Margaret Eisenhart - US grants

The proposed research is an original investigation of how academically-able young women, who might be recruits to engineering, learn about the engineering profession. The collaborative three-year study, using participatory action methodology, qualitative methods, and quantitative measures, will "seed" the women's explorations of engineering as a career and then examine how racially, socio-economically, and geographically diverse young high school women come to know the profession of engineering. It aims to analyze the young women's career exploration journey, the influences that shape their sense of the profession, and their views and feelings about their career options in engineering at the conclusion of the exploration experience and beyond. The study will include 120 diverse (African American, Latina, American Indian, and Euro-American) participants in 3 states and 11 sites.



Intellectual Merit

The study offers a new perspective and innovative methodology to address the question, why are there so few women, including women of color, in engineering and how might this imbalance be lessened? In the career exploration phase of the study, young women who are academically-able but not already interested in engineering will be encouraged to direct and document their own approach to what they learn about engineering. By encouraging the women's own career explorations and reflections, and using current and appropriate-for-youth communication technologies, the PIs intend to elicit their "authentic" perspectives on engineering as a field of study and a career choice. This approach is different from much current research that documents young women's lack of interest and participation in engineering but does not directly investigate how young women see and perceive the profession while they explore its career potential. In addition, the study will contribute valuable information to the career development literature by identifying features and themes of young women's attitudes and decision-making about engineering as a career option. Moreover, by examining diverse young women's own views over time, this research will provide a deeper and richer understanding of gender, youth, and multicultural standpoints in relation to the engineering profession.



Broader Impacts

On a broad national scale, this study seeks to discover and describe the career exploration experiences of a diverse population of young women. It also seeks to examine the reasons for the disinterest in engineering of young women as they consider future career options. The study aims to provide knowledge to expand the engineering workforce as well as to support diversity and multicultural initiatives currently underway in academia and industry. Dissemination of the findings will be through higher education, business communities, and professional societies, catalyzing deeper sensitivity toward those underrepresented in the engineering ranks. This will be accomplished primarily through presentations at professional association conferences, publications in peer-reviewed journals and popular press venues, and web sites.

This longitudinal, empirical, collaborative research study seeks to identify the influence of expanded "opportunity structures" in high school for preparation in mathematics and science on choice of college destinations by non-privileged high school students and their selection of STEM majors. Students studied in this longitudinal study will initially be sophomores in two geographically different urban settings - Buffalo, NY and Denver, CO. The students in the sample have math grades that place in them in the top 20% of their class but have limited social, economic, and cultural capital (for example, parents whose education ended with little or no-college attendance). Because prior work has found that matriculation in good colleges and selection of STEM majors has varied widely in comparing students who seem to come from comparable high schools in terms of socioeconomic status, this study will add to our understanding of underlying factors. Also, the extensive investment across US Public high schools in AP, IB, magnet schools, after-school programs, science competitions, and other enrichment activities indicates that improved understanding of the impact of these investments would be likely to be valuable to many school districts.

Prior research has shown that expanded opportunity structures in science and math facilitate greater college attendance, including at elite colleges. But there is not sufficient research on which types of students are helped by this and on how such structures influence student choice of academic major.

This study builds upon extensive prior research including those that employed anthropological and sociological investigations of indicators that influence personal perceptions and subsequent decisions regarding students' roles in society. This study is grounded by theoretical support from Bourdieu's Theory of Social Practice (1977) and Arum, Gamoran, and Shavit's Theory of Educational Expansion and Differentiation (2007). Answers to the research questions guiding this study are expected to advance understanding of the impact of school structures to expand educational opportunities in science and math to non-socially and non-culturally capitalized students. The PIs hypothesize that when such opportunities for educational expansion are implemented they should contribute to the reduction of inequalities associated with STEM pursuits and outcomes.

Intellectual Merit: The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between (1) access to and use of STEM-related social, cultural, and economic "capital" (or resources) and (2) specific educational pathways in college for a group of academically talented, mostly minority young women who participated for 3 years in a high school program intended to spark and sustain their interest in engineering. The high school program, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE), was implemented in 10 public schools in 3 states (CO, IA, and OH), from 2006-2009. FREE began with 131 mostly urban, Latina, Black, Native American and Asian American girls who were strong students in math and science. The proposed study will follow all the young women who stayed in FREE during high school and their first post-high school year (n=81). In this group, 22% are pursuing engineering majors, 35% are in other STEM majors, 33% are pursuing non-STEM majors, and 10% are undecided. Pierre Bourdieu's "social capital" framework will be employed to analyze the capital the participants brought with them and will have used in college, including that gained in FREE, to pursue their college goals. The concept of "educational pathways" will be used to examine the dynamic interplay between institutional structures for pursuing college degrees, sources of support in college, and individual decisions and choices made in college. Data will include information about the young women's high school backgrounds, experiences and lives (observation; interviews; demographic, self-efficacy and social network surveys; Blackberry PIN, Messenger and email messages; website and Facebook postings) from the FREE project. Comparable new data will be collected about the women's college experiences through Facebook postings, interviews and surveys. The qualitative data will be analyzed by creating a coding scheme of a priori categories (based on the research questions) and in situ (emerging from the data) categories and managed with the ATLAS.ti software program. Survey data will be analyzed with descriptive statistics, and where survey questions have been drawn from national surveys, those data will be used to make national comparisons.

Broader Impacts: This research seeks to impact the broader education community and society as a whole by: illuminating the connections between forms of capital and choice for or against careers in engineering and other STEM fields; contributing to policies and programs for increasing diversity in STEM fields; involving non-privileged students in research related to their STEM circumstances and options; preparing graduate students in Education, Women's Studies, and STEM fields for research on education-related issues, particularly those involving under-represented populations; and widely disseminating results through diverse sources, such as peer-reviewed journals, STEM-oriented associations, the FREE website, college-oriented websites and magazines, local and national press, and speaking engagements.

This collaborative research study seeks to develop a detailed, empirically grounded understanding of new engineers'transitions from schools to workplaces, and thereby to identify continuities and discontinuities between undergraduate education and professional practice in engineering. The study builds upon NSF-funded research by two of the investigators that followed engineering students through their undergraduate engineering experiences; this project represents a next step towards improving engineering education and furthering learning sciences research in neglected areas like STEM workplace learning. The engineers studied in this project will be recent graduates, taking positions typical of students from their institutions, and in economically important or expanding engineering sectors. The central methodology will be learning ethnographies, an innovative approach using ethnographic fieldwork to discover what these new engineers need to learn, how they learn it, what they appear to adapt or use readily from their prior educational experience, and the consequences of these for their workplace participation and developing identities as engineers. The learning ethnographies will ground two further aspects of the study: a comparison of workplace practices with those of these engineers' undergraduate programs, and a survey generalizing ethnographic findings to a broader population. Women and members of underrepresented minority groups will be oversampled to provide a basis for comparative analysis intended to understand distinctive experiences and challenges that members of these groups may face as they move into the workplace.

Lack of continuity between school and work in engineering is often noted, but details of mismatches are insufficiently understood to effectively inform practice; this research addresses this gap in understanding. For industry, it can inform reorganization of workplace practices to better facilitate transitions from school to work. For undergraduate programs, the research can provide a basis for educational practices to be adopted or deemphasized, allowing schools of engineering to better prepare students to be creative and successful engineers. For students, this research may lead to the development of more relevant and practically useful engineering knowledge and more accurate understandings of their possible future careers. It is also expected that this research will inform attempts at recruitment and retention of members of underrepresented groups.