Collaborative Research: Strategic Course-based Adaptations of an Ecological Belonging Intervention to Broaden Participation in Engineering at Scale

该项目旨在通过增加美国培养的工程师的数量和多样性来服务于国家利益。总体而言，科学在提高妇女参与方面取得了巨大进展。然而，在过去的20年里，工程学并没有取得全面的进步，女性每年仍然只获得20%的工程学学士学位。提高工程项目头两年的留用率对于解决持续的人员流失非常重要。特别是，当许多学生认为自己无法掌握课程内容而感到孤独的担忧得到解决时，工程学将变得更具包容性。在本项目中，将实施短期干预措施。这些干预是为了告诉学生，他们班上的大多数学生都有同样的担忧，以前和他们一样有类似担忧的学生已经成功地完成了这门课程，他们的老师相信他们有能力成功。项目团队先前在第一年课程中使用干预措施的研究表明，这些干预措施可以完全消除性别和种族/民族之间的课程保留差异。将开发、测试和进一步改进一种定制这种干预措施的新方法，以便在不同的课程和不同的大学中具有相似的强大效益。简单的干预措施可以轻松、科学地针对许多情况进行定制，这可能会显著改善美国各地的工程成果。该项目采用了一种生态归属干预方法，只需要一节课或一次背诵课就可以实施，并且在几门入门STEM课程中已被证明可以消除性别和种族/民族之间长期存在的成就差距。然而，虽然很简单，但干预不能涉及针对不同大学和课程背景的固定脚本。相反，干预的内容需要根据当地的情况进行定制，以解决学生在特定情况下的具体问题。该项目汇集了一个高度跨学科的团队，横跨三所战略选择的大学，目标是开发一种方法来确定哪些一年级和二年级的课程需要这种干预，揭示学生在课程中的关注点，调整干预来解决这些问题，并解决课程教学的其他实际限制。这种系统的方法还包括为给定课程的所有教员进行入职培训的过程。在回答一系列七个核心研究问题时，该项目打算扩展以下方面的知识：1)在哪里（在哪些结果变量上），何时（在哪些背景下，对哪些学生），以及为什么生态归属干预具有积极影响；2)在与代表性作斗争的大型工程路径中，在更大的代表性挑战中，这种干预本身对代表性的整体问题具有可衡量的影响程度。这种基础知识对于决定何时应用干预措施以及提供如何应用干预措施的重要见解至关重要。NSF IUSE: EHR计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过机构和社区转型轨道，该计划支持高等教育机构和学科社区的STEM教育转型和改善。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。

This project aims to serve the national interest by increasing the number and diversity of engineers produced in the United States. Science overall has made great progress in increasing the participation of women. However, engineering has made no overall progress in the last 20 years, with women continuing to earn only 20% of engineering bachelor’s degrees each year. Improving retention in the first two years of engineering programs is important in addressing ongoing attrition. In particular, engineering will become more inclusive when the concerns that many students have about feeling alone in thinking they are incapable of mastering the course’s content are addressed. In this project, short interventions will be implemented. These interventions are intended to reveal to students that most of the students in their class have these same concerns, that previous students just like them with similar concerns have successfully completed this coursework, and that their instructor believes they are capable of succeeding. Prior research by the project team using the intervention in first-year courses has shown that these interventions can entirely eliminate course retention differences by gender as well as by race/ethnicity. A new method for customizing this intervention will be developed, tested, and further improved so that it can have similar strong benefits in different courses and at different universities. Simple interventions that can be easily and scientifically customized to many contexts may have potential for significantly improving engineering outcomes across the United States.This project uses an ecological-belonging intervention approach that only requires a one-class or one-recitation session to implement and has been shown to erase long-standing achievement gaps by gender and race/ethnicity in several introductory STEM courses. However, while simple, the intervention cannot involve a fixed script for different university and course contexts. Rather, the content of the intervention needs to be customized to the local context in order to address the specific concerns students have in that specific context. This project brings a highly interdisciplinary team across three strategically-selected universities with the goal of developing an approach to identify which 1st and 2nd year courses need this intervention, reveal student concerns in that course, adapt the intervention to address those concerns, and address other pragmatic constraints of how that course is taught. This systematic approach also includes processes for onboarding all the instructors of the given course. In answering a set of seven core research questions, the project intends to expand knowledge about 1) where (on which outcome variables), when (in which contexts, for which students), and why the ecological belonging intervention has positive effects, and 2) the extent to which this intervention on its own has measurable impacts on the overall problem of representation in the larger challenge of representation within the large engineering pathways that have struggled with representation. This kind of foundational knowledge is critical to making decisions about when to apply the intervention as well as providing important insights into how to apply the intervention. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.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.