2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 48: Dynamics of Researcher Identity and Epistemology: The Development of a Grounded-theory Model

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Studies on undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have shown that these programs lead to positive gains including increased retention in STEM majors, clarification of career goals, establishment of collegial working relationships, increased understanding of how science research is done, increased ability to work and think independently from faculty, and increased problem-solving skills. Because of these gains, URE has been identified as a high-impact educational practice. Unfortunately, many undergraduate students are not able to reap the benefits of authentic research experiences due to curricular limitations, exclusive criteria for participating in UREs, and conflicts with work schedules or family responsibilities. This work (funded by an NSF-REE) seeks to understand how undergraduate students in UREs develop their researcher identities and build their engineering knowledge to propose effective practices that can be integrated into engineering courses and curricula.

The first two phases of this multi-institution project focused on answering our overall research question: How do undergraduate engineering students develop their identities as researcher and their ways of knowing engineering through research experiences? This paper focuses on the final stages of Phase 2: the development of a grounded-theory conceptual model.

In Phase 2, we conducted 22 interviews with participants from six institutions, recruited from students who completed a survey in Phase 1. All interview transcripts were coded using the coding scheme that was initially developed from open ended questions in the survey. From the coded transcripts, we developed structured memos that included a participant description, summary of salient concepts from theoretical frameworks and/or themes, and connections to other participants (cross-case analysis). These structured memos served as the data set that was used to develop our conceptual model showing how researcher identity and epistemic thinking (e.g. beliefs about knowledge, processes for generating knowledge, and justification of processes) emerge through participants’ experiences in UREs.

The process of developing our grounded-theory conceptual model from our structured memos started with four coders independently reading a subset of memos to develop an initial list of potential themes. Each coder further refined their themes by testing their salience across participants. Once each coder finalized their own core set of themes, a single list of emerging themes was generated by coders combining and refining their individual lists. This process lead to the generation of six final themes: independence, response to failure, nature/dimensions of research, personal gains from research, social aspects of research, and outcomes of research.

The coding, memos, and themes laid the groundwork for our research team to collaboratively develop and visualize our conceptual model based on the key components of a grounded theory. Each of us brought our knowledge of the data and our own expertise in the theoretical constructs that guided our work. Once we constructed our conceptual model, we assessed its validity by testing it with individual cases from our data, allowing us to refine the model and the language used to label key components. Our poster will document this process and provide the first presentation of the model.

Authors

Dr. Courtney June Faber http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9156-7616 University of Tennessee, Knoxville [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.
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. Rachel Louis Kajfez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9745-1921 The 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.
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
Mr. Dennis M. Lee Clemson University [biography]

Dennis M. Lee is a doctoral candidate 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. Anne Marguerite McAlister http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4155-251X University of Virginia [biography]

Dr. Anne M. McAlister is an Assistant Professor in the First Year Engineering Center at the University of Virginia. She has her PhD in Education and MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, and her BS in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses primarily on identity and qualitative research methods.
Karina Sylvia Sobieraj Ohio State University [biography]

I am a third year Biological Engineering Student pursuing a minor in Biomedical Engineering. I am active in many clubs on campus including Make a Wish and the Society of Women Engineers and I am also an undergraduate researcher for en engineering education research group.
Teresa Porter Ohio State University
Alessandra St. Germain Clemson University [biography]

Senior mechanical engineering undergraduate at Clemson University. Currently doing research for SPRITE, Student's Perceptions of Researcher Identity and Transformative Epistemologies.
Mr. Guoyong Wu Clemson University [biography]

Guoyong Wu is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in education at Clemson University. His research interests are second language acquisition, second language identity and second language socialization.

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