2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This abstract is for an Evidence-based Practice WIP paper.

Equipping engineering education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with granular longitudinal data allows them to understand the landscape of engineering education, identify longitudinal trends, and understand the impacts of strategic broadening participation in engineering (BPE) initiatives both broadly and at their institutions. Achieving and sustaining BPE is a daunting challenge with known benefits. Despite significant investments by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) & women remain underrepresented among engineering U.S. Bachelor's and graduate degree recipients. NSF-funded programs have seen success across the nation in BPE, but there is a need to scale and evaluate these successful practices using disaggregated data from multiple sources.

There are several barriers to accessing these data, including the volume of data, skills required to interact with large data, and the disjointed nature of data that are available but not designed for use with one another. Furthermore, while relevant data are frequently accessible in pre-packaged national or state-level tables and reports, many researchers require more granular data at the institutional and/or discipline level in order to fully contextualize their work. This paper will examine an ongoing effort to make granular, highly relevant, but disjointed data accessible and easily digestible to researchers and stakeholders in a large NSF Alliance.

Background

The [Anonymized] Alliance is an NSF INCLUDES Alliance of higher education institutions. NSF INCLUDES is a nationwide initiative designed to build U.S. leadership in STEM by increasing the participation of groups historically underrepresented in STEM. To achieve these goals, [Anonymized] proposed to scale research-based retention strategies for BIPOC and women students by partnering with various established alliances, such as NSF’s Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, to access and utilize their regional infrastructures and influence.

To support these activities, the data wing of [Anonymized] has spent 2 years iteratively developing data visualization tools that allow researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to easily interact with relevant data from several sources. This has involved hosting several workshops to introduce stakeholders to the data tool and gather feedback, demonstrations with project leadership, and collaboration with external partners to develop a distributable "framework" version of the tool that can be modified to meet an individual partner's needs.

Similar Efforts

There are several ongoing efforts to unify data within specific domains. Many states are developing state-level longitudinal data systems to unify their preK-12 and postsecondary data. Federal agencies such as the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) are pursuing efforts to unify educational data at the national level. Organizations such as the National Student Clearinghouse and MIDFIELD provide deeper insight across the postsecondary space by tracking individual students. Several organizations are also developing tools such as the NCES Table Builders or By the Numbers reports. However, none of these larger efforts both broadly unify data beyond education (e.g. local population data from the US Census) and achieve the level of granularity desired by many researchers.