Given its ongoing struggles at attaining demographic diversity and its key role in nations' economies, the engineering workforce receives considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Yet, prior studies and STEM recruitment initiatives have often underemphasized the variety among available engineering jobs and careers. It therefore…

College students make job decisions without complete information. As a result, they may rely on misleading heuristics ("interesting jobs pay badly") and pursue options misaligned with their goals. We test whether highlighting job characteristics changes decision making. We find increasing the salience of a job's monetary benefits…

We survey undergraduate students at a large public university to understand the pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors driving their college major and career decisions with a focus on K-12 teaching. While the average student reports there is a 6% chance they will pursue teaching, almost 27% report a nonzero chance of working as a teacher in the…

Init2Winit, a gamified mobile application designed to increase students' alignment knowledge between college, career, and salary expectations has been beta-tested in midwestern urban and rural U.S. high schools (age 14-18). Students earn different points in the game when their educational expectations and expected annual income are matched with…

Peer mentoring programs provide an opportunity for individuals with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) to learn, socialize, and work together in supportive and inclusive environments. In this study, we used a phenomenological research design to explore the impact of a college campus-based peer mentoring program on the…

A recent survey of 41 different state boards of education revealed that officials from 28 states indicate that they are experiencing teacher shortages. The shortages in some states are significant. While the teacher shortage in many states is tied to different factors, one frequently cited reason for leaving the teaching profession is low pay.…

This study explored the career outcomes for Latinx doctoral students and the contextual factors of their educational experience influencing these outcomes. A case-study approach is taken to examine the cases of doctoral students at the University of Michigan. These students were tracked each year, for 10 years post-graduation. Furthermore, an…

Four topics were investigated in this longitudinal person-centered study: (a) profiles of subjective task values and ability self-concepts of adolescents in the domain of mathematics, (b) the stability of and changes to the profiles of motivational beliefs from Grade 7 to 12, (c) the relation of changes to student-perceived classroom…

Sociology research methods students in 2013 and 2016 implemented a series of "real world" data gathering activities that enhanced their learning while assisting the department with ongoing program assessment and program review. In addition to the explicit collection of program assessment data on both students' development of sociological…

Physics education research (PER) is a relatively new and rapidly growing area of Ph.D. specialization. To sustain the field of PER, a steady pipeline of talented scholars needs to be developed and supported. One aspect of building this pipeline is understanding how students come to graduate and postdoctoral work in PER and what their career goals…