Research Initiation: Understanding Interactions Between Affect and Identity in First- and Second-Year Engineering Students

在工程教育中，留住工程项目和职业一直是一个令人担忧的问题，特别是在历史上代表性不足的人群中。学生对自己的工程认同感的发展，或者说作为一名工程师的自我感觉，在他们决定坚持本专业的过程中发挥着重要作用。虽然已经从多个角度探讨了工程认同感的发展，但学生对工程认同感的感觉/情感、价值观、态度和信念的影响还没有得到解决。本研究旨在了解学生对学习工程、科学和数学的感受以及他们对这些学科的价值观、态度和信念是如何与学生的工程认同发展相互作用的。这个项目将跟踪参与者作为工程学本科学生的头两年，这是学生决定是否坚持工程学的关键时期。这项工作将提高学生对他们在数学、科学和工程课程中的经历的感受如何有助于他们工程身份的形成，这反过来又有助于他们决定追求或离开工程学。由于学生的其他身份塑造了他们的情感体验和工程身份的发展，我们将在学生其他社会身份的背景下考察工程身份和情感之间的关系。除了塑造教师实践，帮助所有学生体验积极的认同建立情感体验之外，这项工作还可以支持女性和代表性不足的少数族裔参与和保留工程学，支持这个NSF项目的目标，即让所有人都可以参与工程学。现有的情感和工程学认同模型分别表明，局部情感(学生在纪律活动期间经历的不断变化的情绪)和全局情感(学生对某一学科持有的广泛态度、价值观和信念)可能具有影响和互动工程学认同感的潜力，进而影响保持；然而，这些联系尚未被探索。这项工作将建立在数学和科学教育中关于情感的学科文献，以及关于工程认同发展的理论，以便有助于建立与科学、数学和工程有关的情感如何促进学生工程认同的理论。来自三一大学和布法罗大学的研究人员采用混合方法纵向跟踪调查了工科学生头两年的情况，试图回答三个研究问题：RQ1：工科一年级和二年级学生在从事工程工作与数学和科学工作时，当地的情感有什么不同或相同之处？RQ2：在他们大学早期学习数学、科学和工程的过程中，学生们对这些学科的全球影响发生了怎样的变化？RQ3：学生对数学、科学和工程的本地和全球影响如何影响他们的身份，包括工程身份？研究小组将在前四个学期的每个学期采访和调查工科学生，以了解这些学生的情感和身份认同。这项研究将在访谈的基础上提供一组案例研究，从中我们将开发一个情感和工程认同之间的互动模型，该模型还考虑了一系列其他学生身份对塑造这些互动的影响。此外，这项研究还将开发新的测量工程影响的仪器。这些工具、模型和案例研究将为改善保留和扩大参与工程的努力提供信息。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。

Retention in engineering programs and careers is a longstanding concern in engineering education, particularly among historically underrepresented populations. Students’ development of their engineering identity, or the sense of themselves as being an engineer, is known to play an important role in their decision to persist within the major. While the development of engineering identity has been explored from many perspectives, the influences of students’ feelings/emotions, values, attitudes, beliefs about the subject have not been addressed. This research seeks to understand how students’ feelings associated with learning engineering, science, and mathematics as well as their values, attitudes, and beliefs about those subjects, interact with students’ development of their engineering identity. This project will follow participants through their first two years as undergraduate engineering students, which is a critical time during which students decide whether to persist in engineering. This work will improve understanding of how students’ feelings about their experiences in mathematics, science, and engineering courses contribute to the formation of their engineering identities, which in turn contributes to their decision to pursue or leave engineering. Because students’ other identities shape both their affective experiences and the development of their engineering identity, we will examine the relationships between engineering identity and affect within the context of students’ other social identities. In addition to shaping instructor practices to help all students experience positive identity-building affective experiences, this work could therefore support participation and retention of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering, supporting this NSF program’s goal of making participation in engineering open and accessible to all.Existing models of affect and engineering identity separately suggest that local affect (the changing emotions that students experience during disciplinary activity) and global affect (the broad attitudes, values, and beliefs that students hold about a discipline) may have potential to influence and interact with engineering identity, and in turn, to influence retention; however, these links have not been explored. This work will build on disciplinary literature in mathematics and science education about affect, as well as theories on engineering identity development, in order to contribute to a theory of how affect pertaining to science, mathematics, and engineering contributes to students’ engineering identity. Using a mixed-methods longitudinal approach that follows students across their first two years in an engineering program, researchers from Trinity University and the University at Buffalo seek to answer three research questions: RQ1: How are first- and second-year engineering students’ local affect different or the same while doing engineering work vs. mathematics and science work? RQ2: Over the course of their early college experiences with mathematics, science, and engineering, how do students’ global affect about these disciplines change? RQ3: How do students’ local and global affect about mathematics, science, and engineering contribute to/interact with their identities, including engineering identity? The research team will interview and survey engineering students in each of their first four semesters to understand these students’ affects and identities. The study will contribute a set of case studies based on the interviews, from which we will develop a model of the interactions between affect and engineering identity which also considers the influence of a range of other student identities on shaping those interactions. Additionally, the study will develop new instruments for measuring engineering affect. The instruments, model, and case studies will inform efforts to improve retention and broaden participation in engineering.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.