Board 374: Responsive Support Structures for Marginalized Students in Engineering: Insights from Year 4

Walter C. Lee; Malini Josiam

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: June 26, 2024
Conference Session: NSF Grantees Poster Session
Tagged Topics: Diversity and NSF Grantees Poster Session
Page Count: 6
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--46958
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/46958
Download Count: 57

Paper Authors

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Walter C. Lee Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University orcid.org/0000-0001-5082-1411

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Dr. Walter Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Engineering Education and the director for research at the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED), both at Virginia Tech.

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biography

Malini Josiam Virginia Tech Department of Engineering Education orcid.org/0000-0001-9872-8603

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Malini Josiam is a Ph.D. candidate in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. She has a M.S. in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech (2023) and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UT Austin (2021). Her research interests center around the experiences of marginalized students in U.S. higher education institutions, with a focus on those who are marginalized by race and/or gender.

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Abstract

The purpose of this NSF CAREER project is to advance understanding of the navigational strategies used by undergraduate engineering students from marginalized groups. Our poster will present an overview of our results from complete data collection at one site and a snapshot of the tool we developed to assess students’ navigation strategies.

Over the past year, we concluded data collection at our first site. We interviewed upper division undergraduate students, talking to them about their experiences as engineering students and the opportunities and obstacles they encountered in engineering education. We then analyzed this data using two different approaches. First, we took an emotions-centered approach, investigating the contexts in which emotion words naturally surfaced in students as they talked about navigating engineering. Then we took a person-centered approach, uncovering how personal characteristics simplify or complicate navigating through the engineering learning environment. We looked at a subset of the interviews to understand the experiences of Women of Color (WOC) investigating how WOC thrive in engineering. Further analysis to understand the role of personhood in navigating is ongoing.

We also finalized a situational judgment inventory (SJI), piloting the instrument we developed in the previous year and fine tuning based on pilot results. Our SJI is a multiple choice scenario assessment tool that contains one sentence scenarios with one sentence response options. Our final SJI contains 19 scenarios with 5 response options for each scenario. The scenarios are within the following domains: academic performance, faculty and staff interactions, extracurricular involvement, peer-group interactions, professional development, and special circumstances. We will share details about the instrument development process, final instrument, and preliminary results from instrument dissemination with undergraduate engineering students.

Moving forward, we will interview undergraduate students at institutions beyond our primary data collection site to better understand how institutional context plays a role in student navigation of the engineering learning environment.

Citation
Format

Lee, W. C., & Josiam, M. (2024, June), Board 374: Responsive Support Structures for Marginalized Students in Engineering: Insights from Year 4 Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--46958

TY - CPAPER
AB - The purpose of this NSF CAREER project is to advance understanding of the navigational strategies used by undergraduate engineering students from marginalized groups. Our poster will present an overview of our results from complete data collection at one site and a snapshot of the tool we developed to assess students’ navigation strategies.

Over the past year, we concluded data collection at our first site. We interviewed upper division undergraduate students, talking to them about their experiences as engineering students and the opportunities and obstacles they encountered in engineering education. We then analyzed this data using two different approaches. First, we took an emotions-centered approach, investigating the contexts in which emotion words naturally surfaced in students as they talked about navigating engineering. Then we took a person-centered approach, uncovering how personal characteristics simplify or complicate navigating through the engineering learning environment. We looked at a subset of the interviews to understand the experiences of Women of Color (WOC) investigating how WOC thrive in engineering. Further analysis to understand the role of personhood in navigating is ongoing.

We also finalized a situational judgment inventory (SJI), piloting the instrument we developed in the previous year and fine tuning based on pilot results. Our SJI is a multiple choice scenario assessment tool that contains one sentence scenarios with one sentence response options. Our final SJI contains 19 scenarios with 5 response options for each scenario. The scenarios are within the following domains: academic performance, faculty and staff interactions, extracurricular involvement, peer-group interactions, professional development, and special circumstances. We will share details about the instrument development process, final instrument, and preliminary results from instrument dissemination with undergraduate engineering students.

Moving forward, we will interview undergraduate students at institutions beyond our primary data collection site to better understand how institutional context plays a role in student navigation of the engineering learning environment.
AU - Walter C. Lee
AU - Malini Josiam
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Board 374: Responsive Support Structures for Marginalized Students in Engineering: Insights from Year 4
UR - https://peer.asee.org/46958
DO - 10.18260/1-2--46958
ER -