Smartness in engineering: Beliefs of undergraduate engineering students

Abstract

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.

Exploring Undergraduate Engineering Students' Understanding of Power Dynamics

“…Within engineering group projects, the awareness of one's own power granted by their experience can impact how work is distributed among the group. This finding echoes the work of Dringenberg et al [12].…”

“…And I think that starts on a much deeper level than just college, you know. I think it starts from, you know, even preschool elementary school all the way throughout one's K-12 education." (S1)This long-standing association between instructors and power dynamics is further highlighted by S2, who, when asked to provide examples of problematic power dynamics in the classroom, shared an example dating back to elementary school, "I had this teacher.…”

Engineering Identity and Smartness Identity as They Relate to Women’s Participation in Engineering

“…Students' identities as more or less smart than others are based on social comparisons (e.g., which students get the highest grades, which students participate most in class, which students get their assignments completed most quickly, etc.) [25]. Ultimately, students develop their identities as smart relative to others based on sociocultural influences as well as their own individual agency [22], [26].…”

Examining interactions between dominant discourses and engineering educational concepts in teachers' pedagogical reasoning

“…We make some people smart, in short, just by choosing to call them that” (p. 26). While this discourse has been explored in engineering education at the university level (Dringenberg et al, 2022; Secules et al, 2018), the implications have been underexamined in K–12 engineering education.…”