Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) programs have positive effects on student understanding of the nature of science, motivation, and academic performance. However, little is understood about how UREs affect students' views of research, their identities as researchers, and their beliefs about knowledge in engineering. Investigating students' researcher identities and beliefs about knowledge (epistemic beliefs) in the context of URE is important because they shape the students' perceptions, values, and interactions with others, which can then be translated to their classes and future careers. The outcomes of this study help develop meaningful ways for students to engage, function, and learn in research spaces as well as classrooms and laboratories. Findings also expand theories about identity and epistemic beliefs in ways that are specific to engineering fields. The goal of the project is to address the challenge of producing engineers who are well-equipped to tackle complex, ill-defined, and open-ended problems similar to those encountered when doing research. The results enable engineering educators to provide novel educational experiences, developing students as future researchers and engineers such that these experiences will have long term impacts. The project's broader impacts include benefits to fields beyond engineering that engage students in research. Also, by including diverse student populations in the study, a deeper understanding is gained about how students from different backgrounds, engineering fields, and types of institutions experience and benefit from participating in research.
The overarching research question for this project is: How do undergraduate engineering students develop their identities as researchers and their ways of knowing engineering through research experiences? There are four specific aims of this project. The first is to understand how undergraduate engineering students conceptualize and construct what it means to be a researcher. The second is to discover what factors the students think affect their researcher identity development. The third is to find out how these students describe what it means to know something in their fields. The fourth is to understand how students form their beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing during research experiences. A grounded theory approach is used to expand existing identity and epistemic belief frameworks to develop a theory within the context of research experiences in engineering. The three-phase study uses open-ended surveys and interviews to identify themes that answer the research aims and can be used to develop workshops. The intellectual merit of the project lies in developing an engineering-specific learning theory based on students' beliefs about ways of knowing and their identities as researchers. This theory is used to inform and work with engineering educators to find ways to apply research findings in engineering degree programs and UREs. Workshops for engineering educators focus on ways to incorporate the aspects of UREs that help build students' ways of knowing and their identities as participants in their research communities and their engineering fields.
