The principal objective of this three-year project is to conduct a participant observation study that examines the changing identities of undergraduate engineering students as they transform themselves from novice freshmen into graduating seniors prepared for employment or advanced training. The major product is a book length manuscript co-authored by the three members of the research team. With guidance from a panel of consulting advisers, the authors will provide a step-by-step account of how engineering students understand and experience their education as a sequence of value choices and judgments to be made as they move through their engineering curricula. A guiding hypothesis is that the high value engineering curricula place on the calculus based engineering sciences as the foundation of engineering problem solving is linked to the establishment of other social dimensions of engineering identities, and to under-representation of women and minority students. A second objective is to make available to other researchers approximately 2,500 pages of indexed transcriptions from taped focus group meetings and interviews with undergraduate engineering students at a large land-grant university. Finally, by providing a longitudinal account built upon data from transcriptions, participant observation, surveys, and document collection, this study will make a unique and much-needed contribution to our analytic understanding of the character and problems of engineering curricula.
