Backgrounds: This study examined how developing an engineering identity through the interplay between interest, recognition, and performance/competence beliefs and establishing a sense of belonging supported women’s persistence beliefs in engineering. Persistence belief in this study is captured through women’s certainty of graduating with an engineering degree. Students’ levels of motivation, affective states, and actions are based on what students believe to be true. Data were gathered from a survey administered to engineering students at nine institutions across the USA. Only female engineering students were used in the analysis. Students were further grouped into categories based on the representation of their race/ethnicity in engineering; 121 women were identified as minoritized in engineering, and 252 were identified as part of the majority group in engineering. Structural equation modeling was used to understand how the development of an engineering identity and modes of belonging (i.e., belonging in the major and in the classroom environment) supported women’s certainty to graduate with an engineering degree. All latent constructs were examined for measurement invariance; partial measurement invariance was achieved. Equality constraints on the structural paths of the model were not enforced to allow for differences across groups.Results: Seeing oneself as an engineer (i.e., internal recognition) did not support minoritized women’s certainty to persist toward degree completion, whereas this internal recognition supported majority women’s persistence. Belonging in the major and belonging in the classroom environment did not support minoritized women’s certainty to persist. Establishing a sense of belonging in the classroom environment supported majority women’s certainty to persist. Minoritized women’s persistence toward degree completion was supported by their interest in engineering and their confidence in performing well in engineering coursework. However, interest in engineering was two times more influential toward minoritized women’s persistence than their performance competence beliefs.Conclusion: These findings provide educators with a nuanced understanding of how identity development and modes of belonging differentially affect women’s persistence beliefs. These findings suggest that educators need to understand the powerful influence minoritized women’s interest in engineering has on their persistence beliefs and create mechanisms to continuously reinforce interest.

Background: Students who are the first in their families to attend college are an integral part of undergraduate engineering programs. Growing bodies of research argue that educators could better support these students if they understood the unique backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge they bring with them to higher education.Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we identify salient funds of knowledge used by a group of first‐generation college students in their educational and work‐related experiences. Secondly, we use the funds of knowledge identified in our participants' experiences to create a survey instrument.Design/Method: A mixed methods approach was used. Ethnographic interview data of six first‐generation college students were used to hypothesize constructs and create survey items. Survey data were collected from 812 students. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to verify the underlying theoretical structures among the survey items and hypothesized constructs.Results: Validity evidence supported a 10‐factor model as opposed to the hypothesized 6‐factor model. The 10 latent constructs that make up the funds of knowledge instrument are as follows: tinkering knowledge from home, tinkering knowledge from work, connecting experiences, networks from family members, networks from college friends, networks from coworkers, networks from neighborhood friends, perspective taking, reading people, and mediating ability.Conclusions: Recognizing first‐generation college students' funds of knowledge is a first step to creating curricular spaces and experiences that better serve them. A survey scale allows educators to empirically examine how these accumulated bodies of knowledge are transmitted to capital, create advantages in engineering, and provides a useful tool to bridge students' knowledge in the classroom.

Background: Supporting undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been a persistent need. However, assessing the impact of support efforts can prove challenging as it is difficult to operationalize student support and subsequently monitor the combined impacts of the various supports to which students have access simultaneously.Purpose/Hypothesis: This paper describes the development of the STEM student perspectives of support instrument (STEM‐SPSI) and explores how perceptions of student support constructs vary across engineering students.Design/Method: Following best practices for instrument development, forming the STEM‐SPSI consisted of an iterative cycle of feedback from various STEM stakeholders and two rounds of pilot testing with students at multiple institutions. We employed factor analysis to identify student‐support constructs and conduct validation procedures on the instrument.Results: Results suggest that student support can be conceptualized as a combination of 12 constructs. The STEM‐SPSI can help engineering educators evaluate their student‐support mechanisms at an academic‐unit level.Conclusions: The practical contribution of the STEM‐SPSI is to assist colleges in monitoring the extent to which their portfolio of support mechanisms is perceived as helpful by undergraduate students. This work makes a theoretical contribution to the model of cocurricular support that undergirds the instrument by producing empirical evidence for its constructs.

Women’s participation in engineering remains well below that of men at all degree levels. However, despite the low enrollment of women in engineering as a whole, some engineering disciplines report above average female enrollment. We used multiple linear regression to examine the attitudes, beliefs, career outcome expectations, and career choice of first-year female engineering students enrolled in below average, average, and above average female representation disciplines in engineering. Our work begins to understand how the socially constructed masculine cultural norms of engineering may attract women differentially into specific engineering disciplines. This study used future time perspective, psychological personality traits, grit, various measures of STEM identities, and items related to career outcome expectations as theoretical frameworks. The results of this study indicate that women who are interested in engineering disciplines with different representations of women (i.e., more or less male-dominated) have significantly different attitudes and beliefs, career goals, and career plans. This study provides information about the perceptions that women may have and attitudes that they bring with them into particular engineering pathways.

Background: Students' recognition beliefs have emerged as one of the most important components of engineering role identity development for early‐career undergraduate students. Recognition beliefs are students' perceptions of how meaningful others, such as peers, instructors, and family, see them as engineers. However, little work has investigated the experiences that facilitate recognition beliefs, particularly across the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender. Investigation of these experiences provides ways to understand how recognition may be supported in engineering environments and how White and masculine norms in engineering can shape marginalized students' experiences.Purpose: We examined how specific experiences theorized to promote recognition are related to recognition beliefs for students at the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender. Based on self‐reported demographics, we created 10 groups, including Asian, Black, Latino and Hispanic, Indigenous, and White cisgender men and Asian, Black, Latinè/x/a/o and Hispanic, Indigenous, and White ciswomen, trans, and non‐binary individuals. This article describes the patterns within each intersectional group rather than drawing comparisons across the groups, which can perpetuate raced and gendered stereotypes.Methods: The data came from a survey distributed in Fall 2017 (n = 2316). Ten multiple regression models were used to understand the recognition experiences that influenced students' recognition beliefs by intersectional group.Results: There is no one‐size‐fits‐all approach to developing students' recognition beliefs. For example, family members referring to the student as an engineer are positively related to recognition beliefs for Asian, Black, Latino and Hispanic, and White cisgender men. Friends seeing Asian and White marginalized gender students as an engineer is predictive of recognition beliefs. Other recognition experiences, such as receiving compliments from an engineering instructor or peer about their engineering design and contributions to the team, do not influence the recognition beliefs of these early‐career engineering students.Conclusion: This article emphasizes the need to draw on multiple experiences to support the equitable development of early‐career engineers across race, ethnicity, and gender, and reveals patterns for recognition that may support future scholarship on effective classroom practices for recognition.