EAGER: Co-Creating a Research Agenda to Evaluate University Ambassador Programs' Impact on Engineering Identity of K-12 Students

多元化的员工队伍能够更有创造性地解决问题，也更加社会公正。尽管在提高多样性方面已经取得了巨大的进步，但工程领域仍以白人和男性为主。大学正试图通过开展工程外联来增加多样性。具体来说，大学生参观幼儿园到12年级的教室，参与旨在激发学生对工程兴趣的讨论和活动。然而，这些项目是否以及在多大程度上成功地增加了来自传统上代表性不足的群体的学生攻读工程学位和职业的可能性，还有待观察。该项目旨在将参与工程推广的各种利益相关者聚集在一起，以便制定一个全面的、长期的研究议程。通过这一议程，研究人员和项目管理者最终将能够更好地评估和评估项目是否有效地鼓励不同人群追求工程职业，以及帮助项目采用更有影响力的方法。研究人员试图了解大使项目对工程道路的长期影响，以及这些项目是否有助于传统上得不到充分服务的学生培养工程身份。有必要进行有意的纵向研究，以确定大使项目是否具有真正和持久的影响。纵向研究需要大量的时间和资源，而且大使项目之间存在的差异使得小规模研究的用处不大。工程外展社区通常资金不足，无法满足其寻求实现的社会变革的规模，而进行深入的评估将允许更好地利用资源。通过研究，可以确定最有效的策略，并用于制定更有效的外展计划。创建一个统一的研究议程，让不同的利益相关者都参与进来，虽然具有挑战性，但也有许多好处，包括：制定一项评估协议，供全国各地的项目使用；创建K-12和大学人员之间的关系，导致对工程身份的纵向研究；开发可扩展的、有效的项目实施模型。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A diverse workforce leads to more creative problem solving and is more socially just. Though great strides have been made to improve diversity, engineering remains predominantly white and male. Universities are attempting to increase diversity by conducting engineering outreach. Specifically, university students visit kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms and engage in discussions and activities intended to motivate student interest in engineering. However, what remains to be seen is if, and to what extent, these programs successfully increase the likelihood that students from traditionally underrepresented populations are pursuing engineering degrees and careers. This project seeks to bring together a diverse spectrum of stakeholders involved in engineering outreach such that a comprehensive, long-term research agenda can be developed. Through this agenda, researchers and program administrators will ultimately become better able to evaluate and assess whether programs effectively encourage diverse populations to pursue engineering careers, as well as help programs employ approaches that are more impactful.The researchers seek to understand the long-term impact that ambassador programs have on engineering pathways and whether these programs help traditionally underserved students develop engineering identities. There is a need for intentional and longitudinal research to determine whether ambassador programs have real and lasting impact. Longitudinal studies are time and resource intensive and, the variation that exists across ambassador programs make small-scale studies only marginally useful. The engineering outreach community is often underfunded for the scale of social change it seeks to accomplish and conducting deep evaluation will allow for the better use of resources. Through research, the most effective strategies can be pinpointed and used to develop more effective outreach programming. Creating a unified research agenda that a diverse spectrum of stakeholders buy into, while challenging, has numerous benefits including: the development of an evaluation protocol that is used by programs across the county; the creation of relationships between K-12 and university personnel that results in longitudinal studies on engineering identity; and the development of models for scalable, effective program implementation.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.