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Smartness in engineering: Beliefs of undergraduate engineering students
Author(s) -
Dringenberg Emily,
Kramer Amy,
Betz Amy R.
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
journal of engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.896
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 2168-9830
pISSN - 1069-4730
DOI - 10.1002/jee.20463
Subject(s) - status quo , ambiguity , engineering education , mathematics education , action (physics) , coding (social sciences) , pedagogy , sociology , psychology , engineering ethics , computer science , engineering , political science , engineering management , social science , physics , quantum mechanics , law , programming language
Background Modern engineering culture is rooted in assumptions of intellectual superiority. Scholars have demonstrated that smartness functions as an oppressive cultural practice in educational settings. However, the shared ways in which undergraduate engineering students understand what it means to be smart remain largely implicit and unexamined. Purpose/Hypothesis We investigated the beliefs held by students about what it means to be smart and the role of smartness in their undergraduate education. Design/Method We conducted one‐on‐one, semi‐structured interviews with 20 students at a predominately White institution. Our team utilized open, descriptive coding to iteratively condense our data into categories, codes, and subcodes, followed by analysis to identify and characterize the participants' commonly held beliefs. Results Students believed that being smart is working efficiently or maximizing outcomes while minimizing effort. Determining smartness as efficiency included social comparison and assumptions about effort, which introduced ambiguity into students' judgments of smartness. The resulting social hierarchy (relative positioning as smart) was commonly believed to enable or restrict access to necessary resources. Conclusions Students' belief that smartness is an individual capacity to work more efficiently than others obfuscates the reality of smartness as a cultural practice that is baked into our systems and perpetuates inequity. Without action to reveal and disrupt smartness as a structural and oppressive practice, the status quo of inequitable participation in engineering will persist.