RFE: Inclusion, exclusion, and socialization in engineering programs - Investigating key affective socio-psychological mechanisms in professional formation

工程领域需要招收和留住更多不同的学生群体，以便能够提供广泛教育的技术劳动力，以应对社会面临的全球挑战。识别和解决学生进入工程领域并取得成功的主要障碍，对全国的工程教育工作者和工程项目提出了令人烦恼的挑战。越来越多的证据表明，工程专业的文化特征，如高水平的竞争和不断增加的表现压力，可能会导致排斥性的社会动态，从而使一些学生不愿在这个领域坚持下去。该项目借鉴了情感的心理学概念，以探索个别学生对这些排他性动态的反应。更具体地说，个人对这些社会动态的反应可能是由一种与感知到的社会或表现期望相关的严酷的、往往是毫无根据的自我评估所决定的。该研究将收集和分析学生在工程项目中的经历数据，以建立对影响和动态的基本理解，这些影响和动态为感知与工程脱节相关的经历提供了背景。本研究的结果将用于为更具包容性的工程学习环境的设计提供信息，并为学生制定策略，以建立弹性并在工程学习中取得成功。这个项目的目标是发展对特定形式的情感在工程专业学生专业形成中的作用的基本的、理论上的理解。一些与职业形成相关的特殊情感状态可以被定义为一种普遍的、引人注目的痛苦的经验状态，这种状态与对自我的过度批判性评估有关，是由与特定文化背景下社会建构的行为或表现期望的比较引起的。这个项目考察了个人的经历和对这些情感状态的反应，以及提供背景和促进自我评估的社会动态。本研究设计结合诠释现象学分析（IPA）研究个体视角与民族志方法探讨文化语境。更具体地说，IPA包括对工程专业学生的访谈，分析专业形成中负面影响的内部心理体验。在半结构化的焦点小组讨论中，这种情感状态在个人层面的影响和动态被用来引出学生的体验。这些焦点小组提供了对社会模式的理解，这些社会模式为工程项目中的规范和期望的文化建设提供了信息。这两种分析的综合将产生一个综合的模型，从工程专业学生的具体个人和社会文化现实中理解，在工程背景下，某些形式的影响是如何伴随专业形成的。这种对这些情感状态作为社会心理现象的理解提供了对排斥性机制和动态的见解，这些机制和动态可能是工程项目中代表性不足和人员流失问题的核心。

The field of engineering needs to recruit and retain more diverse student populations to be able to provide the broadly educated, technical workforce necessary to address the global challenges facing society. Identifying and addressing key barriers to students' access to and success in engineering have presented vexing challenges for engineering educators and engineering programs across the country. There is growing evidence that cultural characteristics of engineering programs, such as high levels of competitiveness and increasing performance pressures, might lead to exclusionary social dynamics that can discourage some students from persisting in the field. This project draws on the psychological concepts of affect in order to explore individual students' responses to these exclusionary dynamics. More specifically, individual responses to these social dynamics might be informed by a harsh, and often unfounded, self-assessment relative to perceived social or performance expectations. The study will collect and analyze data from students' experiences in engineering programs to develop a foundational understanding of the influences and dynamics that provide the context for experiences related to perceiving a disconnection from engineering. The findings from this research will be used to inform the design of more inclusive engineering learning environments and to develop strategies for students to build resilience and succeed in their engineering studies. The goal of this project is to develop a fundamental, theoretical understanding of the role of particular forms of affect in engineering students' professional formation. Some particular affective states related to professional formation may be defined as a pervasive, strikingly painful experiential state related to an overly critical evaluation of self, prompted by a comparison to socially constructed expectations of conduct or performance in a particular cultural setting. This project examines both individual experiences of, and responses to these affective states and the social dynamics that provide the context and prompt the self-evaluation. The research design combines interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to investigate the individual perspective and ethnographic methods to explore the cultural context. More specifically, IPA comprises interviews with engineering students that are analyzed for internal psychological experiences of negative affect in professional formation. The influences and dynamics of such affective states captured at the individual level are used to elicit student experiences in semi-structured focus groups discussion. These focus groups provide an understanding of the social patterns that inform the cultural construction of norms and expectations in engineering programs. The synthesis of both analyses will result in a comprehensive model of how certain forms of affect accompany professional formation in the context of engineering, as understood from both the embodied individual and the sociocultural realities of engineering students. This understanding of these affective states as socio-psychological phenomena provides insights into exclusionary mechanisms and dynamics that may lie at the heart of issues of underrepresentation and attrition in engineering programs.