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Course-based Adaptations of an Ecological Belonging Intervention to Transform Engineering Representation at Scale

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

12

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41987

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/41987

Download Count

410

Paper Authors

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Linda DeAngelo University of Pittsburgh

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Linda DeAngelo is Associate Professor of Higher Education, Center for Urban Education Faculty Fellow, and affiliated faculty in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. DeAngelo studies social stratification, investigating how social inequities are produced, maintained, and interrupted. Currently her scholarship focuses on access to and engagement in faculty mentorship, the pathway into and through graduate education, and gender and race in engineering.

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Allison Godwin Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)

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Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education and of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. She is also the Engineering Workforce Development Director for CISTAR, the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belonging and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development.

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Kevin Binning

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Natascha Buswell University of California, Irvine

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Natascha Trellinger Buswell is an assistant professor of teaching in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her B.S. in aerospace engineering at Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in engineering education in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She is particularly interested in inclusive teaching conceptions and methods and graduate level engineering education.

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Jennifer Cribbs Oklahoma State University

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Erica McGreevy University of Pittsburgh

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Associate Teaching Professor of Biological Sciences

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Christian Schunn University of Pittsburgh

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Anne-Ketura Elie University of Pittsburgh

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PhD Student | University of Pittsburgh

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Kevin Kaufman-Ortiz Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)

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Kevin Jay Kaufman-Ortiz is from Hormigueros, Puerto Rico. He is an identical triplet, was raised with his brothers in the small town of Hormigueros. He picked up on interests in origami, music, engineering, and education throughout his life. With a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and a certification to teach high school mathematics in Puerto Rico, Kevin has shaped his path to empower others in his learning process. He is currently a Ph.D. student at Purdue University studying Engineering Education. Social causes Kevin cares about are bringing more awareness about the diversity within the LGBTQ+ community in engineering, Belonging and deconstructing what Latinx actually means for communities like Puerto Rico.

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Beverly Conrique University of Pittsburgh

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Carlie Cooper University of Georgia

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Danielle Lewis

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Jacqueline Rohde Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)

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Jacqueline Rohde is a PhD candidate at Purdue University and is the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her research interests in engineering education include the development student engineering identity and professional development

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Abstract

This project uses an ecological belonging intervention approach [1] that requires one-class or one- recitation/discussion session to implement and has been shown to erase long-standing equity gaps in achievement in introductory STEM courses. However, given the wide social and cultural heterogeneity across US university contexts (e.g., differences in regional demographics, history, political climates), it is an open question if and how the intervention may scale. This project brings together an interdisciplinary team across three strategically selected universities to design, test, and iteratively improve an approach to systematically identify which first and second year courses would most benefit from the intervention, reveal student concerns that may be specific to that course, adapt the intervention to address those concerns, and evaluate the universality versus specificity of the intervention across university contexts. This systematic approach also includes persuasion and training processes for onboarding the instructors of the targeted courses. The instructor onboarding and the intervention adaptation processes are guided by a theory-of-action that is the backbone of the project’s research activities and iterative process improvement. A synergistic mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods is used throughout the study.

In this paper, we describe our theoretical framing of this ecological belonging intervention and the current efforts of the project in developing customized student stories for the intervention. We have conducted focus groups across each of the partner institutions (University of Pittsburgh, Purdue University, and University of California Irvine). We describe the process of developing these contextually relevant stories and the lessons learned about how this ecological belonging intervention can be translated across institutional contexts and for various STEM majors and systemically minoritized populations. The results of this work can provide actionable strategies for reducing equity gaps in students' degree attainment and achievement in engineering.

DeAngelo, L., & Godwin, A., & Binning, K., & Buswell, N., & Cribbs, J., & McGreevy, E., & Schunn, C., & Elie, A., & Kaufman-Ortiz, K., & Conrique, B., & Cooper, C., & Lewis, D., & Rohde, J. (2022, August), Course-based Adaptations of an Ecological Belonging Intervention to Transform Engineering Representation at Scale Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41987

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