CAREER: Examining Servingness for Latino Engineering Doctoral Students in Hispanic Serving Institutions

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Doctorates in engineering higher education are critical for the country’s competitiveness and broadening participation in at specialized levels of engineering decisions. Yet, the concept of "support" for graduate education across institutions remains largely unclear. High engineering doctorate graduation rates indicate a degree of institutional success in effectively supporting their graduate students. However, it remains unclear how institutions promote the success of doctoral students beyond simply degree completion. To better understand the role of institutions on Ph.D. success, understanding and enhancing the concept of support for graduate students beyond enrollment—is crucial. This CAREER project will lay the foundation for institutions to effectively support students to lead research and innovation through their graduate engineering programs. Specifically, the integrated education and research plan explores how engineering institutions’ approaches to support impact graduate students in engineering. This project addresses the research question How do institutions support engineering doctoral student socialization? To do so, this project will employ a multi-case study methodology using institutions as the unit of analysis to longitudinally study the experiences of engineering doctoral students at two different types of engineering institutions: the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, a research-emerging engineering institution, and Arizona State University, an R1. This project will leverage trusted site coordinators in each institution’s College of Engineering to recruit students in the first year of their engineering Ph.D. and follow them over a four-year period via monthly prompts to understand their Ph.D. experiences. This project will also involve graduate education stakeholders at these institutions via periodic interviews to understand the institutional factors that impact doctoral students’ experiences at their institutions. The collected data will be analyzed alongside institutional data and documents relating to the support efforts at each university to contextualize the participants’ perspectives. By triangulating these data sources, this work will uncover the connection between doctoral student experiences as a function of the structures for “support.” The methods will be guided via two frameworks: (1) Garcia, Núñez, and Sansone’s framework for support and (2) the Graduate Student Socialization framework. Combining these two frameworks will address two vantage points in the analyses—one from the students’ development in institutions and a second from the institutions’ impact on students. The education plan focuses on doctoral education leaders from both institutions. Using a community of practice model, graduate associate deans, program leads, and staff will learn how institutions can support doctoral students in engineering through collaborative workshops showcasing research findings. Outcomes include a list characterizing high-impact practices articulating insights across both institutions and an established network of practice-sharing. Finally, this project will develop a scoresheet to be used as a rubric by graduate education leaders at other institutions to evaluate institutional structures for support and their impact on doctoral students. As a result, this work will help identify and disseminate best practices that other institutions can implement to better support doctoral students. 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.