2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There continues to be a growing demand for engineering graduates to meet societies’ technological needs. This investigation targets a K-12 engineering outreach program, known as the Colorado SCience and ENgineering Inquiry Collaborative (SCENIC Colorado). The investigation is focused on studying and refinig an educational infrastructure for supporting engineering identity formation in an outreach program in rural Colorado high schools.
SCENIC is informed by existing sociocultural theories on identity development and learning and their application to engineering, as well as empirical literature on how learning environments foster STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) learning and identity development. Previous evaluation results indicated that the rural students gained knowledge and new perspectives about engineering, but identity impacts were not studied.
SCENIC integrates university engineering faculty and student mentors with rural high schools via on-line, interactive curriculum and in-person visits to support high school students in carrying out educationally impactful local environmental monitoring projects. By refining existing university partnerships with regional higher education institutions and rural high schools, SCENIC seeks to transform the engineering formation system. University undergraduate and graduate engineering students enroll in a two-semester course that prepares them to mentor the high school students. Environmental monitoring Pods and other educational resources and interactive support mechanisms will be iteratively improved via design-based research. The project builds on existing partnerships reaching rural high school students where a significant number of students would be the first generation in their families to attend college.
Design-based research will both inform the refinement of the materials and approach for supporting high school student inquiry, and advance our fundamental understanding of the underlying processes and mechanisms that support engineering identity formation. The research questions are: How do aspects of the outreach program’s educational infrastructure support rural high school students’ participation in and identification with engineering and science? How does conducting locally relevant environmental monitoring contribute to rural students’ engineering and science identity development? Qualitative methods in the forms of observations and interviews as well an identity survey will be employed for data collection.
The project will advance knowledge regarding the adaptation of cutting-edge university research tools for environmental monitoring into high school classrooms with an expected impact on enriching high school student developmental and learning outcomes that contribute to students’ forming an identity as the kind of person who is interested in and engages with engineering. Results will be discussed in the paper and at the poster.