Allison Godwin, Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University, was awarded the American Society for Engineering Education, Educational Research, and Methods Division Best Paper for the 2016 conference. Her paper titled, “The Development of a Measure of Engineering Identity,” described a stepwise process for developing an instrument to measure students engineering identity.
In her work, Dr. Godwin examines engineering role identity as the way students position themselves and are positioned by others as engineers. Her instrument was based on prior work in science education and captures students’ self-beliefs of their performance/competence, interest, and recognition in engineering. This development included a pilot of the survey with 371 first-year engineering students at three U.S. institutions and a full-scale deployment with 2916 first-year engineering students at four U.S. institutions. The full paper includes the final instrument that will be used in future work with students across undergraduate engineering education.
