Our work is motivated by the need to cultivate a diverse group of talented future engineers. Adult undergraduate students age 25 and over are an important source of engineers, with life experience that can enhance student experience, but not much is understood yet about this specific group. Adult students face challenges specific to their demographic due to responsibilities in other aspects of their life as employees, parents, spouses, and more. This paper examines adult engineering students' conceptions of what an engineer is, across three distinct academic environments: a community college, a small private undergraduate university, and a large public research university. A semistructured interview approach was used to collect data from adult students with prior engineeringrelated work experience. These data reveal strong similarities among the conception of what it means to be an engineer, despite differences in the demographic background and institutional context of the participants. There are differences in courseload, employment status, and number of dependents among the sample populations at the three institutions. Participants from all institutions identified with occupational respect, application of knowledge to find solutions, benefiting society, and problem solving as important aspects of the engineering occupation. This work suggests opportunities to enhance professional identity development at institutions of multiple types through industrial collaboration and mentorship, policies and programs to support studentparents, and cooperative work opportunities that marry engineering education with engineering practice.
Adult students comprise a significant percentage of undergraduate learners, 10% within engineering programs. Whereas gender and ethnic diversity are commonly studied aspects, studies involving student age comprise a much smaller set of the available literature within the engineering education field. To increase the diversity and number of engineers in the workforce, it is critical that adult students be supported through degree completion.Our work aims to create new pathways for non-traditional engineering students by examining the role of prior work experiences, identity, and expertise. The work supported by NSF REE collects and analyzes qualitative and quantitative data from non-traditional engineering undergraduate students at three diverse institutes of higher education: a large public university (University of California, Berkeley), a small private university (University of New Haven), and a community college (Cañada College). We foresee the data providing critical insights to enable engineering educators to be more effective, and making substantial contributions to our understanding of engineering identities and students' thinking processes. By filling gaps in current understanding of the identities, level of expertise, and experiences of these students, the study aims to improve persistence outcomes for engineering students and increase the number of qualified engineering graduates.In an effort to leverage existing data, we have set out to replicate the work carried out by Atman/Cardella (2007) and Matusovich et al (2011) with a new study population comprised of undergraduate students aged 25 and over. The paper/poster will detail our efforts to train our research team of engineering and social science students in carrying out these experiments with a high degree of fidelity to the original studies. This work is being carried out at universities that do not have students focused on engineering education research; we describe the process by which we trained students to collect the data and actively participate in the research. Features of our training include: human subjects research training with a focus on the Belmont Report and its applications, training in semi-structured interviewing, analysis of the publications from the prior related work, practice data collection sessions, role-playing, training on thematic coding, and finally deployment in real data collection. Motivation -Why Research on Adult Nontraditional Engineering StudentsEngineers seek to find solutions to society's problems. The keystone to successfully attaining solutions may be said to be diversity -diversity of our lived experiences. We can claim that engineering, by its very nature, is dependent on teamwork and creativity of thought. Diversity increases the range and creativeness of possible solutions the team or individual can attain
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