IGE: Developing a Research Engineer Identity

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This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to North Carolina A&T State University (NCAT) will study the development of research identity in engineering graduate students. Briefly stated, research identity refers to the ways in which graduate students define themselves as researchers and is an important factor in student success. Specifically, this project will implement and test approaches to foster research identity development for graduate students in non-research-intensive institutions. It should be noted that smaller institutions/programs often face deficiencies that can impact the ability of faculty mentors to foster student research identities both individually and as part of a larger group. In engineering, a faculty advisor generally guides the graduate research experience and the advisor is the primary resource to help graduate students develop their identities as engineering researchers. Given this apprenticeship model, the mentoring and guidance that a student receives in developing a professional identity is largely dependent on the style, resources, and graduate student group size of the faculty mentor. This project is testing interventions that could potentially overcome these limitations, particularly for students in smaller graduate programs.This study on engineering research identity will be conducted at a Carnegie R2 institution (NCAT), a leading producer of African-American engineers, and it will implement a three-pronged approach that is grounded in sociological and psychological theories of identity. The project entails (1) establishing a Research Engineer Network that will help graduate students develop a research engineer identity; (2) forming Small Research Groups of faculty members with common interests who will foster students' research skills; and (3) designing and administering a survey-based Research Engineer Identity scale and assessment using a mixed-methods research design that includes focus groups, structured interviews, and web-based surveys. The design will culminate with a quasi-experimental test comparing the development of research identify among students participating in the study and a control group of matched students. The three coordinated innovations in this project will collectively build and assess an innovative infrastructure for developing research identify in graduate engineering students. It is anticipated that the project results will be applicable to universities broadly, while particularly informing practice in smaller graduate programs.The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.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.