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The historical exclusion of Black and Brown students from engineering can be linked to systemic racism embedded into engineering education. Rectifying this issue will require Colleges of Engineering to adopt a holistic change strategy to overcome this challenge. While existing scholarship has explored the barriers racially/ethnically minoritized students face in engineering and the change strategies that promote pedagogical innovations in engineering education, this CAREER project sits at the intersection of both topics. This CAREER Award is a multi-case study exploring five institutions that serve as exemplars for recruiting, retaining, and graduating the most Black and Brown undergraduate engineers over a recent decade. This executive summary presents insights about the first year of this study and is organized around four key topics: the project design, two key outputs of year one, preliminary insights from year one's pilot interviews, and looking ahead to year two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the final year of the project, CAREER: Actualizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students' Identity Development (NSF EEC 1554057). Engineering has a history of attracting and graduating look-a-like and think-a-like engineers. Those who look or think like a "stereotypical engineer" may feel more welcome in engineering and may be why engineering has attracted and graduated similar students. This research project considered the unique ways of being, thinking, and knowing--what we call latent diversity--that can be highlighted and valued. Students' latent diversity may or may not align with the values in engineering education that focus on a social/technical dualism, meritocracy, and rigor, which are built-in Whiteness and masculinity. Students, particularly minoritized students (i.e., women, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students), may feel pushed out of engineering or they may feel the need to conform to these values to fit in. These messages create an engineering education that limits who can be an engineer as well as how these engineers are prepared to solve complex engineering problems. In this paper, we use an example of one student, John, and how he navigated his experiences through engineering over four years. We discuss how key themes of mental health and neurodiversity intersect with his identity development as an engineer over time as well as overlap and were complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We use this rich, single case as an example of how the mixed methods research in this study provides a nuanced understanding of students' trajectories in engineering. We also discuss the implications of this work for inclusive teaching and provide connections to existing resources and tools developed from the research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examined the factors influencing students' access to work-integrated learning experiences (WILs; i.e., internships and co-operative education). Several studies have examined how WILs enrich students' academic and career development. Yet, fewer studies examine the considerations associated with who participates in WILs and how these types of experiences shape students' beliefs about themselves as engineers or their career plans after participation. This study examines the narratives of 25 students who did and did not participate in WILs to understand why students choose to participate in WILs, the considerations and challenges to participating in WILs, and the impact of WILs on students' identity development. This research used an adapted framework of identity trajectory theory, which consists of three interlocking strands-institutional (i.e., programs, practices, procedures, etc.), networking (i.e., social networks, faculty interactions, etc.), and intellectual (i.e., field of study, learning progression, career trajectories, etc.). We used analysis of narratives to draw out key themes related to how institutional resources and students' networks facilitate their access to WIL experiences. Analysis also highlighted how WILs affect students' identity development as engineers during undergraduate education, including their career intentions upon graduation. We identified five big ideas that were expressed by the students to address the research questions. These ideas include: 1) Institutional structures and resources facilitate students' access to WILs; 2) Students utilize personal and professional networks to improve access to WILs; 3) Various commitments and responsibilities inhibited students' access and engagement with WILs; 4) WILs positively influence latently diverse students' identity development; 5) Individuals who did not engage in WILs identified supplemental opportunities to support their engineering identity. We highlight how these experiences, or lack thereof, influence students' perceptions of themselves as future professional engineers. These results have implications for practice and policies in engineering education, particularly enhancing students' access to WILs and constructing WILs that support students' identity development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a program wide effort to add computation and experimentation to all of our upper division physics courses, a set of laboratory experiments and computational exercises were developed for a junior / senior level course on electromagnetic field theory. The intent of these exercises was to broaden the students' understanding of the subject matter and build upon existing linkages between theoretical analysis, experimentation, and computation. However, in reality, we found that these exercises proved far more useful in identifying conceptual misunderstandings that did not show up in other assessments. They even identified surprising weaknesses in basic experimental technique. These exercises required students to first find the potential fields produced by simple electrode geometries analytically using the techniques taught in class, then computationally using relaxation techniques in MATLAB and finally experimentally via a water tank simulation. Once they had validated their simulation approaches, the students were to use the computational and experimental methods to find the potential due to a more complex geometry that they could not compute analytically. Three difficulties became apparent in this process. First, we learned that even when testing indicated that students were able to solve problems and answer conceptual questions, they might lack the ability to transfer that knowledge to a practical problem. Second, we found that lab skills that students learned in other classes did not transfer to a new class. Third, students' lacked confidence in drawing conclusions about experimental results and wrote conclusions without sufficient reflection. In this paper, we discuss the experiments and computational problems used, the difficulties encountered by both the students and the instructor and ideas for both improving the exercises and addressing the issues identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]