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2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 143: EAGER: Broadening Participation of First-generation College Students in Engineering – Backgrounds, Experiences and Strategies for Success

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

First-generation college students have entered the spotlight of educational research and reform. This shift in perspective has been covered in popular media, for example, in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s series entitled “Engine of Inequality,” which analyzes the challenges facing first-generation college students. However, engineering programs have been slower in responding to this new emphasis on first-generation college students, perhaps assuming that the lack of success of underrepresented groups is a result of deficiencies in the students’ background and preparation. Our research challenges this assumption by explicitly investigating the connections between first-generation engineering students’ success and their experiences within higher education, using a large-scale quantitative survey. Whereas the deficiency perspective focuses on what these students lack and how they need to change themselves in order to adapt to engineering undergraduate curricula, this study seeks to understand how first-generation college student’s funds of knowledge (i.e., family and cultural knowledge developed by growing up in poor and/or working households) can be leveraged in their engineering work and the factors that contribute to their success in engineering.

This poster will present: 1) an overview of the funds of knowledge constructs used in the survey, 2) the preliminary results from a pilot survey, and 3) an overview of all the survey questions, including engineering identity, agency, belongingness, institutional support, grit, sources of recognition, and certainty of career path.

Using ethnographic data of first-generation college students in engineering, from prior work, seven themes were created to capture aspects of students’ funds of knowledge. The themes were classified as follows: community networks, lived experiences, tinkering knowledge from home, tinkering knowledge from work, perspective taking, reading people, and translation among people. To date, the funds of knowledge themes have been validated, at the first level, using exploratory factor analysis with a broad range of engineering students from first-years to fourth-year of higher at two institutions, one in the Midwest and one in the mountain region. Convenience sampling was used to test and validate the funds of knowledge survey constructs. We are currently in our second data collection process. The large-scale survey will be administered to upperclassman and alumni at five participating institutions across the United States, i.e., in a large public polytechnic, small selective private polytechnic, large land grant, large sub-urban public, and large public universities.

Authors
  1. Dr. Jessica Mary Smith Colorado School of Mines [biography]

    Jessica M. Smith is Associate Professor in the Engineering, Design & Society Division at the Colorado School of Mines and Director of Humanitarian Engineering Graduate Programs. Her research and teaching bring anthropological perspectives to bear on questions of social responsibility and engineering. In 2016 the National Academy of Engineering recognized her Corporate Social Responsibility course as a national exemplar in teaching engineering ethics. Her book Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility will be published by The MIT Press in 2021. She is also the co-editor of Energy and Ethics? (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019) and the author of Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (Rutgers University Press, 2014). She regularly publishes in peer-reviewed journals in anthropology, science and technology studies, engineering studies, and engineering education. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the British Academy.

  2. Dr. Dina Verdín Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-6048-1104 Arizona State University, Polytechnic campus [biography]

    Dina Verdín, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. She graduated from San José State University with a BS in Industrial Systems Engineering and from Purdue University with an MS in Industrial Engineering and PhD in Engineering Education. Dina is a 2016 recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship and an Honorable Mention for the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program. Her research interest focuses on changing the deficit base perspective of first-generation college students by providing asset-based approaches to understanding this population. Dina is interested in understanding how first-generation college students author their identities as engineers and negotiate their multiple identities in the current culture of engineering. Dina has won several awards including the 2018 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference Best Diversity Paper Award, 2019 College of Engineering Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award and the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Distinguished Scholar Award. Dina's dissertation proposal was selected as part of the top 3 in the 2018 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division D In-Progress Research Gala.

  3. Dr. Juan C. Lucena Colorado School of Mines [biography]

    Juan Lucena is Professor and Director of Humanitarian Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). Juan obtained a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech and a MS in STS and BS in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). His books include Defending the Nation: U.S. Policymaking to Create Scientists and Engineers from Sputnik to the ‘War Against Terrorism’ (University Press of America, 2005), Engineering and Sustainable Community Development (Morgan &Claypool, 2010), and Engineering Education for Social Justice: Critical Explorations and Opportunities (Springer, 2013).

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