STORIESThe STORIES project is part of a larger funded study developed by the STRIDE research group. The purpose of this study is threefold: understand the attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets that students bring with them into engineering (aka latent diversity), explore how these characteristics shape their experiences and pathways, and study whether the norms and values of engineering culture support latent diversity, inclusion, and the development of innovative engineering solutions.
This website is a compilation and exploration of the qualitative data from this study. It draws on six semesters’ worth of interviews with 25 students from colleges and universities across the United States. These interviews allowed the research team to take a deep dive into students’ experiences and inform the development of some best practices for inclusive classrooms in engineering. Check out the information below to learn more about the CAREER study and the STORIES project!
All good things start with an idea! Dr. Allison Godwin spent a few years thinking about the concepts that guide this study. You can check out this article about latent diversity that shows this ideation. She then turned these ideas in a proposal for a CAREER award, which is a type of grant that allows researchers to dive deeply into a topic. Dr. Godwin was awarded a CAREER grant in 2016.
The study involves the collection of quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative (numbers) data came from a survey that was filled out by 3,855 first-year engineering students from 32 institutions across the United States. The STRIDE team spent a lot of time designing and testing the quantitative survey, to ensure we would get useful information from the measures. The goal of the survey was to measure a range of ideas regarding students' attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets (latent diversity) that could be analyzed for common patterns. There’s a whole science of instrument development called psychometrics; you can learn more about how we used psychometrics when developing our survey by checking out one of our publications.
The qualitative (words) data come from multiple interviews with engineering students. Like with the survey, the STRIDE team wanted to make sure that these interviews touched on all the information we were interested in. We conducted 12 pilot interviews where we had the chance to test out ideas and improve the questions being asked. You can read about these pilot interviews here and here.
Sending out a survey across the country takes a lot of logistics planning! We partnered with 32 colleges and universities. We picked an array of institutions in order to have a roughly equal representation of students who attended small schools, medium schools, and large schools.
We sent out paper copies of the survey to all of the schools with which we partnered. Students filled out the survey in their first-year engineering programs classrooms, which were then sent back to the STRIDE team.
We scanned and digitized each of those paper surveys. All told, this process took over 70 hours!
Once the data was ready to go, we used an analytic approach called Topological Data Analysis, which can show us patterns in the structure of students’ answers on the survey. This analysis revealed groups of students who filled out the survey similarly and how they were related to one another. We’ve written a lot about this process -- check out these [1, 2] articles if you want to know more about it! TDA is important for the STORIES project because we selected students to interview based on which group they belonged to. We tried to get participants from lots of different groups so we could see how their stories might be different over time.
We reached out to 25 students in the Fall 2018 to start up the interviews! These interviews started a year after the students took the survey, which put many of them in their sophomore year of college. We tried to interview students every semester. We kept interviewing students, even if they had changed majors out of engineering. Speaking with them regularly helped us build closer relationships with students, which meant they were more likely to be open about their experiences.
We focused our second set of interviews on students’ experiences in the second year of their engineering program. We found that students discussed their relationships with faculty as particularly important and framed them as “adversaries or allies.” You can learn more about these narratives here.
We started using journey maps in our interviews, at the suggestion of one of our expert advisory board members, Lynn McAlpine. An example of a journey map can be found in this paper. They helped students think back about their previous semester and remember high and low points.
We saw lots of different perspectives on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on education and pathways by talking to students. We are currently putting together a paper on this topic -- keep an eye on this space or reach out to a member of our team for more information!
We continued to understand how COVID-19 and other experiences influenced students’ pathways and abilities to see themselves as engineers.
We asked students about their planned steps after graduation to see how their journeys would continue.
We plan to continue interviewing students to capture their transition into graduate school or the workforce, even though many of them will be graduating this year.