Background Students' identification with engineering is intertwined culturally with being smart. Broadly, engineering students are often considered to be smart by others and by themselves, and these beliefs about smartness—what it is and who has enough of it to be an engineer—are a fundamental and limiting aspect of students' experiences. Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore how undergraduate engineering students describe themselves as smart enough to be engineers. We aimed to develop rich descriptions of the complex ways they articulate their identities as smart before coming to college and during the first two years of their undergraduate degrees. Design/Method We collected data through a series of interviews with 25 participants. We iteratively and collaboratively analyzed the data to determine the predominant ways the participants articulated their identities as smart enough to be engineers. We generated a qualitative data display to check for patterns related to pathways into engineering programs and privileged social identities. Results We found that engineering students have three different ways to articulate that they are smart enough to be engineers: (1) they have innate abilities, (2) they are hardworking and dedicated to learning, and (3) they have skills and experience related to engineering. Additionally, we provide qualitative evidence that the innate abilities articulation relates to privilege. Discussion/Conclusion The study participants engaged in identity work that produced the three articulations. As engineering educators, we need to take responsibility for the ways in which our participation in the cultural practice of smartness reproduces inequity.

The focus of this work is on examining the sense of belonging within aerospace engineering students across an undergraduate curriculum. Sense of belonging is typically viewed as being respected, valued, and accepted [1] and is a complex topic that includes many different features [2] [3]. It is also commonly viewed as a topic that is extremely important when considering inclusion and diversity initiatives. Gender specifically has been shown to impact sense of belonging in STEM disciplines with women reporting lower sense of belonging than men [4]. The Aerospace Engineering Program at The Ohio State University (OSU) is interested in examining sense of belonging as a way to investigate recruitment and retention efforts in their program. The retention of students in Aerospace Engineering, previously investigated by Kecskemety and Kajfez [5], found that at Ohio State, 21% of students in the Aerospace pre-major left engineering compared to only 15% of Mechanical engineering pre-majors. These two majors are part of the same department at Ohio State and thus have access to similar faculty, advisors, and other resources. Additionally, that study found that there were differences in retention trends for minoritized populations. In order to investigate this further, initial baseline data needs to be collected with respect to student sense of belonging and that is the goal of this work.

BackgroundBeliefs are a complex research construct with deep connections to innumerable different research areas and agendas. Engineering education researchers are increasingly studying beliefs, and synergy across these efforts can lead to a greater impact in translating beliefs research into educational practice.PurposeOur purpose was to enable any researcher in engineering education to productively research beliefs as a construct. Specifically, we aimed to synthesize the different purposes for studying beliefs, and the extent to which researchers have operationalized beliefs.Scope/MethodWe conducted a systematic scoping review of beliefs following the PRISMA protocol. We extracted and mapped data from the 79 academic included manuscripts. We performed additional analysis using both inductive and deductive coding methods to synthesize how beliefs have been researched. We included studies about the beliefs of engineering students in post-secondary education beyond the four most popular types of beliefs (i.e., self-efficacy, mindset, epistemic, and goal orientation beliefs).ResultsGiven the diverse nature of beliefs in engineering education, we found that the findings of the included studies could not be coherently synthesized. Instead, we present (1) a synthesis of researchers' purpose(s) for studying beliefs, and (2) a detailed representation of the many ways in which researchers have operationalized beliefs using different theories and methodological approaches.ConclusionsWe recommend that researchers studying beliefs work to align their stated purpose for studying beliefs with their research contribution and build understanding of how beliefs ultimately relate to behavior. We also identified an opportunity for researchers to carefully and explicitly operationalize beliefs as a research construct.

The underrepresentation of non-male and non-white individuals continues to be a persistent problem at all levels of engineering. In undergraduate education, multiple pathways into engineering degree programs (e.g., introductory courses offered at regional campuses and community colleges) are often viewed as a way to broaden participation in the field by increasing access and affordability. However, research within the K-12 context has uncovered that such educational tracking practices, similar in structure to those seen in higher education, often function in ways that perpetuate social inequalities. Often students in less prestigious tracks develop lower self-beliefs and educational attainment goals while being offered less resource and educational support. Despite these parallels, little is known about how institutionalized pathways function in higher education in terms of equity, access, and inclusion. In addition to the lack of knowledge about institutionalize pathways, little is known about the impact of beliefs about smartness which are directly tied to the various pathways. With an emphasis on math and science, common public messaging emphasizes that in order to be an engineer, one has to be smart regardless of pathway. As such, the beliefs that students hold about smartness and how they identify as smart can impact who chooses to pursue in engineering, through what pathways they engage, and who persists in engineering degree programs. The overall objective of this study is to understand what, if any, patterns exist in the beliefs about smartness and self-identities of undergraduate engineering students across institutionalized pathways. Specifically, this three-year qualitative study aims to explore: 1) What students believe about smartness and engineering and 2) how students express their self-identities as smart and engineers. In this executive summary and poster, we will report on initial findings from preliminary analysis of the first of a series of three interviews over the course of our participants' first- and second-years including engineering students from six different institutionalized pathways that feed into one college of engineering.

The notion of being smart is a concept that underpins the culture of engineering classrooms. That said, it is a topic that is not discussed or addressed by educators directly. Through this special session, we aim to give light to the concept of smartness and the problematic and oppressive practices that result from it given the extent literature on the topic including our own research into the domain. With participants, we aim to generate practical approaches to addressing smartness that work in a variety of contexts to broaden participation in engineering via more inclusive classrooms.

Common discourse conveys that to be an engineer, one must be “smart.” Our individual and collective beliefs about what constitutes smart behavior are shaped by our participation in the complex cultural practice of smartness. From the literature, we know that the criteria for being considered “smart” in our educational systems are biased. The emphasis on selecting and retaining only those who are deemed “smart enough” to be engineers perpetuates inequity in undergraduate engineering education. Less is known about what undergraduate students explicitly believe are the different ways of being smart in engineering or how those different ways of being a smart engineer are valued in introductory engineering classrooms. In this study, we explored the common beliefs of undergraduate engineering students regarding what it means to be smart in engineering. We also explored how the students personally valued those ways of being smart versus what they perceived as being valued in introductory engineering classrooms. Through our multi-phase, multi-method approach, we initially qualitatively characterized their beliefs into 11 different ways to be smart in engineering, based on a sample of 36 engineering students enrolled in first-year engineering courses. We then employed quantitative methods to uncover significant differences, with a 95% confidence interval, in six of the 11 ways of being smart between the values personally held by engineering students and what they perceived to be valued in their classrooms. Additionally, we qualitatively found that 1) students described grades as central to their classroom experience, 2) students described the classroom as a context where effortless achievement is associated with being smart, and 3) students described a lack of reward in the classroom for showing initiative and for considerations of social impact or helping others. As engineering educators strive to be more inclusive, it is essential to have a clear understanding and reflect on how students value different ways of being smart in engineering as well as consider how these values are embedded into teaching praxis.

Women and other minoritized groups experience an unwelcoming environment in higher education [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. This is particularly acute in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, where students have reported experiencing both explicit and subtle biased behaviors by faculty, administrators and fellow students [6] [7]. The behaviors include stereotypical comments about women and other minoritized students' abilities, micro-aggressions, sexist humor, etc. Studies have shown that such behavior can lead to negative cognitive effects which in turn can affect student retention and graduation rates [8]. The aim of this paper is to document the progression and results of efforts undertaken at X university to make the climate more welcoming for minoritized students in the College of Engineering (COE) by offering a course that encourages ally development. Ally development involves training people in the dominant social group and helping them understand the inequities placed on those in the minority [9] [10]. This is especially crucial to have in engineering, where on average, the percent of women receiving a bachelor's degree in the United States is 20.9 percent. Similarly the percent of Hispanic students receiving a bachelor's degree in the United States is 11.4%, Black/African American students 4.2%, Native American .3%, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander .2% [11]. The ally development, based on the framework created by Broido [12] hypothesizes that engaging students from the dominant group as allies to promote equity in engineering is an innovative strategy for creating a positive climate for minoritized students – and, in turn, ALL students, a factor that influences their retention and graduation rates [13] [14]. The initiative started as an informal cohort in 2015-2016 – training students who identify as men to be allies for other students. This cohort met weekly to learn about power, privilege, bias, and microaggressions. The participants then developed and implemented outreach activities in the university community. Taking the positive aspects of the cohort, a semester-long course was developed and offered every semester for undergraduate men students around the cohort concepts – with a primary focus on gender equity. Shortly thereafter a complementary class for students who identify as women was developed with similar topics as well as additions including confidence and empowerment. In Autumn 2018 the men and women's courses were rebranded as "Inclusive Leadership" courses with topics including personal brand, strengths, values, identity, power, privilege, bias, and microaggressions. The focus extended beyond gender to include race, sexual orientation, physical ability, and other categories of social identity. Gender non-binary students had the opportunity to choose between either of the two courses. In Autumn 2019, the courses' enrolled students were limited to new first year engineering students who self-selected to take part in a pilot "Inclusive Leadership Cohort". Students in this cohort took the Inclusive Leadership course concurrently with the first two required engineering courses in their first two semesters at X university. Due to COVID, in Autumn 2020, the courses went back to being open to all undergraduate engineering students. Finally, for the Spring of 2021, a single course offered to all genders will be offered for the first time. This paper documents the perceived impact on the students who took the courses, lessons learned in each stage of the initiative, and initial progress on the first co-ed Inclusive Leadership course to be offered in Spring 2021.

Background: Those who participate in engineering are often assumed to be smart by others. At the same time, the cultural construction of what counts as "smart" is biased and therefore functions as a barrier to broadening participation in engineering. While considerable work has been done to understand engineering identity, how students understand themselves as smart is rarely made explicit in engineering identity research. Purpose: This paper is a theoretical discussion which highlights the need for engineering identity research to integrate students' understanding of themselves as smart. By not incorporating students' understanding of themselves as smart explicitly in work on engineering identity, we allow the bias in what gets recognized as smart to remain implicit and oppressive. Scope: In this paper, we argue that the idea of smart is very salient in engineering contexts and contributes to inequity. Then, we demonstrate how three different framings of identity allow for the explicit integration of how students are understanding themselves as smart. We also present selected examples from our empirical data to illustrate the concrete ways in which students' understandings of themselves as smart manifest in an engineering context. Conclusions: We provided explicit opportunities for researchers to integrate students' understandings of themselves as smart across three different framings of identity and how such understanding has shown up in our empirical research. In doing so, we conclude that making "smart" explicit in engineering identity provides a way to understand the exclusionary nature of engineering, and a new lens to apply when considering efforts to broaden participation in engineering.

The marginalization of women in engineering is a persistent problem. The overall goal of our collaborative project was to promote interest and participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), particularly for high school girls. We took an action research approach with a local high school science teacher to develop, implement, and research the impact of a classroom-based intervention designed to encourage growth mindset and STEM self-efficacy beliefs using mixed methods. We analyzed pre- and postsurvey data collected using a control-treatment design to determine the impact of the intervention on high school boys' and girls' self-efficacy and mindset beliefs. We also conducted semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with purposefully selected participants from the treatment group to further explore students' mindset and STEM self-efficacy beliefs qualitatively. We found that the intervention did result in a statistically significant change towards more growth-oriented beliefs for the high school girls who received the intervention as compared to the control group. We found that the intervention did not result in any statistically significant change in the girls' self-efficacy beliefs, the boys' mindset beliefs, or the boys' self-efficacy beliefs. The qualitative analysis revealed that after receiving the intervention, students held contradictory beliefs about the role of effort and the role of innate ability in STEM achievement. Further, we found that context and gender mattered in how students justified their self-efficacy: boys and girls both expressed the belief that effort would lead to their ability to succeed in science classes, but the girls were less likely than the boys to express the belief that effort would lead to their ability to succeed in the context of a science career. By connecting our findings to broader cultural narratives, we suggest that for the continued success of intervention efforts aimed at promoting a growth mindset and STEM self-efficacy, particularly for girls, such efforts should include opportunities for students to reflect upon and unpack the broader cultural narratives about effort, innate ability, and the gendered stereotypes about STEM ability that inform their beliefs. Finally, from the perspective of a high school science teacher, we also advocate for more representation of women among science teachers and classroom speakers and the importance of explicitly connecting class content and success in classrooms to real-world contexts.

What does it mean to be “smart” in an engineering classroom? How do engineering students make sense of themselves as smart enough to be engineers? The development of shared beliefs about what it means to be “smart” and where you rank compared to others is a result of smartness as a cultural practice. With the cultural practice framing, smartness is not a noun – something that someone possesses a certain amount of, but rather it is a verb – something that is actively happening to and with others in context. The interactions between individuals result in shared beliefs about what it means to be smart. Specifically, when we participate in smartness as a cultural practice, we learn what is recognized as smart and our place in the relative hierarchy of smartness. Beliefs about how to be a smart engineer become particularly impactful to students when navigating educational experiences in an area of study in which “being smart” is synonymous with the field. Engineers are constructed as “smart” in society, where the pervasive belief is that ability is something you either have or you don't. But as students transition into undergraduate engineering programs, how does their participation in the cultural practice of smartness contribute to their beliefs about what it means to be a smart engineer and their identities as smart and as engineers? Our study generated empirical evidence for how. We conducted three interviews with 25 engineering students over the course of their first and second years in an undergraduate engineering program. In the first and third interviews, we asked participants explicit questions about their beliefs and identities related to smartness and engineering. Analysis to compare the beliefs expressed in students' first and third interviews revealed that about half of the 25 participants demonstrated notable change in their beliefs of what it meant to be a smart engineer. We present empirical evidence characterizing the ways in which undergraduate engineering students' beliefs about what it means to be a smart engineer changed over the course of a year for 5 of the 25 participants. We explored these 5 participants' changing beliefs through a lens of cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance is the misalignment between two or more of a person's beliefs and/or behaviors. People experience discomfort with dissonance and therefore work to resolve the misalignment. One way in which someone's dissonance can be resolved is by a person changing their beliefs. Using this lens, we discuss how the changes to participants' beliefs may be an artifact of students' need to resolve the dissonance between the shared beliefs and ranking in a smartness hierarchy produced during their participation in smartness as a cultural practice in the context of pre-college education and engineering education. We also make recommendations to engineering educators on how to engage in the cultural practice of smartness in a way that allows for the growth and development of students' beliefs of what it means to be “smart” in engineering.

Background Modern engineering culture is rooted in assumptions of intellectual superiority. Scholars have demonstrated that smartness functions as an oppressive cultural practice in educational settings. However, the shared ways in which undergraduate engineering students understand what it means to be smart remain largely implicit and unexamined. Purpose/Hypothesis We investigated the beliefs held by students about what it means to be smart and the role of smartness in their undergraduate education. Design/Method We conducted one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 20 students at a predominately White institution. Our team utilized open, descriptive coding to iteratively condense our data into categories, codes, and subcodes, followed by analysis to identify and characterize the participants' commonly held beliefs. Results Students believed that being smart is working efficiently or maximizing outcomes while minimizing effort. Determining smartness as efficiency included social comparison and assumptions about effort, which introduced ambiguity into students' judgments of smartness. The resulting social hierarchy (relative positioning as smart) was commonly believed to enable or restrict access to necessary resources. Conclusions Students' belief that smartness is an individual capacity to work more efficiently than others obfuscates the reality of smartness as a cultural practice that is baked into our systems and perpetuates inequity. Without action to reveal and disrupt smartness as a structural and oppressive practice, the status quo of inequitable participation in engineering will persist.

The purpose of this research paper is to present findings from an exploratory, qualitative study of high school students’ beliefs about smartness. The construct of smartness, which is deeply embedded into all levels of engineering education culture, reflects normative values and can act as a gatekeeper in engineering. Despite the decades of research to broaden participation in engineering education, very little research has explicitly explored the construct of smartness within the context of engineering education and its’ exclusionary implications. For this research paper, we focused on the beliefs of high school students as selection of a collegiate major is often chosen during high school and student beliefs about smartness have serious implications for who considers themselves smart enough (or not) to pursue an engineering degree. Although constructions of smartness intersect with race, class, gender, and other social identities, for this exploratory study we chose to investigate the role of gender in the construction of smartness. We utilized semi-structured, one-on-one interviews to explore 22 students’ beliefs about smartness with the aim of addressing the following research questions: 1) What do high school science and engineering students believe about smartness? and 2) How do the beliefs about smartness of these students who identify as male and female differ, if at all? The major findings of this study are: 1) students’ beliefs about smartness are complex and divergent, 2) students’ beliefs about smartness are related to their interpretations of social indicators of smartness, their epistemic beliefs, and their mindset beliefs, and 3) students who identity as male and female socialized in the same academic environment do not construct smartness in distinctly different ways; however, they may be impacted by smartness very differently based on the stereotypes that exist in their environment. For scholars, a major implication of this research is that when studying smartness, epistemic beliefs, mindset beliefs, and interpretations of social indicators of smartness should all be considered. For the broader community, this contribution provides further evidence for our research agenda of drawing attention to how beliefs about smartness are complex and have exclusionary implications. Social dynamics and ultimately social identities (i.e., gender, race, class, etc.) are interconnected with the social construction of smartness, and therefore, we all must be mindful about how we contribute to the construction of smartness in our academic environments.

A well-developed interview protocol is an essential data collection tool in qualitative research. An established process to refine interview protocols can help build quality and consistency into data collection. However, despite the importance placed on interview protocols by academic texts, there is little guidance regarding how to systematically develop and refine interview protocols, particularly when exploring complex constructs, such as beliefs and identity. In this special session, attendees will learn and practice an approach for refining interview protocols for investigating complex constructs in engineering education. We share this interview refinement approach as it enabled us to determine if our interview questions prompted participants to provide data essential to answering our research questions for a pilot study investigating students’ beliefs and identities. This special session will also include conversations around best practices related to data collection to access complex constructs and how these practices can impact and shape future research. We welcome attendees of all experience levels (novice to expert) with regard to designing interview protocols. The session will be facilitated by Dr. Emily Dringenberg, Dr. Rachel Kajfez, and their graduate students. Dr. Dringenberg is a qualitative researcher well versed in beliefs. Dr. Kajfez is a mixed methods researcher well versed in identity. Both have multiple NSF grants exploring these complex constructs.

This Student Poster Research Paper reports findings on preliminary research conducted to understand how undergraduate engineering students describe intelligence and smartness. The construct of intelligence is salient in engineering education and academic culture more broadly; however, the beliefs that individuals hold about intelligence are very personal and often remain implicit. We are driven to understand students' beliefs about intelligence as extant research has demonstrated that these beliefs can impact student motivation and persistence in academic settings. Beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and smartness have also been linked to the exclusionary nature of engineering as a field. Data was collected in the form of written responses and audio recordings from a focus group and an interview with undergraduate engineering students, including both first-year and senior students. Participants were asked to provide written responses to questions related to their perceptions of intelligence and smartness. In addition to collecting individual responses, the focus group also allowed for open dialogue among participants to present their perceptions of intelligence and to discuss their beliefs. Analysis of our data was guided by the following research question: What are the different ways that undergraduate engineering students describe intelligence and smartness? The participants' written responses pertaining to how they perceive intelligence as a function of time (Worksheet 1) and how they conceptualize smartness (Worksheet 2) were analyzed by identifying major similarities and differences. Our findings reveal that the participants all graphically represented intelligence as growing over time, and three out of the four participants graphically indicated that the “average engineer” was more intelligent than “the average person.” Our final finding indicated that when asked about characteristics of smartness, there was no common consensus on the definition of smartness amongst the participants. Future implications of this research include better insights into how students define intelligence and the lack of consensus on a definition of smartness in engineering. As such, we all (i.e., educators and students) must think critically about how we participate in the co-construction of smartness in engineering classrooms.

14) and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education (Purdue '15).Her team, Beliefs in Engineering Research Group (BERG) utilizes qualitative methods to explore beliefs in engineering.Her research has an overarching goal of leveraging engineering education research to shift the culture of engineering to be more realistic and inclusive.Dr. Dringenberg is also interested in neuroscience, growth mindset, engineering ethics

This Full Research Paper reports findings from a narrative-style study about undergraduate engineering students' beliefs about smartness and identity. Extant research has demonstrated that conceptions of smartness and ability impact students as they navigate engineering at the collegiate level. Through our work, we aimed to better understand the nuanced interaction between these constructs to better support students through their undergraduate experience. For this work, we utilized narrative-style interviews to collect students' stories about their experiences and struggles in school. Interviews were conducted with seven participants, all of whom indicated on a recruitment survey that they had experienced academic struggle in their first year of an undergraduate engineering program. We analyzed the interviews using three-limits of-and developed a resistance part analytical memos and thematic analysis to identify emergent themes. Through our analysis, we aimed to address the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students describe their educational trajectories with respect to beliefs about smartness and identity? Three major findings of this study are; 1.) messages about smartness in educational systems have implications for students' identity as smart and beliefs about smartness, 2.) social experiences have a significant impact, particularly for the female students, on identity and beliefs about smartness, and 3.) students recognize the limits of-and developed a resistance to-normative indicators of ability (i.e., GPA). Our research contributes a more holistic understanding of the formation of beliefs about smartness and identity in the educational trajectories of undergraduate engineering students along with insight into the complex interaction between beliefs about smartness and identity. An implication of this study is that given the pervasiveness of identity and beliefs about smartness, they are almost never explicitly addressed in formal undergraduate engineering education and therefore should be considered by engineering education professionals when developing undergraduate engineering courses and curricula.

Growth mindset is a popular educational theory with empirical ties to motivation and persistence. Despite its popularity, the implementation of the theory in practice risks being over-simplified in the ways it is introduced to students and measured with established survey items. This oversimplification provides a limited research-based understanding of the complex ways in which students react to the theory or the influence that learning about the theory has on their personal beliefs. To expand prior work in this area, we conducted the current study by collecting both quantitative (survey) and qualitative (written reflections) data from first-year engineering students about their intelligence beliefs for (1) a sample of students who received a brief, in-class introduction to the theory (n = 66), and (2) a sub-sample of students who engaged in a more in-depth intervention (n = 6). Our findings show that neither the in-class introduction nor the more in-depth intervention had a statistically significant influence on students' intelligence beliefs, but the in-depth intervention did provide students with a more nuanced understanding of growth mindset theory. Many participants linked growth mindset exclusively to valuing effort. Implications of this study for engineering educators include that given the complexity of growth mindset, a brief introduction into mindset theory is not adequate for significant change in beliefs. Implications also include that survey items alone may not be indicative of growth mindset and qualitative approaches may be necessary for researchers to gain a more holistic understanding of students' intelligence beliefs.

The ideas of intelligence and smartness are woven into all levels of engineering education. The individuals who are 1) accepted to study engineering, and 2) persist to practice engineering are broadly recognized as smart. In Western contexts, intelligence is often believed to be a person's innate and analytical ability, which can be measured by an instrument such as an IQ test and is reflected in grades or standardized assessments. Smartness, on the other hand, is an implicit classification based on collective values, which are co-constructed within a local context. However, these cultural constructions of intelligence and smartness are limited and often lead to negative implications for those who don't fit the prototypical mold of an engineer (i.e. white, male, and middle class). In this paper we seek to start a conversation about how the construction of intelligence and smartness can act as gatekeepers to diversity in engineering. Further, we aim to discuss the role that we as engineering educators play in the construction of smartness in engineering classrooms. To do so, we synthesize literature related to the construct of intelligence including a brief overview of the history of intelligence, examples of how intelligence has been used as a tool to systematically marginalize the less powerful, and a discussion on the cultural construction of intelligence. We then introduce the idea of smartness, using literature to discuss this construct. We include a synthesis of how smartness has been defined in literature and consequences of smartness in classrooms. We then discuss the implications of intelligence and smartness in classrooms for minority groups in engineering as a result of unexamined normative beliefs that often perpetuate stereotypes. We hope to encourage those in academic and non-academic settings to think critically about how their views of intelligence and smartness could lead to exclusionary behaviors, especially for underrepresented students in engineering. Keywords: intelligence, smartness, engineering, inclusion