Conference: Weeding In Not Weeding Out in Engineering Education

American Society For Engineering Education, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This project will support institutions in recruiting, attracting, and graduating engineering students with a wider array of pre-college backgrounds and experiences. As the U.S. goes through a cycle of declining national birthrates, it must find ways to engage more of its population in advancing scientific and technological work. This project will support development of a framework of evidence-based programs that support success of engineering majors from diverse communities and help them feel welcome and excited about a career in engineering. The framework be developed by a group of national experts through a series of knowledge building sessions, to include students, a conference, and follow-on activities. The framework and its implementation guides can be used by institutions to change their recruiting, admitting, and onboarding practices and approaches. This project will support the NSF BPE program by building the capacity of the US engineering workforce through fostering professional development of diverse communities of engineering students. This project will work to help institutions attract and retain more diverse cohorts of students into engineering majors by advancing knowledge in student onboarding, first year experience, and student success. As the U.S. goes through a cycle of declining national birthrates, it must find ways to engage all of its population in advancing scientific and technological work. The goal of this project will be to identify and address the obstacles and promising practices to recruitment, retention, and graduation of diverse cohorts of underrepresented students with a variety of pre-college opportunities and preparation. It will build upon the development of an overview, rationale, objectives, and vision developed in four national brainstorming sessions. The program will consider: 1) institutional cultural resistance to widening admissions and creating multiple educational pathways for engineering majors, 2) other barriers (funding, staff, time) to adaptation and implementation of existing research-based strategies, 3) differing challenges across institution types, and 4) potential use of technologies (AI, etc.) to support implementation of specific research-based strategies. The program will comprise 1) asynchronous pre-conference knowledge building exercises to inform the conference, to include a listening session hosted by the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) that engages students, 2) a two-day in-person conference hosted at National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and 3) post conference virtual working group meetings to include additional subject matter experts to address issues that surfaced during the conference. Across these efforts, a framework will be developed to organize best practices for various student audiences, taking into account intersectionalities across multiple student identities, that could be reconfigured by different institutions to fit their mission, existing programs, student audiences. This guiding framework will foster the development of collective research-based practices and execution strategies to address the most pressing challenges in engineering student success, onboarding, and first year experience programming specifically contextualized for engineering, institutional types, and underrepresented demographic groups. In addition, the outcomes from the proposed meeting will have the potential to result in the development of new strategies and technologies. The proposed framework, new strategies and technologies collectively will provide tools to institutions to increase their capacity to support diverse communities of engineering students to achieve growth and completion. The outcomes of this project will be summarized and posted on the NAE and ASEE websites. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.