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

工程领域需要招募和留住更多样化的学生群体，以便能够提供应对社会面临的全球挑战所需的受过广泛教育的技术劳动力。识别和解决学生获得和成功的关键障碍，工程教育工作者和工程项目在全国各地提出了棘手的挑战。越来越多的证据表明，工程项目的文化特征，如高水平的竞争力和不断增加的业绩压力，可能会导致排斥性的社会动态，可以阻止一些学生坚持在该领域。这个项目借鉴了心理学概念的影响，以探讨个别学生的反应，这些排斥动力。更具体地说，个人对这些社会动态的反应可能是由一个苛刻的，往往是毫无根据的，自我评估相对于感知的社会或绩效期望。该研究将收集和分析学生在工程项目中的经验数据，以建立对影响和动态的基本理解，这些影响和动态为与感知工程脱节相关的经验提供背景。这项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一个基本的，理论上的理解，在工程专业学生的专业形成的特殊形式的影响的作用。与专业形成相关的某些特定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，这种状态与对自我的过度批判性评价有关，这种评价是由与特定文化背景下社会构建的行为或表现期望进行比较而引起的。这个项目检查个人的经验，并对这些情感状态和社会动态提供的背景下，并提示自我评价的反应。研究设计结合了解释现象学分析（IPA）的个人视角和民族志的方法来探索文化背景。更具体地说，IPA包括与工程专业学生的访谈，分析了专业形成中负面影响的内部心理体验。这种情感状态的影响和动态捕捉在个人层面上被用来引发学生的经验，在半结构化的焦点小组讨论。这些焦点小组提供了一个了解的社会模式，告知规范和期望在工程项目的文化建设。这两种分析的合成将导致在一个全面的模型，如何某些形式的影响伴随专业的形成，在工程的背景下，从体现个人和工程专业学生的社会文化现实的理解。这种理解这些情感状态的社会心理现象提供了深入了解排斥机制和动态，可能在于在工程项目的代表性不足和磨损的问题的核心。

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.