RFE Design and Development: Framing Engineering as Community Activism for Values-Driven Engineering

包括阿拉巴马州在内的几个南部州正在向更加以制造业为中心的经济转型，这需要更多的工程劳动力。这项研究的结果将提供一个干预框架，鼓励更多来自少数民族、城市和低社会经济地位背景的学生追求工程职业道路。它还将为如何激励和增加少数族裔工程专业本科生的保留率以及增加社会参与工程师的数量提供见解。本研究的目的是了解将工程作为一种利他（亲社会）职业的框架如何影响来自低社会经济地位的学生和非洲裔美国人家庭的职业认同发展，这些学生在一个以农村为主的南方州的城市地区就读于8 - 10年级。另一个目标是了解在项目中担任导师如何影响来自类似背景的本科工程专业学生的工程职业认同。学生群体提供了该地区最大的未开发的未来工程师资源。在迭代过程中，将探讨参与现有非正式科学，技术，工程和数学（STEM）教育计划的这一人口统计学生的职业身份。根据这些发现，开发了一个为期一年的“帮助你的社区和你的世界”项目，该项目突出了工程的社会影响，并为来自类似背景的本科工程专业学生提供导师/榜样。设计和实施这一项目将有助于更好地理解这些学生的职业认同是如何发展的。这项工作有可能影响进入工程劳动力的美国学生的数量和多样性，并促进制造业和STEM劳动力的发展和历史上具有农业经济基础和/或较低STEM劳动力需求的州的经济基础。本研究将采用混合方法设计，着重强调以视频（或其他多媒体）反思和访谈的形式收集定性数据。定量数据将通过调查学生对STEM的态度，对他们在STEM方面的能力的信念，以及未来学习STEM的意图来收集。对于定性方法，我们将使用共识定性研究方法，其重点是团队建立对访谈数据的理解。以学生为中心的方法将被采取，以了解学生如何理解和理解他们的交叉和社会建构的身份。对于新开发的夏令营，将分夏令营前、夏令营中、夏令营后三个阶段对数据进行分析。这样做是为了创建学生在每个时间点的职业身份和对工程的看法的快照。这也将有助于研究人员检查和比较他们的定义、目标和身份在整个营地中是如何变化的。然后，每个快照的发现将被折叠在一起，以从数据中确定更大的总体主题。这种方法使我们能够更深入地了解学生在项目过程中对自己职业身份的意义，以及项目中哪些方面对学生来说是突出的，以及干预措施如何更好地支持学生的身份发展。访谈和调查数据将进行定性分析和三角测量，以确定数据中的潜在主题和重复模式。结果将通过区域教师讲习班和校外促进者以及通过出版物和会议介绍等传统机制进行传播。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。

Several southern states, including Alabama, are transitioning to a more manufacturing-focused economy that requires a larger engineering workforce. The results of this research will provide a framework for interventions that encourage more students from minority, urban, and low-SES contexts to pursue engineering career pathways. It will also provide insights into how to motivate and increase retention of undergraduate minority engineering students, and increase the number of socially engaged engineers. The goal of this research is to understand how framing engineering as an altruistic (pro-social) profession affects the career identity development of students from low-socioeconomic status and African American families who are enrolled in 8th - 10th grade in an urban area within a predominantly rural Southern state. An additional goal is understanding of how serving as a mentor in the program affects the engineering career identity of undergraduate engineering students from similar backgrounds. The focal population of students offer the largest untapped source of future engineers available in this region. In an iterative process, the career identity of students from this demographic participating in an existing informal science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education program will be explored. These findings to develop a yearlong "Help Your Community and Your World program that highlights the societal impact of engineering and provides undergraduate engineering student mentors/role models from similar backgrounds. Designing and implementing this program will lead to improved understanding of how career identity develops for these students. This work has the potential to impact the number and diversity of U.S. students entering the engineering workforce and facilitate a manufacturing and STEM workforce development and economic base in states that have historically had agricultural economic base and/or lower STEM workforce needs.The research will use a mixed methods design with a heavy emphasis on qualitative data collection in the form of video (or other multimedia) reflections, and interviews. Quantitative data will be collected through surveys of student attitudes towards STEM, beliefs about their ability in STEM, and intentions to study STEM in the future. For the qualitative approach, we will use the Consensual Qualitative research approach with its emphasis on team-built understandings of interview data. A student-centered approach will be taken in order to understand how students make sense of and come to understand their intersecting, and socially constructed identities. For the newly developed summer camp, the data will be analyzed in three stages: before the camp, during the camp, and after the camp. This will be done to create a snapshot of the students' career identities and perceptions of engineering at each time point. This will also help the researchers examine and compare how their definitions, goals, and identities altered throughout the camp. Then the findings from each snapshot will be collapsed together to identify the larger overarching themes from the data. This method allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the students' own meaning making about their career identities as they progress through the program, and what aspects of the program were salient for the students, and how interventions can better support identity development in students. The interview and survey data will be qualitatively analyzed and triangulated to identity underlying themes and repeated patterns in the data. The results will be disseminated in hands on workshops of regional teachers and out of school facilitators as well as through traditional mechanisms such as publications and conference presentations.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.