Emma Treadway
Trinity University, TX·Education Research
Many students who start engineering degrees do not finish them, and this has been a persistent concern in engineering education. One known factor is engineering identity: whether a student comes to see themselves as an engineer.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
Social Science
- Topics
engineering identity
engineering education
student retention
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Compare first- and second-year engineering students' local affect, the emotions they experience in the moment, while doing engineering work versus mathematics and science work, using interviews and surveys across four semesters.
- Track how students' global affect, their broader attitudes, values and beliefs about mathematics, science and engineering, changes over their early college experiences in a longitudinal mixed-methods design.
- Determine how local and global affect interact with students' engineering identity and with their other social identities, building interview-based case studies into a model of these interactions.
- Develop and test new instruments for measuring affect toward engineering, mathematics and science that can support future research on identity formation and retention.
More about the research
Identity has been studied from several angles, but one piece has been largely left out, namely how students actually feel about engineering, mathematics and science, and what they value and believe about those subjects. This project asks how those feelings and beliefs, together called affect, interact with the growth of an engineering identity, and therefore with the decision to stay or leave.
Why it matters
Retention in engineering remains a long-standing problem, and students often leave during their first two years. By showing how emotions, values and beliefs about mathematics, science and engineering feed into whether students see themselves as engineers, this work could help instructors design course experiences that build identity for a wider range of students. The resulting model, case studies and measurement instruments are intended to inform retention efforts and broaden participation in engineering.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Holly Golecki
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Education Research·Early-career
Develop and validate a new measure of human-centered design self-efficacy for high school students, so that curricula can be evaluated on whether students believe they can design for real end users.
Jennifer Detlor
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Education Research
Identify which factors lead engineering students to self-identify as rural, and how strongly they hold that identity, using a survey in which students define rurality in their own terms.
Lance Perez
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Education Research
Identify the rural assets and structural barriers that shape engineering awareness before college, through site visits and semi-structured interviews with principals, counselors and STEM teachers at rural Nebraska high schools.
The school
Trinity University: 3 labs on PI Pages, $6M a year on research.
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