2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the United States, some engineering programs provide multiple pathways for students to enter engineering degree programs with the intention of recruiting and retaining diverse individuals into the field. s. Such pathways may include offering required introductory courses from the degree granting institution at local community colleges or regional campuses. While the use of pathways is intended to increase access to engineering and therefore diversity in the field, pathways have the potential to function as “tracks,” which are understood to be inequitable in pre-college education as they provide different learning experiences and opportunities. Researchers have demonstrated that tracked educational experiences result in students from more prestigious or resourced tracks developing more positive beliefs about their abilities as students and their educational aspirations. Because tracking is a racist and sexist practice, it actually creates and perpetuates inequity. Therefore, research is needed in the context of engineering education to understand the beliefs and identities of students who participate in different pathways to engineering to determine if these pathways into engineering function similarly to the problematic tracking practices that perpetuate inequity. For the past four years, we have been exploring undergraduate engineering students’ beliefs and identities with respect to smartness and engineering from different institutionalized educational pathways. In our executive summary and poster, we will summarize key findings from this four-year study and highlight important take-aways and recommendations for stakeholders of this research such as engineering students, engineering instructors, and engineering advisors (both high school and college).

We studied engineering students from six different institutionalized pathways into engineering at a large, public, Midwest, R1 university. Those pathways included starting at a community college or regional campus. They also included a standard, honors, residential-cohort, and alternative math starting point pathway at the main campus. Participants were selected from a recruitment survey that included demographic information and short-form essay questions. Participants were purposefully selected to represent a range of institutionalized pathways into engineering. The participants were interviewed three times over a span of three semesters and asked questions about their beliefs and identities around smartness and engineering. They were also asked about their academic experiences, plans, and decision-making. Interviews were analyzed by a team of researchers consisting of a post-doctoral scholar, a graduate research assistant, and four undergraduate research assistants. Interviews were analyzed through a series of analytic memos and data display techniques. The first round of memos focused on condensing the data based on demographics, pathways, and the beliefs of each participant individually. The second round of memos focused on complex meaning making over time (across the three interviews) for each participant that participated in the complete three-interview sequence, as well as cross-case analysis of participants within and across the six institutionalized pathways into engineering.

Key findings of this research provide strong evidence indicating there is an inextricable link between smartness and engineering consistent across all institutional pathways into engineering. Students’ identities as smart and beliefs about what it means to be smart often share defining features with their identities as engineering and beliefs about engineering. Specifically, we found that engineering students articulated that they are smart enough for engineering in three distinct ways: 1) they have existing skills and experiences, 2) they have innate abilities, and 3) they are hardworking. The participants who expressed that they are smart enough for engineering because of their innate abilities most intricately connected their identity as smart with their engineering identity. When considering pathways, we found that, although participants from all pathways tended to identify as smart enough for engineering, participants from the most prestigious pathways (e.g., honors, scholars) were more likely to believe that they have innate abilities, which make them smart enough for engineering as did the participants that tended to hold more privileged social identities (e.g., White men). Finally, our work also resulted in the development of what we have named the “11 dimensions of smartness in engineering,” which has significant implications for how smartness is produced and practiced in engineering classrooms.

This work allowed us to gain insight into the complex ways in which smartness manifests itself in engineering students’ decisions to enter the field and make decisions regarding their experiences and participation in engineering classrooms and degree programs. Ultimately with these insights, we aim to equip different stakeholders (high-school advisors and counselors, undergraduate engineering advisors, perspective and current engineering students, and engineering professors and instructors) with tools that are grounded in the implications of being smart engineers to support students to and through undergraduate engineering programs.