2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 226: Collaborative Research: The Organizational Climate Challenge: Promoting the Retention of Students from Underrepresented Groups in Doctoral Engineering Programs: Year 1

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

This NSF Level II Equity for Excellence in STEM study uses an intersectional approach within a mixed-methods project to describe and analyze department climate for engineering doctoral students, centering the experiences of students from underrepresented groups to understand climate factors that may promote (or diminish) their persistence in doctoral completion. We aim to answer several research questions: 1) How do students across intersectional groups perceive department-level climate? 2) How do students across those groups identify the departmental climate issues? 3) How do climate concerns relate to degree completion? This mixed-methods project aims to examine doctoral students’ perceptions of the policies, practices, and procedures that impact their retention to degree completion and the differences in experiencing those factors based on intersecting social categories. This project adopts an explicitly intersectional approach to the meaning and relevance of students in multiple social categories, including gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation, considered within engineering doctoral education. Drawing on organizational climate science and intersectionality theory, the project’s multidisciplinary team aims to use a student-centered approach to shed light on multiple climate factors (e.g., diversity climate, psychological safety climate, mastery climate, performance climate, etc.) by engaging with students from diverse groups. To achieve a comprehensive picture of departmental climate and doctoral student commitment, which may differ by intersectional group, discipline, and institution type, iterative and complementary project implementation cycles are planned over the four-year project period. In Year 1, the researchers aim to use findings from the quantitative pilot climate survey approach to inform the qualitative design. The team aims to repeat this process in Year 2 to develop, refine, and validate the final survey instrument, including a climate scale sensitive enough to assess intersectional phenomena unique to students from diverse groups. The scale will be grounded in measurement invariance, in that factors will be measured similarly across different groups to reveal similarities and differences between engineering doctoral student populations. In Years 3 and 4, the researchers plan to administer the final survey nationally and incorporate follow-up interviews with a subsample of survey respondents, using a mixed-methods approach. In partnership with the American Society for Engineering Education, the team plans to deploy the climate survey nationally to engineering doctoral students and to share survey findings with engineering deans. Completed work includes a targeted review of climate literature produced by the engineering education research community, a systematic review of organizational climate and the retention of students from historically excluded groups in engineering doctoral education, the development and pilot testing of a climate survey, and semi-structured interviews to follow-up with a selection of survey respondents.

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 strengths are ideation and transdisciplinary teamwork. My current work focuses on organizational climate to better support the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse groups to degree completion.
Nicole 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 developing and implementing 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. 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.
Dr. Joe Roy American Society for Engineering Education [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.

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