Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) is the largest of the 23 colleges in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), annually serving 75,000 students as they pursue associate degrees and transfer to universities for a bachelor’s degree. The number of students who are attending NOVA with engineering as their declared degree program is noticeably greater than the number of students actually enrolled in engineering courses. To characterize and address this gap, NOVA in collaboration with Virginia Tech (VT), will examine the policies and practices of the college that contribute to creating students’ professional disposition as engineers, including the ways in which classes and activities make them feel like engineers. The project will also use transfer data to demonstrate how community college students experience and navigate existing engineering transfer pathways. This will result in a future IUSE: RED proposal in which NOVA and VT can engage in structural change to work toward establishing a department that is more supportive of students and their transfer success. Findings will be shared with institutional peers as they seek to make similar academic and operational improvements, in full alignment with the priorities of the IUSE:RED program.

To accomplish these goals, this work will focus on three research questions: (1) How do community college students develop their dispositions as engineers? (2) How do NOVA faculty, staff, and leaders experience the current academic leadership structure and resource allocation? (3) What are the current transfer pathways for community college engineering students at a multi-campus community college? Data collected will be analyzed through the framework of Systems Thinking Leadership, an approach to understand persistent, complex problems within engineering education by examining how various system components and stakeholders interact rather than focusing solely on distinct parts or symptoms. Beginning a three-step process of discovery, framing, and action as a revolutionary approach to enhancing student engineering experiences and transfer pathways at NOVA, this project will focus on the discovery and framing phases, wherein we explore the concerns, values, and assumptions of departmental stakeholders to diagram relationships, map patterns of behavior, and create a structured framework for change. Collaborative working sessions with the project team, NOVA’s Office of Institutional Research, and relevant stakeholders will guide two complementary components of this study: a quantitative component that will include institutional data queries and student surveys, and a qualitative component which will include stakeholder interviews, focus groups, and document reviews. This project will allow NOVA to (1) understand the factors that influence students’ engineering dispositions, (2) explore the transfer behaviors of students who graduate from NOVA and/or transfer prior to getting a degree, and (3) evaluate the current academic leadership and resource allocation for the engineering department and propose fundamental structural change to better serve students in their preparation for future academic and industry work.