College of Education
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Beyond Diversity As Usual: Expanding Critical Cultural Approaches to Marginalization in Engineering Education(2017) Secules, Stephen; Elby, Andrew; Gupta, Ayush; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In general, what we think of as "diversity work" in undergraduate engineering education focuses in the following ways: more on the overlooked assets of minority groups than on the acts of overlooking, more on the experiences of marginalized groups than on the mechanisms of marginalization by dominant groups, more on supporting and increasing minority student retention than on critiquing and remediating the systems which lead minority students to leave engineering. This dissertation presents a series of arguments which push beyond a status quo understanding of diversity in engineering education. The first approach the dissertation takes up is to problematize educational facts around failure by interrogating their roots in interactions and cultural norms in an engineering classroom. In another argument, the dissertation places the engineering classroom cultural norms of competition, whiteness, and masculinity in a critical historical context of the discipline at large. Finally, I demonstrate how engaging students in a critique of marginalizing educational culture can be an important source of agency. In addition to applying and demonstrating the value of specific novel approaches in engineering education, the dissertation contributes to the research community by discussing the respective affordances between these and other possible scholarly approaches to culture and marginalization in education. I also suggest how a consideration of the taken-for-granted culture of engineering education can be an important tool for instructors seeking to gain insight into persistent educational problems. In addition, this dissertation makes implications for diversity support practice, envisioning new forms of support programming rooted in intersectionality and critical praxis.Item Career Aspirations of High School Males and Femailes in a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program(2015) Bishop, April; Kivlighan, Dennis M; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With the large number of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) jobs across the nation and state which are unfilled due to lack of interested and qualified STEM applicants, there is a need for more students to leave high school, enter college in STEM majors and continue through the STEM pipeline to STEM careers. The purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which high school students who participate in a STEM program from elementary through high school aspire to STEM careers compared to students with similar mathematics achievement who did not participate in the STEM program. Of particularly interest was the effect of the STEM program on female aspirations toward STEM careers. Career aspirations was self-reported one month before students graduated from high school on a school and graduates of the STEM program were compared to graduates with the same gender and a similar mathematics test score. The quantitative, retrospective study found that 58.75% of the students in the STEM program aspired to STEM careers after high school compared to only 40.00% of students with similar academic achievement that were not in the STEM program. Students in the STEM program were 0.47 times more likely to aspire to STEM careers compared to their peers who did not participate in the STEM program. The study also found that males in the STEM program were 0.35 times more likely and females in the STEM program were 1.0 times more likely to aspire to STEM careers than same gender students not in the STEM program. The effect on gender was not statistically significant due to the small number of females in the study; however, the data is important because females in the STEM program were twice as likely to aspire to STEM careers, in particular engineering. The STEM program effectively achieved one of its goals to increase student interest, especially females, in aspiring to STEM careers.