Collaborative Research: Toward Curricular Integration Leveraging Students Community Cultural Wealth in an Engineering Design Context

Engineering design courses are a staple of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. These courses provide students with opportunities to tackle real-world problems before encountering them in the workplace. The courses require students to integrate their creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. Design courses are crucial aspects of the professional formation of engineers and, therefore, are essential to the competitiveness of the nation’s scientific workforce. We intend to extend the translation of asset-based approaches in engineering education practice to design-based courses, one of the hallmarks of engineering coursework. Expanding the application of asset-based approaches within engineering courses will contribute to making engineering education more inclusionary of all students. This project uses Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) to recognize the diverse forms of capital that students bring to the engineering design process and to understand how they leverage these assets within a design context. CCW has been used to identify essential factors in engineering students’ persistence but should be applied more contextually within the curriculum. The project will use an exploratory sequential mixed-methods research design to expand CCW theory for application in engineering design courses. Our work uses CCW to recognize the diverse forms of capital that students bring to the engineering design process and to understand how they leverage these assets within a design context. First, we will use interview data from 11 engineering students to contextualize the forms of capital to a design context and develop design-based definitions that align with the CCW forms of capital. Following, we will engage with potential adopters and gather feedback to reinforce and/or refine the framework and the corresponding descriptions of the forms of capital. The researchers will seek feedback from 10-15 faculty experts who teach engineering design courses. The aim of this phase is to identify how and under what conditions do engineering design instructors recognize students’ design-based forms of capital when presented with experiences from student interviews. Survey measures will be developed based on salient experiences identified through student interviews and feedback from design instructors. The team will deploy the survey to a large sample of 1,000-1,500 engineering students to conduct the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. We will gather evidence to validate and finalize a design-based CCW survey instrument using a critical approach to quantitative methods. The final survey instrument and its accompanying ethical-use manual will provide a way for design-based course instructors to understand the impact of these forms of capital on students’ engineering self-efficacy and identity development. This project will help to promote the integration of asset-based approaches such as CCW into students’ professional formation to help improve engineering education, a necessary corrective if we are to build an equipped engineering workforce ready to tackle the complex challenges of the 21st century, and ultimately help strengthen the workforce. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.