Research Initiation: Understanding the Impact of Institutional Supports on the Motivation, Belonging, Identity Development, and Persistence of Engineering Students

教育工程专业学生的多样化，创造性，参与和熟练的队列是本科工程课程的中心使命。实现这一使命对于提供未来的工程劳动力至关重要。不幸的是，工程专业的学生毕业的持久性仍然不理想的低，尽管工程的大学和学院到位，以支持学生的成功的计划和资源。本项目探讨学生是否以及如何使用这些机构资源，提高他们的持久性和成功的工程专业学生。从这项研究中获得的知识和见解将提高机构设计课程的能力，以最大限度地提高学生群体的利益。本研究旨在探讨与学生的工程身份、大学归属感以及工程相关动机相关的学术和课外因素。从纵向数据集跟踪本科生从大学开始到毕业，该项目认为：i）如何使用机构的支持预测学生的工程相关的动机，归属感和身份随着时间的推移发展，ii）如何使用机构的支持预测持久性，以及iii）是否持久性的影响是通过学生的心理过程的变化介导的。这项工作的结果将告知该领域与持久性相关的基本机制，为这些机构支持可能（或可能不）有效的原因提供急需的见解，并直接应用于更有效地支持持久性的机构支持的未来发展。审查某些体制支助结构是否对特定群体特别有帮助（例如，该奖项反映了NSF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。

Educating a diverse, creative, engaged, and skilled cohort of engineering students is the central mission of undergraduate engineering programs. Achieving this mission is essential to providing the engineering workforce of the future. Unfortunately, persistence of engineering students to graduation remains undesirably low, despite the programs and resources that universities and colleges of engineering put in place to support students' success. This project examines whether and how students' use of these institutional resources enhances their persistence and success as engineering students. Knowledge and insights gained from this research will improve the ability of institutions to design their programs to maximize the benefits to their student population. The project investigates academic and co-curricular factors associated with students' engineering identity, their sense of belonging in college, and their engineering-related motivation. Drawing from a longitudinal dataset tracking undergraduates from the start of college through graduation, the project considers: i) how the use of institutional supports predicts students' engineering-related motivation, belonging, and identity development over time, ii) how the use of institutional supports predicts persistence, and iii) whether the effects on persistence are mediated through changes in students' psychological processes. The results of this work will inform the field about the underlying mechanisms associated with persistence, providing much needed insights into the reasons why these institutional supports may (or may not) be effective, with direct application to the future development of institutional supports that more effectively support persistence. An examination of whether certain institutional support structures are particularly helpful to specific groups (e.g., by gender, race/ethnicity, first-generation college student) will provide valuable, generalizable insights for targeted retention efforts.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.