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在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，科学在增加妇女参与方面取得了很大进展。然而，在过去的20年里，工程学并没有取得任何整体的进步，女性继续每年只获得20%的工程学学士学位。在工程项目的头两年提高保留率对于解决持续的人员流失问题非常重要。特别是，当许多学生在认为自己无法掌握课程内容时感到孤独的担忧得到解决后，工程学将变得更具包容性。在这个项目中，将实施短期干预。这些干预措施旨在向学生表明，他们班上的大多数学生都有同样的担忧，之前和他们一样有类似担忧的学生已经成功完成了这门课程，他们的导师相信他们有能力成功。项目组在一年级课程中使用干预措施进行的先前研究表明，这些干预措施可以完全消除按性别和种族/族裔划分的课程保留率差异。一种定制这种干预的新方法将被开发、测试和进一步完善，以便在不同的课程和不同的大学中产生类似的强大效益。这个项目使用了一种生态归属干预方法，只需要一堂课或一次复习课就可以实施，并在几个STEM入门课程中被证明消除了长期存在的按性别和种族/族裔划分的成就差距。然而，尽管很简单，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情况进行定制，以解决学生在该特定情况下的具体关切。该项目将一个高度跨学科的团队带到三所经过战略选择的大学，目标是开发一种方法，以确定哪些一年级和二年级的课程需要这种干预，揭示学生在该课程中的担忧，调整干预以解决这些担忧，并解决该课程教学方式的其他实用限制。这一系统化的方法还包括培训特定课程的所有讲师的流程。通过回答一组七个核心研究问题，该项目打算扩大关于以下方面的知识：1)在哪里(关于哪些结果变量)，何时(在什么背景下，对哪些学生)，以及为什么生态归属干预具有积极影响，以及2)这种干预本身在多大程度上对整个表征问题产生了可衡量的影响，在较大的挑战中，在表征方面遇到了困难的大型工程路径内的表征。这种基础知识对于决定何时应用干预措施至关重要，也为如何应用干预措施提供了重要的见解。NSF IUSE：EHR计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生的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转变和改进STEM教育的努力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.