2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this work in progress paper, we describe the design of a study to explore the social, cultural, educational, and institutional factors affecting matriculation of undergraduate Latina engineering students into graduate engineering programs and/or engineering careers. Motivation for this study comes from recent observations that Latina engineering students are significantly less likely to attend graduate school than women from other ethnic or racial groups. These observations are consistent with overall under-representation of Latina/o and Hispanic populations in terms of both engineering degrees attained and in terms of participation in STEM professions. Relatively little is known about the factors affecting graduate school matriculation of the Latina population in engineering and other STEM disciplines.

Traditional approaches to understanding student academic success often focus on the student’s ability or inability to fully integrate within the institutional structure. This perspective tends to focus on under-represented minority student deficits relative to the majority population of successful students. In recognition that a deficit-based perspective potentially misses key parameters related to success of minority students, a growing body of work is adopting an asset-based perspective by investigating social and cultural capital students employ to achieve desired educational outcomes. In the current investigation, a mixed-methods approach is adopted that blends the more traditional institutional integration perspective with the evolving and broader social and cultural capital framework. An explanatory sequential design is developed with a quantitative first phase informing and guiding a qualitative second phase. The quantitative initial phase employs a survey instrument derived by blending elements of the College Achievement Model with quantitative implementations of the Community Cultural Wealth Model, which are generally qualitative frameworks. Thus, achieving a quantitative implementation that holds true to the underlying perspectives of this asset-based approach brings up challenges that are discussed within the paper. The qualitative second phase emphasizes how students utilize social and cultural assets when making decisions related to career choices and potential graduate study. Results from the first-phase are used to inform the qualitative portion of the investigation by providing insights for focus group questioning routines. Emphasis in the second-phase is placed on understanding how Latina engineering students use various forms of capital to find academic success and how these forms of capital influence career and graduate study decisions.

This work in progress paper describes the trials and tribulations of the mixed-methods design process. Efforts to balance the two theoretical perspectives are discussed and initial results from the quantitative portion of the study are presented.