Background: As engineering remains central to the US economy, it is imperative that the innovators of this field reflect the world in which we live. Despite decades of concerted effort to broaden participation in engineering, representation continues to lack.Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide education researchers and practitioners with a clear understanding of barriers to the participation of Black American children in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Our interest is driven by the role that precollege STEM experiences play in children's likelihood of becoming potential engineering students.Scope/Method: We conducted a systematic literature review of 41 articles focused on Black children in precollege STEM contexts. Each article underwent individual review to gain deeper insight into key contextual factors that enable and constrain these potential engineers.Results: We situate our research findings in Perna's college choice model to highlight the key factors that may influence one's career and college decisions. The contextual factors are associated with the (1) social, economic, and policy context (e.g., racism, sexism, and classism); (2) STEM educational and community context (i.e., social perceptions and access); and (3) the local support context (i.e., teachers and family).Conclusions: Our results represent the early workings of a “glass ceiling” above the heads of potential engineering students. The underrepresentation of Black Americans who thrive in engineering is a byproduct of the lack of accessibility to quality and advanced learning experiences that too often plague K–12 schools and communities that serve high populations of Black Americans. Such findings have implications for research and practice.

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.

States and institutions increasingly rely on articulation agreements to streamline vertical transfer, although the effectiveness of those policies on transfer student outcomes remains unclear. To better understand this effectiveness, we explored a partnership between the College of Engineering at a mid-Atlantic research university and two community colleges located within the same state. We interviewed engineering faculty and academic advisors (i.e., the street-level bureaucrats who implement policy) to explore how an articulation agreement influences processes and policies related to coursework transfer. Our results revealed complexities in the implementation of the articulation policy as it collides with an enrollment management university policy that differs in purpose. Their collision has challenging implications for transfer students and for the faculty and advisors responsible for interfacing with those students.

Background: Despite many initiatives to improve graduate student and faculty diversity in engineering, there has been little or no change in the percentage of people from racially minoritized backgrounds in either of these groups.Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this paper is to counter the scarcity fallacy, in which institutions blame the “shortage” of qualified people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds for their own lack of representation, related to prospective PhD students and prospective faculty from traditionally marginalized groups. This study identifies the BS‐to‐PhD and PhD‐to‐tenure‐track‐faculty institutional pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino engineering doctorate recipients.Design/Method: Using the US Survey of Earned Doctorates, we tracked the BS‐to‐PhD institutional pathways of 3952 Black/African American and 5732 Hispanic/Latino engineering PhD graduates. We also used the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to track the PhD‐to‐tenure‐track faculty pathways of 104 Black/African American and 211 Hispanic/Latino faculty.Results: The majority of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino PhD graduates in this study did not earn their BS degrees from Top 25 institutions, but rather from Not Top 25, non‐US, and minority‐serving institutions. The results also show the relatively small proportion of PhD earners and faculty members who move into highly ranked institutions after earning a bachelor's degree from outside this set of institutions.Conclusions: The findings of this study have important implications for graduate student and faculty recruitment by illustrating that recruitment from a narrow range of institutions (i.e., Top 25 institutions) is unlikely to result in increased diversity among racially minoritized PhDs and faculty in engineering.

Background: In the field of engineering education, assessment and evaluation have been given insufficient attention as they relate to broadening participation. We posit that this lack of attention negatively impacts our ability to develop and implement sustainable solutions at scale.Purpose: The purpose of this article is to explore the presence of an assessment cycle in the literature related to broadening participation in engineering. The assessment cycle refers to the process by which assessment/evaluation is planned, enacted, and used to improve educational processes.Scope/Method: The scope of this study was influenced by it being situated in a larger study focused on broadening participation of Black Americans in engineering and computer science. We completed a literature map that illuminated a subset of literature broadly related to assessment/evaluation, and subsequently conducted a systematic literature review of 33 publications reporting on assessment/evaluation efforts. Our analysis of these efforts was grounded in a six‐stage assessment cycle.Results: The results of this study highlight common publishing practices related to the assessment cycle in the context of broadening participation. We find that assessment/evaluation is generally published at the program level, focused on student development or academic success as a proxy for program effectiveness, and concentrated on positive claims.Conclusion: There is room to significantly improve how assessment/evaluation information is published. By highlighting productive and unproductive publishing practices related to assessment/evaluation, this research has important implications for the use and publishing of assessment/evaluation, particularly as it relates to broadening participation in engineering.