Social Network Analysis of an Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Learning Environment
Gallegos, Hernan
2019
- There are many focal points that researchers in the engineering education field focus on to help contribute to the diversity and inclusion of the STEM field. I want to focus my work on the undergraduate engineering experience and bring those methods to fruition in this small part of the STEM field. My primary focus is to see where under-represented minority students are regarding their ... read morenon-under-represented peers in these undergraduate engineering settings. There are current studies that analyze the persistence, capital, and identity of URM students in engineering, but there is another way to analyze how their networks may contribute to these three factors. Thus, I begin to focus on the social networks of these students at a small, private, predominantly white institution in the Northeast. This thesis focuses on the student networks that are created within an undergraduate mechanical engineering department. I conducted a Social Network Analysis to focus on the three classes of 2019 (seniors), 2020 (juniors), and 2021 (sophomores). The goal of this study was to see what current social networks were being created between these three classes and which factors contribute to a student’s connectivity, or degree centrality, within these networks. Factors that were observed were class year, race/ethnicity, gender, and grade point average (GPA). After collecting data, both gender and race/ethnicity do not play a huge factor in a student´s degree centrality. However, the class year does have a significant impact on their degree centrality. GPA had an interesting connection between degree centrality. One statistical test proves it is significant (less conservative) meanwhile another proved it to be statistically insignificant (more conservative). Thus, this could lead us to conduct another study with a bigger population and see if GPA (and maybe race/ethnicity) ends up being influential in a students connectivity within the network.read less
- ID:
- mp48sr931
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
