CAREER: Actualizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students' Identity Development

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

CAREER: Realizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students' Identity Development The U.S. needs new and innovative engineering solutions to meet the global demands of our growing economy. However, most engineers graduating from engineering degree programs are more alike in their problem solving approaches, ways of thinking, and engineering identities than different in their skills as innovative thinkers. Students who do not conform to this mold of "being an engineer" are often alienated from engineering, do not develop engineering identities, and leave engineering, which reduces the much-needed human potential for innovation. This project responds to these challenges by characterizing and empirically understanding how to support students' innovative mindsets and engineering identities. These underlying differences are termed latent diversity, attributes that are present as potential sources for innovation, but are not visible or actualized. The outcomes of this work will help create more inclusive college classrooms that accept a wider set of students and produce engineers who can adopt various perspectives for innovative problem solutions. These diverse engineers will be more prepared to address the grand challenges of the 21st century. The overarching goal of this project is to characterize how diverse students experience the culture of engineering and negotiate their identities as engineers. This research can actualize the power of students' alternative mindsets and ways of thinking for greater innovation in engineering solutions. It also expands traditional strands of research on diversity in engineering in complementary and transformative ways. This project uses mixed methods to determine: 1) what kinds of diversity in thought, innovation mindsets, and attitudes are present in engineering students; 2) how undergraduate students with latent diversity form engineering identities within an engineering community of practice over time; and 3) what support, both inside and outside of the classroom, can be provided to promote inclusion of students with latent diversity in engineering. To garner this insight, national survey data from first-year engineering students will be collected and latent diversity will be characterized by using topological data analysis. From these results, longitudinal narrative interviews with latently diverse students will be use to understand students' identity development and how this identity development is supported or hindered by their classroom experiences and institutional structure. These narratives will be analyzed both deductively (informed by identity-trajectory theory) and inductively (based on individual experiences) to propose a new theoretical framework of latent diversity that can be incorporated into researchers' and practitioners' ways of understanding how to educate engineering students. The integrated education plan will implement pedagogies to support the development of latently diverse students in first-year engineering programs (a critical time point at which many talented students are lost from engineering programs). Workshops for educators, co-curricular support program staff, and engineering administrators and policy makers will be developed to reframe ways of thinking about engineering students and enact evidence-based practices that can support students both in and out of the classroom. This approach will provide key engineering education personnel with novel tools to develop a new generation of innovators. The integrated research and educational plan will directly impact the educational experiences of thousands of engineering students to develop innovative, rather than homogeneous, engineers.