Ezra Systems Seminar: Allison Godwin (Cornell CBE)

Description

Also available via Zoom
 

Identity, Motivation, and Belonging Development in the System of Undergraduate Engineering Education

Studying student psychosocial development in engineering education necessitates a systems framing of how individual actors shape and are shaped by structures within classrooms, departments, universities, and society more broadly. Of high importance in student development is engineering role identity or students’ perception of themselves as the kind of person that can do engineering. Identity is an enduring and continuous sense of oneself and is often thought of as the answer to the questions, “Who am I, Who can I be, and Where do I belong?” Identities are foundational ways in which individuals view themselves and the world (both consciously and unconsciously) and shape actions and outcomes. Research shows that developing a robust engineering role identity is important for academic outcomes like recruitment, retention, career placements and experiences including social integration and well-being. In addition to identity, other related factors like motivation and belonging have a similar influence on student outcomes. And, in the ecosystem of engineering education, minoritized students including women, Black, Latiné, and Indigenous students may have more difficulty developing engineering identities, belonging, or feeling motivated to engage and persist because of cultural norms and stereotypes of who can be an engineer. Indeed, the proportions of bachelor’s degrees in engineering awarded to minoritized students have not dramatically changed in the last three decades.

This talk will describe how research on student development across scales provides ways to address persistent challenges that limit who participates in engineering. I will describe studies of internal dialogues of self [micro] that influence engineering choice at the transition to university, interpersonal interactions and classroom environments that convey messages about who can become an engineer [meso], and ongoing work about how curricular structures shape student retention and degree attainment [macro]. Together, these studies of student development across the nested layers (i.e., micro, meso, and macro) in the ecosystem of undergraduate education provide levers for change to support student development.
 

Bio:
Speaker Bio: Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin ’67, ’68 Professor in Engineering Education Research in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University and the Associate Director of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse groups of students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belonging and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2021 Journal of Civil Engineering Education Best Technical Paper, the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, the 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Research.