Designing Engineers: Impact of an Extra Curricular Intensive Design Program on Students

Despite substantial attention and effort to broaden participation within Engineering, the number Black adults earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering still lags far behind that of White students. This negatively impacts both the life chances of Black adults as individuals and families, and also the broader society because research suggests that minorities in STEM fields may innovate at higher rates than their majority (white, male) counterparts. This paper reports on a concurrent mixed-methods research design use to investigate the ways in which a five-week intensive design-based summer program impacted the engineering self-efficacy, values, and identities of African American engineering students at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The results suggests that 1) students’ engineering self-efficacy significantly increased over the course of the workshop, 2) they entered the program with a high level of engineering values which were sustained over the course of the workshop, and 3) their engineering identities were impacted in notable ways with some students’ internalizing stronger engineering identities, while others instead were able to see more clearly the path forward required for them to become an engineer.