Background Sustainability is increasingly a vital consideration for engineers. Improved understanding of how attention to sustainability influences student major and career choice could inform efforts to broaden participation in engineering.Purpose Two related questions guided our research. How do career outcome expectations related to sustainability predict the choice of an engineering career? Which broader sustainability-related outcomes do students perceive as related to engineering? To address both questions, we compared effects for engineering and nonengineering students while controlling for various confounding variables. Design/MethodWe conducted a survey to collect responses about sustainability and other variables of interest from a national sample of college students in introductory English classes. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlational analysis. ResultsStudents who hope to address certain sustainability issues such as energy, climate change, environmental degradation, and water supply are more likely to pursue engineering. Those who hope to address other sustainability issues such as opportunities for women and minorities, poverty, and disease are less likely to do so. Students hoping to address sustainability-related outcome expectations with obvious human relevance are less likely to pursue engineering. Yet those students who perceive "improving quality of life" and "saving lives" as associated with engineering are more likely to pursue the profession.Conclusions Our results suggest that showing students the connection between certain sustainability issues and engineering careers could help those striving to increase and diversify participation in engineering. A broader range of engineers would likely bring new ideas and ways of thinking to engineering for sustainability.
The primary objective of this research is to understand the role of community participation in green stormwater infrastructure development. Even though the literature affirms the need for community participation to facilitate its implementation, no study in the engineering literature examines this idea with an in-depth, descriptive case study. It is important to understand how technical and non-technical factors interact to promote or hinder its implementation. This work uses the qualitative case study methodology to fulfil the objective and answer the research questions. The case study is based on the Proctor Creek Watershed, Atlanta Georgia, a rapidly growing urban area located in the southeastern United States. Data sources include participant interviews, documents, and field notes, which are analyzed through deductive coding. The deductive codes are informed by this study's conceptual framework. Findings reveal that community participation in this case is embedded in collaborative partnership efforts. Also, social conditions highly influence the participation processes by dictating the priorities the community develops during participation processes. Factors such as funding and political support promote green stormwater infrastructure implementation more so than community participation. However, community education addresses the challenge of green stormwater infrastructure perspectives; hence community education plays a role in implementation. These findings affirm existing literature adding to the development of current theories. iii DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my parents, Mervyn and Desarie Barclay. They provided constant love, support and encouragement throughout my formal education, especially at this last stage. I believe that my mother's constant prayers and my father's unwavering confidence in me gave me the determination I needed to complete my Ph.D. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Above of all, I thank God who is faithful and has continually given me grace and strength throughout all my endeavors. I am sincerely grateful for my advisor, Dr. Leidy Klotz. He invested in me from my time as an undergraduate student and continued throughout my four years as a graduate student. I am especially grateful for the opportunities Dr. Klotz gave me to develop as a teacher. Thanks to all my committee members Dr. David Morgan Young, Dr. Catherine Mobley and Dr. Caitlin Dyckman, for their expert advice and guidance throughout this study. I am appreciative of the time they all took to serve on my committee. I am particularly thankful for Dr. Denise Simmons, my longest academic mentor and a constant inspiration to me. Thanks to all the interview participants for sharing their time, insights, knowledge and experiences to inform my study. I am blessed to have an incredible family. Despite the distance, my parents and my sisters, Renee Barclay-Rochester and Kezia Barclay are always just a phone call away for refreshing, encouraging and fun conversations. v
In discussions of the recruitment and retention of engineering majors, students are sometimes treated as a homogeneous group with respect to the necessary preparation for college, their career values, and their aspirations despite the diversity of opportunities and specialties across disciplines. Moreover, initiates just starting their post-secondary education in engineering may not perceive disciplines as practitioners do: they may identify and find affinity for features of an engineering specialty that may be different from actual practice. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of students at the start of their engineering studies using data drawn from a nationally-representative survey, conducted in 2011, of 6772 students enrolled at 50 colleges and universities in the U.S. By identifying students intending to major in eight different disciplines (bio-, chemical, civil, electrical/computer, environmental, industrial/systems, materials, and mechanical engineering), we show how student goals, values and self-perceptions differ. Regression analysis is used to study how the likelihood of entering one of these eight disciplines is associated to career outcome expectations, students' self-beliefs around their science, physics, and math identities, and constructs measuring their personal and global science agency. Results indicate that students intending to major in engineering show substantial interdisciplinary distinctions in the investigated domains. The utility of this work is that it should help to guide more effective recruiting of students into engineering disciplines and allow for a broadening of recruitment efforts to students who would normally be overlooked for engineering careers.
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