[INES Announce] Issue 16.1 of Engineering Studies

[Jessica Smith]

Dear INES,

We’re happy to share the new issue of Engineering Studies<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/test20/current>, which is another special issue with the theme of gender.

It opens with an editorial by our Managing Editor Kacey Beddoes, who provides an overview of the past 15 years of research on gender, race, and power in the journal. The first two articles focus on gender and early-career assignments, and the final article shows how a dominant spatial visualization test (Purdue Spatial Visualization Test of Rotations) was “initially promoted because of its ability to demonstrate ‘gender differences in spatial ability’ rather than its ability to accurately measure a spatial construct.”

Thank you to Kacey, and to all of you who served as editors and reviewers!

All the best,
Jessica


Shannon K. Gilmartin, Samantha R. Brunhaver, Sara Jordan-Bloch, Gabriela Gall Rosa, Caroline Simard & Sheri D. Sheppard (2024) Early-Career Assignments and Workforce Inequality in Engineering, Engineering Studies, 16:1, 8-32, DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2023.2272807<https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2023.2272807>

Positioned as part of leadership development in many organizations, ‘stretch assignments’ are a type of work assignment that can prove someone’s readiness to advance in their career. Informed by status characteristics theory, our research investigates the frequency and expected outcomes of stretch assignments among recent engineering graduates in the workforce. Findings suggest that early-career stretch assignments, especially assignments involving new and unfamiliar areas, potentially intensify gender and racial/ethnic workforce inequality. Other types of assignments that may be more familiar and clearly-scoped to early-career engineers show a different and less inequality-intensifying pattern. We discuss why early-career engineers’ assignments may be sites of inequality and the need for more focus on organizational processes around career-advancing work.

Floris van der Marel, Tua Björklund & Sheri Sheppard (2024) Moments that Matter: Early-Career Experiences of Diverse Engineers on Different Career Pathways, Engineering Studies, 16:1, 33-55, DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2023.2272791<https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2023.2272791>

While many early-career engineers in the United States leave the field of engineering in the first few years of their careers, we know little of their early professional experiences and reasoning for career plans. We conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with early-career engineers, comparing the experiences of engineers across intersections of gender and race. In particular, we examine meaningful early-career experiences and how these connect to the innate needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as well as career intentions. Top moments on the job were often first-time experiences and milestones that enhanced the engineers’ sense of competence. Meaningful moments connected to relatedness were more often positive than negative experiences for White men, whereas experiences undermining relatedness were more common for people of color and/or women. Connections to autonomy emerged more in bottom moments, especially for White engineers. Across different intended career pathways, early-career engineers often evaluated their experiences regarding their ability to work effectively and through social validation from peers and managers (or undermined by a lack thereof). The results indicate the need for a greater understanding of early-career affordances in supporting entry and retention in the engineering workforce by promoting individual effectiveness and social validation.

Kristin A. Bartlett (2024) The Politics of the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test of Rotations (PSVT:R) and its Use in Engineering Education, Engineering Studies, 16:1, 56-77, DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2023.2297958<https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2023.2297958>

The Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R) is commonly used in engineering education to measure spatial ability in efforts to predict academic or vocational success, or as a placement test. However, the politics of the instrument are rarely discussed. Here I provide a critical review of the historical literature that provides the basis for current work using the PSVT:R. I examine the validation and popularization of the PSVT:R, discuss how the instrument may not actually measure mental rotation, and explain how the construct of ‘gestalt processing’ was created in an effort to raise the status of spatial instruments which favored men. I argue that the isometric imagery style used in the test, which is rooted in the masculinized discipline of engineering graphics, further politicizes the test. I discuss the usage of the PSVT:R in spatial training efforts targeting historically excluded groups, and how understanding the politics of the PSVT:R should inform future efforts.


Jessica M. Smith<https://www.jessicamsmith.net/> (she/her/hers)
Editor-in-chief, Engineering Studies<https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/test20>
Professor, Engineering, Design, and Society Department<https://www.mines.edu/eds/>
Colorado School of Mines
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.inesweb.org/pipermail/announce-inesweb.org/attachments/20240401/f7d7e8dc/attachment.htm>