Data Use in the Design of Interventions to Improve Equity in Engineering Education

Introduction: This full research paper explores how data is used to design equity interventions. The percent of engineering degrees awarded to people who have historically been excluded from engineering has increased since 2010. But there is still substantial underrepresentation for women and people from racially and ethnically marginalized groups. One potentially promising practice is to harness the power of data, including big data, to design interventions to improve equity. However, there are gaps in our understanding of how higher education faculty and staff use this data in designing equity interventions. Objective: The purpose of this paper is to answer the question: How is data used in the process of designing efforts to improve equity in engineering programs? Methods: We performed a content analysis on surveys completed by and artifacts generated by higher education faculty and staff who participated in a structured professional development and research experience. The experience focused on planning and executing a data-driven project designed to improve equity in engineering education. Results: Analysis of the data suggests the following: participants articulate the core challenge that they are facing in terms of data indicating demographic disparities, make the case for addressing inequities via presentation of relevant data, and conceptualize evaluating success via gathering quantitative data about intervention outcomes. However, many projects are not, themselves, focused on the creation or use of data (e.g., mentoring programs), Conclusion: This work shows how higher education faculty and staff who are designing interventions to promote equity in engineering education are using data in the design phase of their work. Understanding their patterns of data use is an important first step in determining how data use impacts their projects' outcomes and, based on that finding, how future cohorts can be best supported in the design of their interventions.