The Development of a Measure of Engineering Identity This research paper describes the recent development of items to measure post-secondary students' engineering identity. Engineering identity is a particular type of role identity that students author during their experiences in engineering, typically in college. This paper draws upon a subject-related role identity framework that focuses on students self-beliefs of their interest, performance/competence, and recognition within engineering. First, a pilot survey of 371 first-year engineering students was conducted at three institutions in the U.S. during the spring semester of 2015. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to examine the underlying structure of the piloted questions about students' engineering identity. The developed items were used in a subsequent study deployed in the fall semester of 2015 that measured more than 2500 first-year engineering students' attitudes and beliefs at four institutions in the U.S. The data on engineering identity measures from this second survey were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results indicated that the developed measures do extract a significant portion of the average variance in the latent constructs and the internal consistency of the measures (Cronbach's α) fell within the acceptable and better range. The development of these items provides new measures for engineering education researchers to more deeply explore the underlying self-beliefs in students' engineering identity formation.

Background: Social identity theory has been used to understand student and professional engagement in engineering. Engineering identity development, however, can be disrupted by the barriers and challenges associated with the racialized and gendered perceptions of engineering.Purpose/Hypothesis: This study examined the engineering identity development and resilience of Black women engineers in industry through the exploration of their experiences in the engineering workplace. Many studies document challenges that underrepresented groups face in engineering. This work, instead, focuses on particular supports and empowerment that enabled continued participation in the engineering workforce over time.Design/Method: This interpretative phenomenological analysis consisted of nine self‐identified Black women engineers currently employed in engineering industry with at least 10 years of work experience and explored the background, pathway into and through engineering, and what it means to be an engineer through 90‐min interviews with each participant.Results: The results of this study suggest that engineering identity development alone does not contribute to the retention of Black women in the engineering workplace but instead the confluence of race, gender, and role identity that aids in developing a resilient engineering identity.Conclusions: The formal, informal, and structural educational experiences of Black women engineers are critical to the development of a resilient engineering identity. This identity is dependent on the complexities associated with being Black, a woman, and an engineer.

Understanding students' self-ascribed engineering identity may be one way to understand engineering choices and to help recruit new students to the engineering pipeline. In our framework, identity is composed of students' perceptions of their performance/competence, recognition, and interest in a domain. This paper outlines the creation of a model of engineering choice based on this framework. The data utilized in this analysis come from the nationally-representative Sustainability and Gender in Engineering (SaGE) survey. Distributed during the fall of 2011, the survey was completed by 6,772 college students across the United States enrolled in first-year English courses. A structural equation model was built using previously validated constructs of mathematics, physics, and general science identities. These three constructs predict an engineering identity which, in turn, influences the choice of engineering in college. The model is a step towards a better understanding of the choice of an engineering major in college.