2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

America is falling behind in terms of educational success on the international stage [1]. Institutions across the US have noted that to strengthen our next generation of thinkers, a focus on improving the diversity of thought is needed, an issue easily solved by expanding the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of those working on innovative problems [2]. This is most evidently observed in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields where there not only exists an achievement gap but also a large disparity along both the race and gender divide [3], [4].

These gender and race gaps have been partially attributed to the perceptions students have of engineering. While studies have been conducted to quantify these gaps, few focus on assessing the results of the research attempting to improve those perceptions. This paper will outline the effectiveness of an assessment tool in order to measure diverse students’ ability to envision engineers as more than the traditional straight, white, cisgender male.
This study used an arts-based design for a research methodology with a central focus on participants’ illustration of “an engineer”. Alongside the illustrations, students were asked to provide 5 adjectives describing the traits of an engineer and a sentence depicting the participant’s opinion of what an engineer does. The goal was to assess students’ perceptions of engineering prior to participating in an engineering summer camp. These points of data were gathered with a procedure that removed bias by removing any context surrounding the task. The participants of this first study were a group of 36 high school students who identified themselves as men.

The analysis of the study’s first set of participant responses overwhelmingly displayed a male-centered and technologically based interpretation of “an engineer”. Notedly, this interpretation also distinctly excludes a conversation or illustration of race for most depictions submitted. The extended analysis to be explored is if this exclusion was due to the medium the participants used in their illustration. This further analysis will also seek to determine whether participants were depicting themselves as engineers, or if, even with an increasingly diverse STEM population, the illustrations continue to be significantly representative of men.

The continued study will: (1) refine the procedure and method used to gather the illustrations to give a more complete picture of the participant’s view of engineers, and (2) expand the number of illustrations analyzed to give a more generalized description of how the participants view the engineering profession, and (3) use that more generalized description to assess whether attempting to reframe engineering as a white male-dominated field has improved the perceptions of the next generation of STEM students.