Browsing by Author "Godwin, Allison"

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    Engineering students’ agency and career goals to engage in sustainable development: Differences between first-year students and seniors
    France, Jared; Milovanovic, Julie; Shealy, Tripp; Godwin, Allison (Emerald, 2022-11-24)
    Purpose: This paper aims to explore the differences in first-year and senior engineering students’ engineering agency beliefs and career goals related to sustainable development. The authors also sought to understand how topics related to sustainable development in engineering courses affect senior engineering students’ goals to address these issues in their careers. This work provides evidence of how students’ agency beliefs may be shaped by higher education, which is essential to workforce development. Design/methodology/approach: Findings stem from two national surveys of engineering first-year (Sustainability and Gender in Engineering, n = 7,709) and senior students (Student Survey about Career Goals, College Experiences, n = 4,605). The authors compared both groups using pairwise testing by class standing. Findings: The results indicate that undergraduate studies tend to reinforce students’ engineering agency beliefs to improve their quality of life and preserve the environment. Significantly more senior students selected career goals to address environmental issues compared to first-year students. In general, students undervalue their roles as engineers in addressing issues related to social inequities. Those topics are rarely addressed in engineering courses. Findings from this work suggest discussing sustainability in courses positively impact setting career goals to address such challenges. Research limitations/implications: The study compares results from two distinct surveys, conveyed at different periods. Nonetheless, the sample size and national spread of respondents across US colleges and universities are robust to offer relevant insights on sustainable development in engineering education. Practical implications: Adapting engineering curriculum by ensuring that engineering students are prepared to confront global problems related to sustainable development in their careers will have a positive societal impact. Social implications: This study highlights shortcomings of engineering education in promoting social and economic sustainability as related to the engineering field. Educational programs would benefit from emphasizing the interconnectedness of environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development. This approach could increase diversity in engineering education and the industry, and by ripple effect, benefit the communities and local governance. Originality/value: This work is a first step toward understanding how undergraduate experiences impact students’ engineering agency beliefs and career goals related to sustainability. It explores potential factors that could increase students’ engineering agency and goals to make a change through engineering.
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    The Journey of Becoming and Belonging:  A Longitudinal Exploration of Socialization's Impact on STEM Students' Sense of Belonging
    Goldschneider, Benjamin Jared (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-05)
    Persistently high attrition rates from STEM majors present a stubborn challenge for researchers, administrators, and faculty alike. To approach this problem, my dissertation examined the socialization processes by which students develop a sense of belonging to both their institution and their discipline. Previously identified as an important factor in students' persistence and overall satisfaction with their undergraduate experience, belonging is a critical piece of the retention puzzle. However, not every student experiences or develops belonging in the same way. This dissertation applied the theoretical lens of socialization to deepen the understanding of how social interactions help or hinder students' belonging to their university and chosen major alike. My dissertation work was grounded in the synthesis of two theoretical frameworks: Conrad et al.'s (2006) model of socialization and Strayhorn's (2018e) conceptualization of sense of belonging. The study took the form of an embedded case study of two similar disciplinary contexts within a large public land-grant Research 1 institution, with four students from each context for a total of eight participants. By leveraging four years of interview data from each participant, supported by institutional documentation, I addressed the question: In what ways does a student's socialization experience influence, if at all, their sense of belonging to both their chosen discipline and their university? Data analysis included qualitative coding, trajectory mapping, and thematic analysis. Trajectories were produced for each participant before expanding the analysis to examine patterns across and between the contexts. My findings addressed the mechanisms of socialization at the undergraduate level and how they evolved over time. The primary outcome of my work was a set of three distinct socialization trajectories, named the Anchored, who built strong socializing relationships early and maintained them throughout their undergraduate years; Independents, who neither sought nor wanted such relationships; and Wanderers, whose socializing relationships tended to be short-lived and inconsistent, although desired. Fourteen unique groups of socializing agents were identified, along with five common drivers for intentionally engaging with specific agents: personal and academic support, research and industry aspirations, and finding a path. Pre-college socialization experiences were salient for developing anticipatory belonging, as students who were exposed to their discipline or institution prior to arriving as students had an easier time becoming integrated to their communities. Once students arrived, their socialization trajectories tended to shape their feelings of belonging to the institution, with close ties forming for the Anchored, appreciation for general support among the Independents, and a mix of happiness and frustration for the Wanderers. By contrast, disciplinary belonging was more reliant on the individual participant's goals and interests. Disciplinary differences between the two contexts were identified but were limited in scope and generally linked to the career outcomes students associated with their chosen major rather than their experiences in the major. Finally, my research revealed that a strong sense of belonging in one domain of undergraduate life could be sufficient for a student to persist to degree completion despite weak or absent feelings of belonging in other areas.
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    Operationalizing and monitoring student support in undergraduate engineering education
    Lee, Walter C.; Hall, Janice L.; Godwin, Allison; Knight, David B.; Verdin, Dina (2021-10-08)
    Background Supporting undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been a persistent need. However, assessing the impact of support efforts can prove challenging as it is difficult to operationalize student support and subsequently monitor the combined impacts of the various supports to which students have access simultaneously. Purpose/Hypothesis This paper describes the development of the STEM student perspectives of support instrument (STEM-SPSI) and explores how perceptions of student support constructs vary across engineering students. Design/Method Following best practices for instrument development, forming the STEM-SPSI consisted of an iterative cycle of feedback from various STEM stakeholders and two rounds of pilot testing with students at multiple institutions. We employed factor analysis to identify student-support constructs and conduct validation procedures on the instrument. Results Results suggest that student support can be conceptualized as a combination of 12 constructs. The STEM-SPSI can help engineering educators evaluate their student-support mechanisms at an academic-unit level. Conclusions The practical contribution of the STEM-SPSI is to assist colleges in monitoring the extent to which their portfolio of support mechanisms is perceived as helpful by undergraduate students. This work makes a theoretical contribution to the model of cocurricular support that undergirds the instrument by producing empirical evidence for its constructs.