Collaborative Research: Engineering Identity, its Predictors, and its Impact on Retention across Educational Stages

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports persistence in engineering by understanding how identity develops in high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and how it may develop differently for underrepresented students. Identity refers to how people see themselves, or the "kind of person" that they identify with. Logically speaking, if individuals strongly identify themselves with a particular field, they are more likely to pursue and remain in that field. Yet there is limited research testing this idea, particularly in engineering. This project is surveying thousands of students in engineering programs at a variety of different high schools and colleges to build an evidence base. The results are being used to understand how engineering identity and early engineering experiences predict persistence to graduation and persistence in the profession. This information is being used to better design and evaluate the impact of early engineering outreach and interventions. The variety of schools and students in this study is enabling examination of differences by gender and ethnicity, which is informing interventions to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering. The results are being disseminated widely to teachers, professors, administrators and others so that they can use the results to improve programs for engineering student recruitment and retention. The investigators are employing survey scale development and multivariate regression modeling to examine the predictors of engineering identity and its impact on persistence at different educational stages. Identity is emerging as an attractive explanation for who persists in engineering, yet few studies have directly linked identity to persistence, nor thoroughly examined the host of factors that shape identity. This project is building on work on math and science identity, as well as research on the importance of professional experiences, to examine these issues. The study is unique in its examination of engineering identity across a range of educational stages, including high school, undergraduate, graduate, and recent bachelor's-level engineering graduates. Through ongoing longitudinal work and a cross-sectional design using multivariate regression, this study is describing engineering identity trajectories from high school through graduate study or professional employment. Study sites include 100 high schools enrolling approximately 5000 students per year in engineering courses and engineering departments of mechanical, civil and biomedical engineering at five institutions enrolling a total of 5000 undergraduate and 2000 graduate engineering students. The results are providing an understanding of how engineering identity develops and how that identity impacts persistence.