Engineering (verb) Diversity: Using the Engineering Design Process to Define and Intervene in the Issue of Undergraduate Diversity at the Institution Level
The under-representation of women and students of color in the undergraduate engineering population is a persistent and complex issue. The numerous 'leaks' in the talent pipeline, along with the multifarious causes of under-representation, lead many institutions, including our own, to take a scattershot approach to recruiting and retaining diverse students in the undergraduate engineering population that may include extra-curricular K.12 programming, college admissions scholarships, 'gold shirt' programs, and wrap-around mentoring and academic support. While many of these programs have been shown effective in recruiting and/or retaining under-represented students into engineering, they are often implemented with little consideration to the scale or efficiency needed to achieve institution-level goals for undergraduate diversity, which assumes that such goals have even been clearly articulated in the first place. In this workshop, we propose and demonstrate the use of the Engineering Design Process (EDP)8 as an effective framework for goal-setting and developing targeted interventions to substantively advance undergraduate diversity at the institutional level. We adopted a 4-phase EDP that involves: (1) Defining the problem;; (2) Generating multiple unique and viable concepts and selecting a final concept;; (3) Detailed design and implementation of a final design;; and (4) Design validation and iteration. This case study specifically details the use of Phase 1 through Phase 3 of the EDP for developing and implementing a strategic plan of action for undergraduate diversity at the institution level;; and, to our knowledge, it represents the first attempt to use EDP in this context.
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