Funding
COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: RESEARCH: DEVELOPING REFLECTIVE ENGINEERS THROUGH ACCESSING AND CHARACTERIZING IMPLICIT BELIEFS ABOUT THE VALUE OF DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES IN SERVICE-LEARNINGNATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AWARD #2327937. $318,227
COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: RUI: ENGINEERS MAKING PROCESS SAFETY JUDGEMENTS...MIND THE GAP! BELIEFS VS. BEHAVIOR
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AWARD #2113845. $348,620
COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: RESEARCH: COLLABORATION IN ENGINEERING PRACTITIONER AND STUDENT TEAMS: A STUDY OF BELIEFS ABOUT EFFECTIVE BEHAVIORS
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AWARD #2217606. $349,590
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Since the professional socialization of engineering students commonly fosters the belief that engineers' scientific approaches to problem solving are superior to other ways of thinking, it is important that engineering education provides students with explicit opportunities to reflect on, and learn to be critical of, such beliefs, a process known as reflexivity. This research will produce new knowledge on qualitative methods for effectively accessing implicit beliefs in engineering education. Service-learning in engineering provides an educational context to investigate this phenomenon as it explicitly positions students to engage with others in socio-technical contexts. With an overarching goal of fostering egalitarian beliefs about the value of diverse perspectives in all engineering students, this project will investigate the context of service-learning.
The research study will leverage both quantitative and qualitative methods through interviews, written reflections, and immersive game-play to answer the following four research questions: 1) What do participants believe about how they approach making judgements? 2) How do they behave when actually making judgements? 3) What gap, if any, exists between their beliefs and behavior, and 4) How do participants reconcile any gap? The knowledge produced by this project can benefit not only scholars seeking to further study the relationship between beliefs and behaviors, but also engineering educators responsible for the professional formation of their students' ability to exercise reflective judgement, especially in process safety contexts. Finally, the outcomes of this work have the potential to contribute to the professional formation of practicing engineers by informing workforce development. This reflective process, which brings awareness to gaps between beliefs and behaviors, is an unconventional yet promising approach to ultimately reducing process safety incidents.
This project will 1) identify which effective team behaviors are performed least frequently by students and practitioners in engineering design teams (target behaviors), and 2) characterize why a diverse sample of engineers chooses to perform those behaviors or not. The project findings will provide necessary insight into how to support engineers to become even more effective collaborators in both academic and professional contexts. Also, research products will enhance understanding of how engineers' collaborative behaviors (and reasons for performing particular behaviors or not) are similar or different in school and work contexts. Extending the current literature, we will provide a nuanced characterization of why the target behaviors are not performed in engineering teams, focused at the level of individual beliefs and also considering the role of social, cultural, and political factors that inherently matter in design teams.
Dr. Dringenberg will be contributing to the project as senior personnel. In parallel with the scientific research goals, the PI of this work, Dr. Zakee Sabree is working to enable faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in STEM to put best practices for promoting equity in recruitment and retention of graduate students into practice as a way to promote equity in his field of microbiology and beyond. Specifically, Dr. Dringenberg will support the implementation and assessment of professional development for professionals designed to enable reflexivity around their unique positionalities and the role of who they are in their own teaching and mentoring of the next generation of scientific scholars.
The NSF CAREER award is the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of both. Dr. Dringenberg’s project aims to help broaden participation in a field where women and people of color remain systemically excluded. Using a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews, Dr. Dringenberg will analyze the beliefs that engineering educators hold about why minoritization of women and people of color endures in the field, how they justify their beliefs, and characterize the experiences that they recognize as key to their evolution. Prior work on broadening participation in engineering has primarily focused on understanding underrepresented minority students and their experiences from a deficit perspective. Dr. Dringenberg’s project takes a complementary approach by focusing on engineering faculty, staff and administrators who identify as members of a race or gender-based majority and are viewed as proponents of diversity and inclusion by a member of a minoritized group. The research findings will inform the design and implementation of professional development opportunities targeting other majority-group educators to take responsibility for disrupting the problematic status quo for participation in engineering by surfacing and critically reflecting on their own deeply-held beliefs.
Dr. Dringenberg and fellow OSU Assistant Professor, Dr. Kajfez, are working on an EHR Core Project with the help of GRA Amy Kramer. This project aims to find critical insights to how different pathways into engineering degree programs (e.g., community college, regional campuses, and main campus options) are related to students’ beliefs about intelligence and engineering, as well as students’ personal identities related to being smart and an engineer. The research outcomes of this project have implications for broadening participation in engineering because it has been designed to reveal the possible ways in which these pathways actually serve to promote social inequity as a function of student’s beliefs and identities. Ultimately, this work has implications for policy and practice related to institutionalized educational tracking in STEM programs in higher education.
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