| Abstrakt: |
Increasing diversity and broadening participation in engineering programs has been a persistent challenge due to various factors. Despite efforts to enhance engineering education, we have not seen a significant increase in matriculation, retention, and graduation rates in certain engineering fields. For decades, academic institutions have received financial resources to broaden participation in these programs. However, these funded recruitment and retention efforts have resulted in minimal improvement in the participation of women, students of color, individuals with disabilities, and other underrepresented groups. One hypothesis for this discrepancy is the lack of accessibility in engineering curricula for women and students of color. Access involves having diverse representations of curricula, such as word problems, equations, simulations, and graphics. In this research, we shift the focus from analyzing teacher interactions and student test scores to examining engineering curricula. We gathered information from catalogs, course content, and syllabi to develop a typology of engineering curriculum content. Whereas most instructors tend to use text and equations with some images, our results indicate that student learners have more diverse preferences in how they would prefer curricula. The findings suggest that we should consider these diverse preferences involving different representations of curricula when planning and developing engineering education programs to meet the needs of all students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
