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，以便能够提供受过广泛教育的必要的技术劳动力，以应对社会面临的全球挑战。找出并解决阻碍学生进入工程学并取得成功的关键障碍，给全国各地的工程教育者和工程项目带来了令人烦恼的挑战。越来越多的证据表明，工程专业的文化特征，如高水平的竞争力和不断增加的表现压力，可能会导致排他性的社会动态，这可能会阻碍一些学生在这一领域坚持下去。这个项目利用了情感的心理学概念，以探索学生个体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通过相对于感知的社会或表现期望进行的严厉的、往往没有根据的自我评估来提供信息的。这项研究将收集和分析学生在工程项目中的体验数据，以建立对影响和动态的基础理解，这些影响和动态为感知与工程脱节的体验提供了背景。这项研究的结果将被用来指导设计更具包容性的工程学习环境，并为学生制定策略，以培养他们的复原力，并在他们的工程学习中取得成功。这个项目的目标是对特殊形式的情感在工科学生专业形成中的作用形成一个基本的、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、令人震惊的痛苦体验状态，与对自我的过度批判性评估有关，这种评估是通过与特定文化背景下社会对行为或表现的预期进行比较而引发的。这个项目考察了个体对这些情感状态的体验和反应，以及提供背景和促进自我评估的社会动态。研究设计结合解释现象学分析(IPA)来考察个体视角和民族志方法来探索文化语境。更具体地说，IPA包括对工科学生的访谈，分析他们在职业形成中负面情绪的内部心理体验。在个体层面上捕捉到的这种情感状态的影响和动态被用来在半结构化焦点小组讨论中引发学生的体验。这些焦点小组提供了对社会模式的理解，这些模式影响了工程项目中规范和期望的文化建设。这两种分析的综合将导致一个全面的模型，即某些形式的影响如何伴随着工程背景下的专业形成，这是从工程专业学生的具体个人和社会文化现实来理解的。这种将这些情感状态理解为社会心理现象的理解，提供了对排他性机制和动态的洞察，这些机制和动态可能存在于工程项目中代表不足和自然减员问题的核心。

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.