2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: A Mixed Methods Approach to Better Understand Researcher Identity

Presented at ERM Technical Session 2: The Study of Identity in Engineering Education

This Work in Progress (WIP) paper will detail a mixed methods approach to exploring undergraduate student researcher identity. In recent years, the notion of engineering identity has increased in popularity in engineering education research as a consideration for career choice and persistence in the field. While this explosion of engineering identity work has laid the foundation for a variety of perspectives on the topic, one area which has been less explored is mixed methods approaches to analyzing identity. Our work focuses on the concept of undergraduate research identity in engineering and explores students’ experiences through a quantitative survey and connected qualitative interviews. Our analysis aims to answer the research question: What are the differences between how students conceptualize their researcher identity in a survey and in interviews? With this information, we hope to better understand researcher identity and better support students in their career choices related to research.

Undergraduate research has been identified as a high impact practice, which has the potential to significantly enhance a student’s academic experience. However, little is known about the impact of these experiences on a student’s identity as a researcher. Through this multi-phased, multi-institution research project, we aim to better understand engineering students’ identity development with respect to their researcher identity. Our data set includes surveys and interviews with 20 undergraduate researchers. For this WIP, we are specifically analyzing the responses to the survey question “Do you see yourself as a researcher?” to which students could answer on an anchored scale of 1 to 7 with 1 being “No, not at all” and 7 being “Yes, very much.” We pair these results with interview questions aimed at understanding students’ current view of their researcher identity and their reasoning behind their survey choices. The interviews often led students to think more deeply about their researcher identity and delve into the ways their own skills and interests match or do not match their research mentors and colleagues.

Findings from our work include an overview about the similarities and differences between the survey and interview responses along with explanations to why some changes occurred from the perspective of the participants. Findings also include a categorization of research identity based on a continuum which developed through our mixed methods techniques. Additionally, this work explores the ways that a mixed method approach can reveal inconsistencies between qualitative and quantitative findings that provide insights from the data that would not be possible using quantitative or qualitative analyses alone.

Authors

Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9745-1921 Ohio State University [biography]

Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Ohio State and earned her Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on the intersection between motivation and identity, first-year engineering programs, mixed methods research, and innovative approaches to teaching. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Identity and Motivation in Engineering (RIME) Collaborative.
Dennis M. Lee Clemson University [biography]

Dennis M. Lee is a doctoral student and Graduate Research Assistant in the Engineering and Science Education Department at Clemson University. He received his BA and MS in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to his studies at Clemson University, he taught introductory biology at Tri-County Technical College in Pendleton, SC. His research interests include the development of researcher identity and epistemic cognition in undergraduate STEM students.
Ms. Katherine M. Ehlert Clemson University [biography]

Katherine M. Ehlert is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Miami University. Previously, she earned her PhD in Engineering and Science Education from Clemson University, her MS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University, and her BS in Mechanical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University
Alessandra St.Germain Clemson University [biography]

Senior mechanical engineering student at Clemson University. Currently doing research for SPRITE, Student Perceptions of Researcher Identity and Transformative Epistemologies.
Dr. Lisa Benson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5517-2289 Clemson University [biography]

Lisa Benson is a Professor of Engineering and Science Education at Clemson University, and the past editor of the Journal of Engineering Education. Her research focuses on the interactions between student motivation and their learning experiences. Her projects include studies of student perceptions, beliefs and attitudes towards becoming engineers and scientists, and their development of problem-solving skills, self-regulated learning practices, and epistemic beliefs. Other projects in the Benson group involve students’ navigational capital, and researchers’ schema development through the peer review process. Dr. Benson is an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Fellow, and a member of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), American Educational Research Association (AERA) and Tau Beta Pi. She earned a B.S. in Bioengineering (1978) from the University of Vermont, and M.S. (1986) and Ph.D. (2002) in Bioengineering from Clemson University.
Dr. Elizabeth G. Creamer Virginia Tech [biography]

Dr. Elizabeth G. Creamer is professor emerita, Educational Research and Evaluation in the School of Education at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University where she taught graduate level courses in mixed methods research. She is the author of the 2018 SAGE textbook, An Introduction to Fully Integrated Mixed Methods Research.
Dr. Marian S. Kennedy http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4395-3154 Clemson University [biography]

Marian Kennedy is an Associate Professor within the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Clemson University. Her research group focused on the mechanical and tribological characterization of thin films. She also contributes to the engineering
Dr. Courtney June Faber http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9156-7616 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Courtney Faber, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo (UB). Prior to joining UB in August of 2023, she was a Research Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Engineering Fundamentals at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was also the Director of the Fundamentals of Engineering and Computing Teaching in Higher Education Certificate Program. Her research focuses on empowering engineering education scholars to be more effective at impacting transformational change in engineering and developing educational experiences that consider epistemic thinking. She develops and uses innovative research methods that allow for deep investigations of constructs such as epistemic thinking, identity, and agency. Dr. Faber has a B.S. in Bioengineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education from Clemson University and a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University. Among other awards for her research, she was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022 to study epistemic negotiations on interdisciplinary engineering education research teams.

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