2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering doctoral student retention and persistence from an organizational climate and intersectional perspective: A targeted review of engineering education literature

Presented at Graduate Studies Division (GSD) Technical Session 6: Challenges and Coping Strategies of Engineering Graduate Students

This literature review was conducted as a preliminary assessment of the available research literature produced by the engineering education community on climate affecting the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. We seek to understand this specific student group’s retention in context of organizational science--specifically as an organizational climate issue--- and use an intersectional approach to consider the meaning and relevance of students’ belonging, simultaneously, to multiple social categories such as gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, race/ethnicity, and disability status. We review the literature on engineering doctoral students produced by the engineering education community as a first step to building a climate survey instrument. The objective of this literature review is to explore how the concept of ‘climate’ is being used in context of doctoral engineering student retention to degree completion, and we gather a body of evidence of climate factors. To do this, we conducted a targeted literature review and used organizational climate and intersectionality as our approach to interpreting the literature, as we aim to understand how climate affects the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. In this paper, we first briefly present our understanding of climate as grounded in organizational science and intersectional theory. We then explain our methodology and finally discuss our analysis of the doctoral engineering student literature in engineering.

Authors

Dr. Julie Aldridge http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6655-5971 The Ohio State University [biography]

My background and research interests are in organizational change, innovation, and leadership. My current work focuses on organizational climate to better support the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse groups to degree completion.
Dr. Nicole M. Else-Quest http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4177-2395 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [biography]

Nicole M. Else-Quest is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A first-generation college student, Dr. Else-Quest earned her Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to understand psychological gender differences, how they develop and shape participation in STEM, and how we can intervene to expand women's and girl's participation in STEM. She has written extensively on implementing intersectionality within social sciences research and adapting quantitative as well as qualitative methods to do so. Else-Quest is currently PI on two grants from the National Science Foundation, both focused on interventions to improve girls’ and women’s participation and persistence in STEM education from elementary school through doctoral training. In addition to her scholarly work, she is co-author of the undergraduate textbook, Psychology of Women and Gender: Half the Human Experience+ (Sage, 2022). She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and is Associate Editor of the journal Stigma and Health.
Dr. Joseph Roy American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) [biography]

Joseph Roy has over 15 years of data science and higher education expertise. He currently directs three national annual data collections at the ASEE of colleges of engineering and engineering technology that gather detailed enrollment, degrees awarded, research expenditures, faculty headcounts, faculty salary and retention data for the engineering community. He is PI of a NSF Advanced Technological Education funded grant to build a national data collection for engineering-oriented technician degree and certificate programs at 2-year institutions. Prior to joining the ASEE, he was the senior researcher at the American Association of University Professor and directed their national Faculty Salary Survey. He also developed a technical curriculum to train analysts for a national survey of languages in Ecuador while he was at the University of Illinois as a linguistic data analytics manager and member of their graduate faculty. He has a B.S. in Computer Science & Mathematics, a M.S. in Statistics from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa.
Dr. So Yoon Yoon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1868-1054 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. So Yoon Yoon is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering and Computing Education in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati, OH, USA. Dr. Yoon received her Ph.D. in Gifted Education, and an M.S.Ed. in Research Methods and Measurement with a specialization in Educational Psychology, both from Purdue University, IN, USA. She also holds an M.S. in Astronomy and Astrophysics and a B.S. in Astronomy and Meteorology from Kyungpook National University, South Korea. Her work centers on elementary, secondary, and postsecondary engineering education research as a psychometrician, data analyst, and program evaluator with research interests in spatial ability, STEAM education, workplace climate, and research synthesis with a particular focus on meta-analysis. She has developed, validated, revised, and copyrighted several instruments beneficial for STEM education research and practice. Dr. Yoon has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings and served as a journal reviewer in engineering education, STEM education, and educational psychology. She has also served as a PI, co-PI, advisory board member, or external evaluator on several NSF-funded projects.

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