Resumen de Exploring diverse pre-college students’ interests and understandings of engineering to promote engineering education for all
Morgan M. Hynes, Cole Joslyn, Avneet Hira, James Holly, Nicholas Jubelt
Engaging a representatively diverse (across class, race, gender, and cultural lines) population in a future of engineeringcontinues to be a struggle for many countries. This paper presents a study from the U.S. context, where racial and ethnicminorities and women are significantly underrepresented in engineering. The interview study asked diverse pre-collegestudents about their personal and career interests and how they defined engineering. These responses were coded usingHolland’s Career Theory framework of six interest dimensions (realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, andconventional) to categorize students’ personal and career interests to see how they may or may not correspond to theirunderstandings of what interests an engineering future may appeal to. The results illustrate that the students’ personalinterests map to the full spectrum of Holland’s dimensions. However, students’ understandings of engineering map to amore stereotypical view of engineering that does not always match to their personal interests. The paper argues forintroducing engineering in ways that highlight how engineering pervades a wide array of domains and interest areas.
