2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Our research paper examines the role of climate (e.g., interactions with others) in the skill development of engineering and physical science doctoral students. Skill development in graduate school occurs related to students' primary funding mechanism, in which they might interact with a research group or teaching team. Advisors also play a pivotal role in the engineering doctoral student experience; however, less is known about how positive mentoring influences skill development for engineering doctoral students. We investigated the following research questions:
1) How, if at all, do interactions with advisor(s), faculty, and peers predict skill development (associated with primary funding mechanism) for engineering and physical science doctoral students?
2) Specifically, how do such interactions predict skill development (associated with primary funding mechanism) for the following career-related skills: a) research, b) teamwork and project management, c) peer training and mentoring, and d) communication?
We administered the Graduate Student Funding Survey to engineering and physical science doctoral programs in the United States, with focused sampling of institutions that produce a high number of doctorates and that have highly ranked programs. We developed the survey, including survey items on demographics, funding mechanism, skill development, and climate (i.e., interactions with others). Data collection occurred in Fall 2019 (n = 615). We did not restrict respondents based on year of study or citizenship status. Following data collection, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on the interaction survey items, resulting in three climate factors: 1) Advising climate (9 items), 2) Faculty and staff climate (4 items), and 3) Peer climate (4 items). In our findings, we report descriptive statistics for field of study, gender, race/ethnicity, and citizenship status. We ran stepwise logistic regression models for each skill development variable (research, teamwork and project management, peer training and mentoring, and communication), for four regression models in total. Independent variables for the models included demographics, funding mechanism, and the climate factors. We found that advising climate was statistically significant for all four career-related skills, faculty and staff climate for peer training and mentoring skills only, and peer climate for both peer training and mentoring and communication skills. All statistically significant climate variables positively predicted skill development. Our findings highlight the importance of climate within engineering doctoral programs, quantifying how a positive climate promotes development of career-related skills. Future work should examine the specific actions that contribute to a positive climate and provide further guidance on how graduate programs can adopt such practices at their institutions.