Design and Development: Diversifying Engineering via Identity-Congruent Education (DE-ICE)

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Studies show that students who are not able to see themselves as an engineer at an early age are less likely to pursue engineering careers later in life. This can be especially true of students who may not have easy access to academic and extracurricular activities, including diverse students from rural and urbans populations. Research has shown that incorporating engineering-related educational games into middle school curricula can help students develop an identity as an engineer. This project focuses on fourth grade students because this is a pivotal age where many students from underrepresented groups opt out of an engineering educational trajectory. This project develops and introduces educational games for fourth grade classrooms that demonstrate engineering concepts. The effect of playing these games, which are co-designed with teachers, will be studied in terms students' sense of engineering and how the way they identify with engineering as a result. The study will collect a variety of data from students about their related educational experiences. The data, including notebook entries, interviews, and focus groups, will help researchers investigate and generalize the efficacy of such games for promoting helping middle school students identify with the potential to pursue a career path in engineering. Descriptions of the educational game experiences, their classroom implementations, and assessments on student engineering identity formation will be shared freely.Recent studies show large positive effects of small educational interventions when employing integrative frameworks that are culturally-responsive, chronically-salient and identity-congruent. Additionally, digital game-based learning has demonstrated significant promise in elementary engineering education. This project will operationalize the identity-based motivation framework via digital game-based learning experiences aimed at enhancing engineering identity formation of diverse elementary students. Assessment of students' engineering identity will be made using instruments including the "Draw an Engineer Test" and the "Engineering Identity Development Scale." The identity-based motivation framework will inform the interventions, which will include students' creation of engineering characters who will interactively solve basic engineering problems. The interventions will integrate humanitarian engineering applications of math and science, with lesson plans mapped to the Next Generation Science Standards and aligned with Essential Understandings within Montana's Indian Educational for All Act. Assessment of students' post-intervention engineering identities will augment analyses of interviews, focus groups and game play artifacts in elucidating intervention features effective in enhancing engineering identity formation. Data collection and analysis will rely on innovative qualitative methods, including effects matrices and network analyses, to determine the influence of the educational intervention experiences on students' engineering identity. This mixed-method research will result in a deeper understanding of students' attitudes and dispositions toward engineering, and the features of the intervention design, development and/or experiences that influenced them. This research will also result in adoptable educational interventions designed to encourage engineering identity formation in a diverse group of students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.