Baltimore , Maryland
June 25, 2023
June 25, 2023
June 28, 2023
Cooperative and Experiential Education Division (CEED)
Diversity
9
10.18260/1-2--44177
https://peer.asee.org/44177
220
Adrian Nat Gentry is a Ph.D. student at Purdue University in Engineering Education. They completed their undergraduate degree in Materials Engineering from Purdue in May 2020. Adrian’s research interests include assessing student supports in cooperative education programs and the experiences and needs of nonbinary scientists. Adrian is involved with Purdue’s Engineering Education Graduate Association and the oSTEM chapter at Purdue.
Dr. Eric Holloway currently serves as the Sr. Director of Industry Research in the College of Engineering at Purdue, where he focuses on industry research in the College of Engineering. He also holds a courtesy faculty appointment in the School of Engineering Education and the School of Mechanical Engineering.
Dr. Douglas is an Associate Professor in the Purdue School of Engineering Education. Her research is focused on improving methods of assessment in engineering learning environments and supporting engineering students.
Work-integrated learning (WIL) programs (e.g., Co-op programs, internships, and workforce development programs) provide students with crucial opportunities to build professional social networks. Based on social capital theory, we understand that students’ professional networks provide them access to career-related resources, information, and support. We utilize social capital theory and social cognitive theory to guide our understanding of how mentors support engineering students’ career development. Together, social capital theory highlights the need for students to build social networks with career professionals. Social cognitive career theory informs which mentoring efforts are instrumental for a student’s career development. The purpose of the study is to examine the item and scale level performance of the Mentoring Social Capital Instrument, an instrument developed to examine what career-related supports students access through their mentors. We ask the following questions: 1) to what extent are student interpretations of the Mentoring Social Capital items consistent with how the assessment questions are intended to be interpreted?; 2) to what extent do experts agree that the Mentoring Social Capital items are aligned with the theory? We conducted cognitive interviews with eight undergraduate students to explore the extent to which students interpreted the Mentoring Social Capital items. Additionally, expert review feedback was collected from 15 engineering education and educational psychology experts to determine how well items of the Mentoring Social Capital instrument align with the theoretical frameworks proposed. We made revisions to 20 items based on the cognitive interviews and expert review. The results of this study were used to improve the item clarity and interpretability of Mentoring Social Capital instrument for undergraduate engineering students in work-integrated learning programs. Future work will include piloting the Mentoring Social Capital scale with Co-op students at a large, midwestern R1 institution.
Gentry, A. N., & Holloway, E., & Douglas, K. A. (2023, June), Work in Progress: Assessing Undergraduate Engineering Students' Career Social Capital Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--44177
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2023 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015