scientific and theoretical literature, research has shown the effectiveness of embodied conversational agents in providing career mentoring functions. The career-related functions typically include sponsorship, exposure, visibility, coaching, protection, and challenging assignments. With this in mind, the proposed project will utilize exploratory, sequential mixed methods to study the overall effectiveness of the virtual mentoring system. Project effectiveness will be measured by using three factors: content knowledge, attitude and preliminary indicators (i.e. applying to graduate programs or summer research opportunities, taking the GRE, etc.). As a part of the research project, the investigator will compare the virtual mentoring system with other traditional mentoring programs. The proposed project is potentially transformative, with immense potential to help diversify the engineering and computer science professoriate.