Alice L. Pawley, Ph.D. - US grants

The Purdue Center for Faculty Success (PCFS) will provide targeted research, programs and University-level coordination to increase the number of minority women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty positions; improve the success of all women STEM faculty; and engage all faculty in transforming the institution. The PCFS will combine NSF and institutional support to undertake research on the applicability of specific theoretical models in the Purdue environment, develop programs informed by these theoretical models and that focus on gaps in our current portfolio of initiatives, and provide formative assessment and comprehensive evaluation of programmatic impacts. University leaders and policymakers, including Purdue President and ADVANCE PI France Córdova, will use PCFS results as compelling evidence to sustain and advance institutional transformation and implement policy that will impact the Purdue STEM community and beyond. Our vision is to accelerate institutional transformation through a highly visible infrastructure that offers innovative campus-wide coordination and collaboration for initiatives such as: an innovative and prestigious Presidential ADVANCE Advocate position focused on increasing the diversity of the pool of STEM faculty candidates; enhancing the role of Purdue's ethnic cultural centers in faculty support; adapting ADVANCE best practice STRIDE and WISELI "train the trainer" workshops; mentoring cohorts of junior faculty for research and career development; providing leadership mentoring for associate and full professors; transforming the entire faculty, including majority faculty; developing Diversity Forum toolkits; and initiating Diversity Catalyst and Leader Workshops.

Intellectual Merits. Institutional ethnography is a critical method with which to approach understanding the experience of marginalized participants, and provides a new approach to enrich ADVANCE research on STEM women faculty, in particular underrepresented minority women. PCFS efforts will not only advance understanding of the applicability of pipeline and chilly climate models that ground so many "women in science" initiatives but will explore through institutional ethnography the applicability of proposed new models that integrate "boundary" metaphor approaches for exploring women's underrepresentation. Thus PCFS research will generate new knowledge and advance theoretical frameworks that will be of interest to theorists and ADVANCE programs across the nation. The Purdue ADVANCE Advocate and cultural center efforts aimed at enhancing minority women STEM faculty recruiting will be assessed for new insights into enhancing minority faculty recruitment.

Broader Impacts. Improved understanding of the career pathways of women STEM faculty at Purdue, in combination with the assessments of the effectiveness of novel programs, will result in a rigorously tested, explicitly articulated suite of programs that other institutions can adapt to their own campuses. Innovative PCFS efforts to recruit minority women STEM faculty will help address a particularly persistent national STEM challenge, and other PCFS initiatives will increase participation of women in the STEM faculty ranks and in leadership positions. This will have an immediate positive impact on STEM undergraduate and graduate women at Purdue who may contemplate a potential career in academia and potentially on all individuals who are interested in science and engineering careers. PCFS includes Research Team students at the graduate and post-doctoral level and junior faculty in all programmatic initiatives and thus will support and encourage early-career advancement. Through novel partnerships with our ethnic cultural centers, PCFS will broaden participation across campus in the recruitment and support of faculty from underrepresented groups. The transformation of the entire faculty, including majority faculty, by PCFS will provide new approaches to sustain institutional support for faculty success. In addition to publications in leading journals and presentations at national and international research conferences, Purdue will disseminate a PCFS-developed toolkit for Diversity Forums and will host a national conference focused on ADVANCE theoretical frameworks as drivers for institutional change.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This engineering education research award to Purdue University will employ researchers to develop a conceptual framework for assessing sustainability knowledge gained by undergraduate engineering students and to explore elements of a sustainability concept inventory. Although plans to integrate sustainability throughout engineering curricula are widely supported, there are few resources available to measure the efficacy of such efforts. The field and practice of engineering education will benefit from the development of a rigorous conceptual framework to allow for grounded assessment of burgeoning sustainability curriculum initiatives. The bridging of expert and novice perspectives on sustainability will inform the creative investigation of both, i.e., it will refine expert conceptions and clarify novice misconceptions. By highlighting the explicit link between engineering, sustainability and society, this work will serve to highlight the broader dimensions of the engineering profession. As a result, if engineering becomes more attractive to a wider fraction of the population, there would be an expected increase in number of engineering graduates prepared for challenging work in sustainability.

This engineering education research project seeks to answer the question of why some groups are chronically under-represented in engineering degree programs. To address this issue the PI will use narratives to understand how under-represented engineering students describe interactions with their educational institutions and what institutional factors affect persistence and success. The project will develop and then disseminate tools based on "personas" and "informance" to help policy makers learn how institutions can evolve to better address and support the experiences of under-represented groups.

The broader significance and importance of this project will be to provide new insights into the perplexing and persistent program of low representation of some groups in engineering degree programs. The PI plans to focus on both primarily white institutions and also minority serving institutions to address questions on structural differences using a narrative approach. Should the project be successful, it will inform policy decisions within engineering schools and potentially at other higher education administrative level as well. The project thus has potential broad impact both on the knowledge base used to make decisions and practice.

This engineering education research project will support a workshop to create peer networks among pre-tenure faculty who are pursuing careers in engineering education research. Because many faculty who do research in engineering education are hired in departments where all or most of the faculty pursue discipline-specific engineering research, previous research has shown these faculty face several challenges in long-term career success. The peer and mentoring relationships that will be established by this workshop are anticipated to provide guidance on how to increase the success of faculty and thus retain them in engineering education research.

The broader significance and importance of this project will be to build peer mentoring networks among faculty engaged in engineering education research. By sharing success strategies, these networks can lead to greater success of engineering faculty members, particularly those at institutions without established engineering education programs or faculty and administrative expertise in engineering education. The PIs have addressed how the network established by this workshop can be sustained following termination of NSF funding.

Teamwork is critical to engineering professional work. While some aspects of helping engineering students learn how to work in teams are well understood and incorporated into instructional tools, others are poorly handled, such as helping teams learn how to address implicit and explicit marginalization amongst teammates. As in other areas of social life, teams can have teammates that engage in marginalizing behavior towards other teammates, particularly those from underrepresented populations; this can be detrimental to the work of the team and potentially damaging to the individuals being marginalized. It is particularly important for instructors of large undergraduate courses to have tools that will make peer-peer or instructor-peer marginalization identifiable at the classroom level so that they can interrupt discriminatory or marginalizing behavior amongst teammates, and to help teammates learn how to interrupt others' marginalizing behavior when instructors are not around. This will help better prepare students for a diverse engineering workforce. The workplace requires engineers to work together to solve important problems that need the intellectual contributions of each team member. Therefore, engineers need to know how to self-correct when teammates marginalize other team members.

Instructors and researchers need better insights on how to detect, manage, and study marginalizing interactions to improve team experiences for all team members. Existing research on teamwork, even that focused on engineering students, has tended to focus on retrospective survey data reported by teammates, not live classroom observation. The goal of I-MATTER (Identifying Marginalization and Allying Tendencies to Transform Engineering Relationships) is to develop a theoretically and empirically grounded framework and tool to help instructors of large classrooms identify teams engaging in marginalizing behaviors. This framework and tool will be developed through classroom observation of large first-year engineering courses at a predominantly white university, interviews with groups of underrepresented students, interviews with instructors, and a study featuring qualitatively-analyzed diaries produced by students from underrepresented populations. Findings will be incorporated into an observation tool for instructors of large classes, and into a modification of a web-hosted instrument called CATME which measures behaviors necessary for effective team functioning. A field-tested instrument for classroom observation will provide a research infrastructure and a protocol for identifying suspected marginalization of students, and will enable large-scale improvements for peer evaluation in engineering courses. The diverse networks of the research team and the extensive use of the CATME system will facilitate widespread dissemination of the research to influence instructors to support the goal of broadening participation in engineering.

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.