A Longitudinal Study of the Dimensions of Disciplinary Culture to Enhance Innovation and Retention among Engineering Students

The U.S. engineering educational system has been generally slow in developing pedagogies that successfully promote innovative behaviors. Although numerous sources recognize the growing scope and complexity of challenges that lie ahead in the 21st century, engineering is struggling to balance its goals between the high-risk pursuit of innovation and the traditional problem-solving approach of producing functional, reliable applications. In short, engineering needs more creativity and interdisciplinary fluency, but not at the expense of its discipline-specific problem-solving skills. At the same time, engineering programs continue to struggle with attracting and retaining members of underrepresented populations—whose diversity could greatly contribute to innovation. Interestingly, this lack of diversity is often attributed to cultural traits of the field—often characterized as masculine, individualistic and function-oriented. Notably, students in fields that emphasize functionality (e.g. engineering) rather than creativity (e.g. industrial design) express higher levels of uncertainty avoidance. Together, these cultural dimensions of engineering continue to limit innovative practices, such as interdisciplinary collaboration, design thinking, and diversity of perspectives. The purpose of this study is to investigate patterns of cultural traits in students across disciplines, with the goal of building an actionable theory of engineering culture that can support pedagogies of inclusive and collaborative innovation. Specifically, we are using Hofstede’s theory of dimensions of national culture to understand engineering disciplinary culture. We are using an instrument to evaluate the original four dimensions of national culture (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity) to see if the dimensions map to academic disciplines to explain how students develop skills to operate within and across disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, we are exploring the re