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Investigating Engineering Culture During COVID-19

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Engineering Education Culture: Mental Health, Inclusion, and the Soul of Our Community

Tagged Division

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37391

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37391

Download Count

296

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Paper Authors

biography

Jessica R. Deters Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-8766-9548

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Jessica Deters is a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech in the Department of Engineering Education. She holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics and a minor in the McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs from the Colorado School of Mines.

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biography

Marie C. Paretti Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-2202-6928

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Marie C. Paretti is a Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she directs the Virginia Tech Engineering Communications Center (VTECC). Her research focuses on communication in engineering design, interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, design education, and gender in engineering. She was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to study expert teaching in capstone design courses, and is co-PI on numerous NSF grants exploring communication, design, and identity in engineering. Drawing on theories of situated learning and identity development, her work includes studies on the teaching and learning of communication, effective teaching practices in design education, the effects of differing design pedagogies on retention and motivation, the dynamics of cross-disciplinary collaboration in both academic and industry design environments, and gender and identity in engineering.

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Abstract

Research on engineering culture often aims, either explicitly or implicitly, to understand why engineering in the U.S. remains largely white and largely male. However, while increasing diversity in engineering has been a major focus in the U.S. for decades, the percentages for women and people of color have stayed relatively stagnant. Recently, however, the COVID-19 pandemic caused rapid changes in education and exacerbated challenges around diversity and inclusion in engineering. It also provides a unique opportunity to investigate engineering culture during a time of crisis to examine possibilities for cultural change from a new lens. To that end, this study investigates three U.S. mechanical engineering student’s perspective on their department’s response to COVID-19 in order to understand the extent to which various dimensions of engineering culture [1] impacted the response. This study aims to understand how students’ reported experiences map onto the dimensions of engineering culture as well as to assess the fit of the theoretical framework and inform codebook development for a larger research study.

Deters, J. R., & Paretti, M. C. (2021, July), Investigating Engineering Culture During COVID-19 Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37391

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