A Systematic Literature Review of Women's Epistemologies in Engineering Education.

Currently and historically, women are underrepresented in engineering. Engineering education research (EER) has explored possible explanations as to why this phenomenon persists, including but not limited to hinderances to identity development, lack of belongingness, and the epistemological underpinnings that are fundamental to engineering education. In this paper, we will focus specifically on these epistemological foundations in relation to women's epistemologies and how different ideas about knowledge and learning relate to why women are underrepresented in engineering. In the space of engineering education, we strive to create an environment that fosters inclusive epistemologies for students to succeed. However, educational research suggests that women's epistemologies fundamentally differ from men's because of factors like socialization, cultural influences, and experiences of marginalization that are common for women. Because engineering began as an exclusively middle-class white male field and remains male-dominated, male epistemologies shape the default pathways to understanding in engineering education. Women's epistemologies may differ from fundamental ways of knowing that engineering education is built on. Based on this difference, we believe there is an epistemological mismatch between women and the engineering field. To begin to investigate this claim, we conducted a literature review as part of a larger study to understand what has been studied in EER regarding women's epistemologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the landscape of women's epistemologies in recent EER. Our guiding research question is: "How have women's epistemologies been studied in published engineering education research?". To begin this literature review, we searched through the ASEE conference proceedings database (also known as PEER) for student women's epistemologies from 2016 to 2021. We chose this time frame to focus on current research of epistemologies in EER. The keywords used in the search were "Epistemology + Women + Engineering." We focused on engineering students to highlight the epistemologies that relate to learning rather than teaching. Once a preliminary set of articles was identified, we performed secondary and tertiary rounds of exclusion to scope the range of articles included in the study that addressed the research question. We performed a categorical analysis to compare each article across multiple groupings of attributes. The result of this literature review was a table, in which we extracted information from the papers based on seven categories: framework, methodology, population, instrument, main result, related concepts, and unit of analysis. This table allows for easy access to each paper to understand the main points of the study and whether or not the authors related epistemologies to other concepts in EER, including student outcomes. A highlight of our results concerns the "unit of analysis" category, which shows how student epistemologies have been studied from a multitude of perspectives, including program-level effects on student epistemologies to individual-level epistemological differences between students. As a result, the single word of epistemology has come to possess a multitude of meanings in EER. Future work involves analyzing these units of analysis to create a unified language around student epistemologies in engineering to better the field's understanding of the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]