Making Engineering Education More Inclusive Through the Power of Defaults
Conference
Ohland, MW, Dickerson, D, Masta, S et al. (2023). Making Engineering Education More Inclusive Through the Power of Defaults
. 10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343085
Ohland, MW, Dickerson, D, Masta, S et al. (2023). Making Engineering Education More Inclusive Through the Power of Defaults
. 10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343085
As part of a larger project to assess what marginalization looks like in engineering student teams in the classroom, an opportunity evolved to measure gender and race/ethnicity more authentically and more safely than is commonly done. This paper describes the design of these authentic questions and how students responded to them. In the case of the race/ethnicity question, the paper compares student responses to the new question to their responses to an earlier question that had no option to select multiple identities and no opportunity to write in a free-text response. This process makes visible the students who were likely harmed by the old question design, emphasizing the importance of an authentic measurement.
