Changing the lens of engineering education

NSF CAREER Award supports Dina Verdín’s research to reflect engineering students’ educational journeys

Engineering students bring with them unique identities, motivations and lived experiences that influence how they navigate this demanding discipline. At Arizona State University, Dina Verdín is working to make sure those experiences inform how researchers understand student success.

Verdín, an assistant professor of engineering in The Polytechnic School, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, has earned a 2025 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. With the award, she will create a new framework that moves engineering education beyond generalized models and toward approaches that reflect students’ lived experiences, guiding the field with a more accurate and responsive lens.

What brought Verdín to ASU was the university’s charter, with its emphasis on serving all students and measuring its success by how those students succeed.

“ASU’s mission of accessibility and social impact resonates with my work,” she says. “My research seeks to challenge traditional boundaries of who gets to participate in engineering and reimagine how students develop an engineering identity and a sense of belonging.”

Verdín also teaches in the engineering education systems and design doctoral program and combines her industrial engineering background with her expertise in education to explore both the technical and the human sides of engineering.

“I leverage the data-driven, decision-making practices learned in industrial engineering with my knowledge of educational systems and learning environments through my training as an engineering educator to inform my research,” she says. “Having this interdisciplinary perspective allows me to examine educational environments with a wider lens and with a student-focused intention.”

Rethinking student development theories to reflect experiences in engineering education

Verdín’s CAREER Award research centers on a challenge she sees across the field: the theories commonly used to study engineering education were largely developed in other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology. While valuable, they don’t always reflect the distinct realities of engineering students, the pressures students face in forming their identity in the field, or the rigorous environments in which they learn.

“Theories are a crucial part of research projects,” she says. “They help drive the questions we ask, the methods we use, the way we analyze our data, the conclusions we draw, and the recommendations we make toward practice. These theories provide us with a roadmap to guide the data analysis and interpretation and position researchers within a body of existing knowledge. The kinds of theories that engineering educators work with to understand student development and motivation are different.”

Verdín notes how, in engineering, there are established theories that explain physical phenomena or those grounded in universal principles. But it becomes more complicated when thinking about students’ behaviors, motivations and lived experiences, and factoring those into understanding the system.

To borrow a physicist’s joke, “imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”

“In engineering education, our ‘units’ of analysis are real students with real feelings, unique histories of learning, identities and sociocultural experiences that shape how they interact in our institutions,” Verdín says.

Her research also pays close attention to students from underserved backgrounds, whose educational motivations and experiences are often overlooked when generalized theories are applied to understand their experiences in engineering.

Her project will create a guiding framework to help researchers critically evaluate and adapt existing theories, so they align more closely with the lived experiences of engineering students. As a case study, she is examining achievement goal theory, or AGT, a widely used motivational theory, to create the guiding framework that can be applied to other important theories of student behavior, motivation and development.

Ultimately, Verdín hopes her framework will change how engineering education researchers across the country approach their work, moving away from a one-size-fits-all application of theories and toward a practice that reflects engineering students’ various motivations and pathways.

The framework will provide engineering education researchers with tools to design more culturally responsive studies, shaping the questions they ask and the supports they recommend.

This past summer, Verdín presented at the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference. Her paper entitled, “Whose Goals Are We Measuring? A QuantCrit Analysis Examining the Cultural Blind Spots in Achievement Goal Theory,” earned two best diversity paper awards, underscoring national recognition of the importance of her work.

Verdín’s paper focused on the missing cultural aspects of AGT and the need to examine at how individual life experiences influence students’ educational motivations.

“In the paper, I describe the lack of sociocultural considerations when developing AGT and its implications for its ability to explain minoritized students’ achievement motives,” she says. “I provided empirical evidence of the dangers of understanding motivation from a “culture-free” lens and how the theory’s tenets have high explanatory power for some students but not all students.”

She credits this paper for laying the foundation for the development of this project that earned her a CAREER Award.

Verdín’s research addresses gaps in theory while responding to a broader call for inclusive engineering education. By centering the lived realities of students, particularly those who have been underrepresented in higher education, she seeks to ensure that engineering becomes a space where more students can see themselves and succeed.

Advancing student success through research

By reimagining theories like AGT, Verdín aims to illuminate how engineering students advance as learners, how they navigate the rigors of engineering programs and what supports their persistence to graduation. She believes this approach will especially benefit students whose perspectives have historically been overlooked in engineering research.

“My work gives researchers a structured way to reimagine existing theories so that they start from the lived experiences of our engineering students and are more culturally relevant,” Verdín says. “I also envision this framework being used to equip the next generation of engineering education scholars to promote research that challenges and refines existing educational theories so that they contribute to a more theoretically inclusive understanding of our students.”

In the long run, Verdín’s research will lead to better insights, more effective support systems and new opportunities that will help all of our engineering students thrive — a true reflection of ASU’s charter to measure itself “by whom it includes and how they succeed.”​