2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Outreach programs for youth often attempt to position adults as role models, usually with the goal of inspiring youth by conveying that they, too, can be like the role model. In engineering, contact with with role models has been touted as one way to increase the number of members of underrepresented groups pursuing engineering study and careers. We challenge the notion that all youth engaging in engineering outreach programs readily take up outreach educators as role models. This is not to say that this never occurs, but we do not think it occurs at the level that we or others in the field had anticipated.
Over two years, we conducted interviews and surveys with fourth- and fifth-grade students participating in an engineering outreach program. In Year 1, surveys of students (n = 80) probed what students knew about their outreach educators after having worked with them for eight weeks. In Year 2, we conducted pre/post surveys in the Fall and Spring (n = 73 and n = 90, respectively). In the Fall, students rated the importance of a variety of characteristics for someone to be a role model, and in the Spring, students rated their outreach educators on these same characteristics.
We conducted interviews with students (n = 88) in the Spring of Year 1 after the program ended for the year and asked students about their experiences learning with their outreach educators. In Year 2, we conducted interviews with students at the end of the Fall (n = 73) and Spring (n = 76) semesters and asked students to describe who their role models were and why.
When asked to identify their role models in interviews, students most often mentioned family members (55%), followed by celebrities (25%), classmates (9%), teachers (6%), and outreach educators (4%). Students’ reasons for choosing these role models were fairly evenly split between what role models do (30%), how role models treat people (29%), and personal attributes of role models (24%). Survey data corroborated the interview findings: students rated behavioral and personal characteristics as important in a role model. For example, over 85% of students rated behavioral characteristics (e.g., treats people with respect or sets a good example) as being important. Over half of the students surveyed (65%) indicated that the outreach educators were role models to them. However, students’ tendency to cite personal characteristics suggests that these youth think of role models in the frame of behavioral models who demonstrate how to be a good person. That is, while students may have seen the outreach educators as behavioral role models, they did not necessarily see them as career role models.
We question whether youth in this age group are looking for career role models, and we challenge the assumption that youth take up an individual as role model simply because a program attempts to position them as such. To be clear, we are not arguing that engineering role models are not important or not influential. Rather, we think it is important to gain a better understanding of how youth view the individuals presented as engineering role models, what value these relationships provide to them, and the potential these relationships have to influence youths’ developing engineering identities.