Development and refinement of an interview protocol to study engineering students' beliefs and identities

Abstract

The underrepresentation of non-male and non-White individuals in engineering continues to be a persistent and critical problem [1-3]. A widespread and commonly accepted approach to recruit and retain diverse individuals in engineering is to provide multiple pathways into engineering degree programs, such as offering introductory courses at community colleges or regional campuses. Although these pathways are intended to promote diversity, they are similar in structure to the educational tracking practices common within the K-12 context, which extant research has shown perpetuate social inequalities [4]. Specifically, students in less prestigious tracks have lower educational aspirations and less favorable self-beliefs [5]. As such, the objective of this research is to understand the beliefs and identities with respect to smartness and engineering of undergraduate engineering students from different institutionalized pathways into engineering. Each pathway is a trajectory to earning an engineering degree from a large, public, research-intensive university in the Midwest, which enrolls just over 1600 new first-year undergraduates in engineering each year on the main campus alone. Specifically, this project is designed to address the following research questions: 1) What do students from different institutionalized pathways into engineering believe about smartness and engineering? 2) How do these students express their personal identities related to being smart and being an engineer? In order to answer our research questions over the scope of the full, three-year project, we will collect and analyze a series of three interviews with 30 participants across six different first-year institutionalized pathways into engineering: main campus-honors program, main campus-residential cohorts, main campus-standard program, main campus-alternative math starting point, regional campuses, and community college. The first interview is to establish the participants' beliefs and identities related to smartness and engineering. The two follow up interviews, conducted approximately six months and one year after the initial interview, will provide additional insight by looking back at what aspects of the individuals' beliefs and identities have changed or remained the same during their degree progress. During the time span of the data collection, it is expected that participants will move between institutions, pathways, and perhaps even out of engineering. To date, we have completed the pilot phase of this multi-year, qualitative study. During the pilot, we conducted semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with nine first-year engineering students across three different institutionalized pathways into engineering. The main objective of the pilot was to develop and refine the interview protocol. As a constructivist study, we are interested in how each participant assigns meaning through their subjective experiences [6]. As such, the one-on-one interviews are the primary means of data collection, and it is essential that the protocol elicits responses from the participants that allow us to answer our research questions. The methods utilized during the pilot, the interview protocol development and refinement, and future work will be discussed in the following sections of this executive summary.