Collaborative Research: Intersectionality of Non-normative Identities in the Cultures of Engineering (InIce)

这个项目的动机是需要增加和多样化的工程劳动力，这将有助于增加美国的经济增长和繁荣。该项目的最终目标是更有效地了解学生在大学中对攻读工程专业感兴趣的方式，以及如何帮助他们坚持到完成工程学位，特别关注那些可能对工程角色有不同看法的学生。这将通过大规模的定量评估来完成，然后对被确定为持有各种规范或非规范态度概况的学生进行纵向研究，重点是了解学生在工程中的归属感及其发展中的工程身份。这项工作的结果将产生切实可行的方法，通过以研究为基础的招聘和教学策略，增加工程项目的多样性，重点关注工程领域的学生身份。将针对进入学术界的研究生（他们将教授未来的工程专业学生）开发特定的课程材料，以帮助开始培养更受欢迎的工程文化。这项工作的理论框架是工程文化中“规范性”的交叉方法。在方法上，该项目将利用现代统计技术，通过学生的态度数据来识别学生群体，而不需要事先对学生进行分类（如性别、种族、民族），以了解工科学生的态度是如何分成各种“规范”和“非规范”的。在此之后，我们将对从经验确定的态度概况中选择的学生进行纵向研究，以了解这些学生如何驾驭他们的工程经验并在他们选择的专业中发展他们的身份。这项工作的智力价值在于提高了对不同学生发展他们的工程身份、导航他们的工程社区和融入他们所选择的学科的方式的理解，以及帮助学生在工程领域取得成功的实际方法的发展。这扩展了先前的研究结果，即工程领域的不满和缺乏社区是学生不选择或离开工程专业的原因。解决学生认为不适合工程的核心问题，可以开始阻止有才华的人从工程领域外流。这项研究的结果将被纳入研讨会（针对当前的研究生和教师）的发展，并广泛提供围绕工程多样性设计的研究生课程。这项工作的更广泛的影响将是促进对如何在研究机构和更广泛的工程社区中为教育工作者和管理人员提供更多样化的工程专业群体的经验验证的理解，包括实用的解决方案。

This project is motivated by the need to increase and diversify the engineering workforce, which will help to increase economic growth and prosperity in the United States. The ultimate goal of this project is to understand more effectively the ways in which students can become interested in pursuing engineering majors in college and how to help them persist through to the end of an engineering degree, with particular attention on those students who may have different views of the role of engineering. This will be accomplished by a large quantitative assessment followed by a longitudinal study of students who are identified as holding various normative or non-normative attitudinal profiles,with a focus on understanding students' feelings of belongingness in engineering and their developing engineering identities. The outcomes of this work will result in practical ways to increase diversity in engineering programs through research-based recruitment and teaching strategies focused on student identities within engineering. Specific course materials will be developed to target graduate students entering academia (who will be teaching future engineering students) to help begin to foster a more welcoming culture in engineering.The theoretical framing of this work is an intersectional approach towards "normativity" in engineering culture. Methodologically, this project will utilize modern statistical techniques to identify clusters of students through their attitudinal data, without the prior imposition of categorizations of students (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity) in order to understand how engineering students' attitudes group into various "normative" and "non-normative" profiles. Following this, we will conduct a longitudinal study of a selection of students from the empirically-identified attitudinal profiles to understand how these students navigate their engineering experiences and develop their identities in their chosen majors. The intellectual merit of this work is an improved understanding of the ways in which different students develop their engineering identities, navigate their engineering communities, and enculturate into their chosen disciplines as well as in the development of practical ways to help students be successful in engineering. This extends previous findings that dissatisfaction and lack of community within engineering are causes for students not choosing or leaving engineering studies. Addressing the core issue of student perceptions of not fitting into engineering can begin to staunch the exodus of talented individuals from engineering. The results of this research will then be incorporated into the development of workshops (for current graduate students and faculty) and widely available graduatecourses designed around diversity in engineering. The broader impact of this work will be to promote an empirically-validated understanding of how to retain a more diverse body of engineering majors including pragmatic solutions for educators and administrators, both at the researchers' institutions and in the wider engineering community.