Exploring Diverse Pre-College Students' Interests and Understandings of Engineering to Promote Engineering Education for All

摘要

Engaging a representatively diverse (across class, race, gender, and cultural lines) population in a future of engineering continues to be a struggle for many countries. This paper presents a study from the U.S. context, where racial and ethnic minorities and women are significantly underrepresented in engineering. The interview study asked diverse pre-college students about their personal and career interests and how they defined engineering. These responses were coded using Holland's Career Theory framework of six interest dimensions (realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional) to categorize students' personal and career interests to see how they may or may not correspond to their understandings of what interests an engineering future may appeal to. The results illustrate that the students' personal interests map to the full spectrum of Holland's dimensions. However, students' understandings of engineering map to a more stereotypical view of engineering that does not always match to their personal interests. The paper argues for introducing engineering in ways that highlight how engineering pervades a wide array of domains and interest areas.