2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

First-Year Women’s Interpretations of Self-Efficacy After an Ecological Belonging Intervention

Presented at Student Division Technical Session 5: Self- Efficacy

This WIP research paper examines first-year students’ descriptions of struggle, self-efficacy, and belonging after an ecological belonging intervention in a second-semester introductory programming course at a large Midwestern public institution. Students receive signals about who can succeed as an engineer from their environments and through interactions with others which often conform to stereotypes of white, male, and nerdy engineers. These messages may be particularly damaging for cognitive outcomes like learning and affective outcomes like belonging for Black, Latino/a/x, Indigenous, and women students. To address these systemic equity gaps as a result of these signals, the larger research project developed a contextual ecological belonging intervention that was administered to half of the sections in this first-year course. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative longitudinal interviews were conducted with a stratified sample by race/ethnicity, gender, and intervention status in the same semester as the intervention (either Spring 2022 or Spring 2023; n = 71). This WIP describes themes of four women’s interpretation of their abilities to succeed in engineering (i.e., self-efficacy). These women are stratified across the intervention and “business as usual” and who stayed in and left engineering. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed with two first-pass coding methods—in vivo coding and descriptive coding—and a second-pass axial coding to provide themes of awareness of lower confidence than peers, differences in discussing engineering skills across intervention groups, and the impact of engineering on well-being and retention. The results offer promising indications for how this intervention may (re)shape women’s interpretation of common struggle and development of self-efficacy in engineering.

Authors

Miss Karen Elizabeth Nortz Cornell University [biography]

Karen Nortz is an undergraduate senior studying civil engineering at Cornell University. She will be starting her PhD in Engineering Education Research at University of Michigan in the Fall.
Dr. Allison Godwin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0741-3356 Cornell University [biography]

Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belonging and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2021 Journal of Civil Engineering Education Best Technical Paper, the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, the 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Research.
Dr. Linda DeAngelo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8508-5909 University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Linda DeAngelo is Associate Professor of Higher Education, Center for Urban Education Faculty Fellow, and affiliated faculty in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. DeAngelo studies social stratification, investigating how social inequities are produced, maintained, and interrupted. Currently her scholarship focuses on access to and engagement in faculty mentorship, the pathway into and through graduate education,and gender and race in engineering.
Danielle V. Lewis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7266-6328 [biography]

Danielle Vegas Lewis is currently the SUNY PRODiG Fellow at SUNY Fredonia where she teaches sociology and gender courses. She also serves as a Research Associate for Dr. Linda DeAngelo at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research agenda aims to understand and disrupt the ways in which socially constructed identities allow for the reproduction of social inequality, with a focus on understanding the ways institutions of higher education and other social structures challenge or uphold hegemonic environments in which majority populations accumulate power that harms students underrepresented in certain contexts.
Kevin Jay Kaufman-Ortiz http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-6488-7104 Purdue University [biography]

Kevin Jay Kaufman Ortiz holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus and is a licensed mathematics teacher by the Department of Education in Puerto Rico. Kevin is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering Education as well as a M.S. student in the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. His interests currently lie in cultural identity, engineering culture, acculturation, transnational migration, decolonization, belonging, and inclusion of occupational migrants from the U.S. territories who are looking to pursue engineering degrees and work in the mainland U.S.
Charlie Díaz University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Charlie Diaz is a PhD student studying Higher Education at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a recipient of the K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship. His research interests include minoritized student experiences in Higher Ed, student activism, and the development of inclusive policy and practice in Higher Ed.
Carlie Laton Cooper University of Georgia [biography]

Carlie is a doctoral student in the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia (UGA). She earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from UGA (2017) and a Master of Education in Higher Education Administration from Georgia Southern University (2021). She has higher education experience in business affairs and academic advising. She researches structures that contribute to underrepresentation in STEM majors and is currently a Graduate Assistant for the UBelong Collaborative.

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