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STEM, Gender, Ethnicity, and Cyberbullying

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Critical Reflections on Engineering Ethics Education

Tagged Division

Engineering Ethics

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

12

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37728

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37728

Download Count

624

Paper Authors

biography

Claire Lynne McCullough P.E. High Point University

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Dr. McCullough received her bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee, respectively, and is a registered professional engineer in the state of Alabama. She is a member of I.E.E.E., Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and Eta Kappa Nu. She is currently Professor and Founding Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the High Point University, and teaches courses in such areas as Engineering Ethics, Controls, and Engineering Design. Dr. McCullough has over 30 years' experience in engineering practice and education, including industrial experience at the Tennessee Valley Authority and the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command. Her research interests include Image and Data Fusion, Automatic Target Recognition, and Bioinformatics. She is a former member of the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission, and is the delegate of the Women in Engineering Division of ASEE to the Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

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Svetlana Chesser Auburn University

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Svetlana Chesser is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Educational Psychology at Auburn University. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Auburn University in 2013 and holds master’s degrees in Biology and Chemistry from her native country Belarus. Prior to joining the faculty at Auburn, Dr. Chesser taught psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and served for 10 years as an 8-12 science teacher. Her primary research examines how early childhood experiences shape children and adolescents’ cognition and behavior. Using data from Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS), she is seeking to find out how executive functioning subcomponents (i.e., working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control) develop in response to high-stress environments. The goal is to pinpoint cognitive and behavioral adaptations to harsh environments in youth who have experienced adversity, so we can design educational interventions that work with, instead of against, these adaptations.

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Brian J. O'Leary University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

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Dr. Brian J. O’Leary is Department Head and Associate Professor of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), where he has worked since 2001. He completed his PhD in Organizational Behavior at the A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, focusing on justice in the workplace. He also holds a BA from the General Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, a BS in Accounting from Guilford College, and an MBA from Butler University. Dr. O’Leary has taught numerous graduate and undergraduate courses at UTC, including Groups and Teams in Organizations, Training and Development, Current Topics in I-O Psychology, Introduction to I-O Psychology and Introduction to Psychology. Before starting his PhD, Dr. O’Leary worked for 14 years in various management positions at Western Electric, AT&T and Lucent Technologies, primarily in government contracting, accounting and project management. Dr. O’Leary has also provided consulting services to local, regional and international organizations.

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Bart L. Weathington WECO Solutions

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Dr. Weathington is founder and managing consultant at WECO Solutions where he focuses on the application of applied psychological knowledge to real world problems. Formerly he served as Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and UC Foundation Professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He was also Chair of the Institutional Review Board for the University. He taught courses on job analysis, performance appraisal, employee selection, compensation and benefits, behavioral finance, the psychology of money, and research methods at both the graduate and undergraduate level. He has co-authored books on research methods and applied psychology in addition to numerous journal articles and conference presentations. Dr. Weathington followed a nontraditional route into academe by spending several years working as a management consultant planning, designing, and delivering organizational performance solutions and helping organizations meet human resource challenges. Continuing this trend, his current research and consulting interests are broadly focused on the application of psychological knowledge to real world issues. Specifically, he is interested in issues regarding employee selection, development, and compensation as well as the impact of changes in technology on the workplace.

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Abstract

The under-representation of women and minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is a growing concern. To explore whether cyberbullying contributes to this lack of participation, this study investigated the relationships between race, gender, and college major with reports of cyberbullying. The results of a cross-tabulation analysis of 402 surveys, 93% of which were completed by current students, revealed statistically significant differences in cyberbullying by major and gender, with non-STEM majors showing a higher incidence of cyberbullying than STEM majors, and women in all majors being cyberbullied at a higher rate than men. Although race was not a significant contributor to cyberbullying for the entire sample, the results indicated that minorities in STEM majors were cyberbullied at a higher rate than non-minorities. Implications for the study are presented and suggestions for future research are discussed. To our knowledge, this is the first study to identify possible connections between the environmental factor of cyberbullying and the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM fields. It is important to identify all possible social and environmental filters that remove women and minorities from the STEM pipeline as part of the attempt to expand the number of underrepresented categories in STEM professions. Our findings are one more step in that direction. As the United States and other countries struggle with issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, to identify factors affecting them, and determine how they can be most effectively addressed, becomes an ethical imperative for those in the STEM professions.

McCullough, C. L., & Chesser, S., & O'Leary, B. J., & Weathington, B. L. (2021, July), STEM, Gender, Ethnicity, and Cyberbullying Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37728

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