Collaborative Research: Engineering Identity, its Predictors, and its Impact on Retention across Educational Stages

该项目通过了解高中，本科和研究生的身份如何发展，以及代表性不足的学生如何发展不同，来支持工程的持久性。身份是指人们如何看待自己，或者他们认同的“人”。从逻辑上讲，如果一个人强烈认同自己的某一领域，他们更有可能追求并留在该领域。然而，只有有限的研究来验证这一想法，特别是在工程领域。该项目正在调查数千名不同高中和大学的工程专业学生，以建立证据库。研究结果被用来了解工程身份和早期工程经验如何预测毕业的持久性和职业持久性。这些信息正被用于更好地设计和评估早期工程外联和干预措施的影响。这项研究中的学校和学生的多样性使性别和种族差异的检查成为可能，这为扩大代表性不足的群体参与工程的干预措施提供了信息。研究结果正在广泛传播给教师、教授、管理人员和其他人，以便他们可以利用研究结果来改善工程专业学生的招聘和保留计划。研究人员正在采用调查量表的开发和多元回归模型来研究工程身份的预测因素及其对不同教育阶段持久性的影响。身份正在成为一个有吸引力的解释，谁坚持在工程，但很少有研究直接联系身份的持久性，也没有彻底检查的主机的因素，塑造身份。这个项目是建立在数学和科学身份的工作，以及对专业经验的重要性的研究，以检查这些问题。这项研究是独特的，在其检查工程身份在一系列的教育阶段，包括高中，本科，研究生和最近的学士学位工程毕业生。通过正在进行的纵向工作和使用多元回归的横截面设计，本研究描述了从高中到研究生学习或专业就业的工程身份轨迹。研究地点包括100所高中，每年招收约5000名学生，在五个机构的机械，土木和生物医学工程工程的工程课程和工程部门，共招收5000名本科生和2000名研究生工程学生。这些结果提供了对工程身份如何发展以及这种身份如何影响持久性的理解。

This project supports persistence in engineering by understanding how identity develops in high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and how it may develop differently for underrepresented students. Identity refers to how people see themselves, or the "kind of person" that they identify with. Logically speaking, if individuals strongly identify themselves with a particular field, they are more likely to pursue and remain in that field. Yet there is limited research testing this idea, particularly in engineering. This project is surveying thousands of students in engineering programs at a variety of different high schools and colleges to build an evidence base. The results are being used to understand how engineering identity and early engineering experiences predict persistence to graduation and persistence in the profession. This information is being used to better design and evaluate the impact of early engineering outreach and interventions. The variety of schools and students in this study is enabling examination of differences by gender and ethnicity, which is informing interventions to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering. The results are being disseminated widely to teachers, professors, administrators and others so that they can use the results to improve programs for engineering student recruitment and retention. The investigators are employing survey scale development and multivariate regression modeling to examine the predictors of engineering identity and its impact on persistence at different educational stages. Identity is emerging as an attractive explanation for who persists in engineering, yet few studies have directly linked identity to persistence, nor thoroughly examined the host of factors that shape identity. This project is building on work on math and science identity, as well as research on the importance of professional experiences, to examine these issues. The study is unique in its examination of engineering identity across a range of educational stages, including high school, undergraduate, graduate, and recent bachelor's-level engineering graduates. Through ongoing longitudinal work and a cross-sectional design using multivariate regression, this study is describing engineering identity trajectories from high school through graduate study or professional employment. Study sites include 100 high schools enrolling approximately 5000 students per year in engineering courses and engineering departments of mechanical, civil and biomedical engineering at five institutions enrolling a total of 5000 undergraduate and 2000 graduate engineering students. The results are providing an understanding of how engineering identity develops and how that identity impacts persistence.