Studying and Evaluating Education, Guidance, Advancement, and Learning in Technology and Engineering

The National Science Foundation has a strong commitment to broadening participation in STEM. This commitment is embedded in its Strategic Plan and investment priorities related to "preparing a diverse, globally engaged science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce" and "integrating research with education." To maintain the country's competitive edge across the world, NSF funds projects that will help the nation with pinpointing effective strategies to attract, retain, and support underrepresented students in engineering. This project will measure the impact of strategies designed to encourage underrepresented, pre-collegiate students to pursue engineering careers, practices for developing and monitoring inclusive engineering education, and support systems that encourage underrepresented students to persist in engineering. The project is closely aligned with the NSF broadening participation priorities, and it has great potential to build upon the literature base on integrating engineering experiences for pre-collegiate students (e.g., high school) and informing current engineering practices and efforts at various junctures of the STEM pipeline, especially engineering. It is quite likely that it will contribute to the recruitment, retention, and graduation engineering literature for underrepresented students, thereby increasing their participation in engineering at every juncture of the educational pipeline. Using a mixed-method research design, the investigators outlined a project that involved collecting both quantitative and qualitative data on how to best attract, retain, and support traditionally, underrepresented pre-collegiate and collegiate students in engineering. The project will apply a research paradigm based on an expectancy-value model and the theory of planned behavior through a two-pronged approach. First, an attraction program will concentrate on high school students and teachers/counselors to assess strategies for encouraging students to pursue engineering careers. These include afterschool activities in engineering disciplines for high needs, ethnically and gender diverse students (120 secondary students annually) and professional development to educate science teachers/counselors in engineering preparation, as well as in the diversity of engineering career pathways (40 teachers/counselors annually). Second, a retention program will focus on female undergraduate students and on faculty members, graduate students, and post-doctoral associates, with the aim of developing successful engineering educational practices that encourage women undergraduates to persist in the field. This component will consist of academic interventions for female students (25+ annually) as well as training for instructors (40+ annually) on inclusive practices. Overall, the project's research insights on pedagogical and counseling professional development, pre-college programs, and college retention programs, will elevate the engineering profession and national welfare by adding to the diversity of perspectives that will shape the future of technological advancement.