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Research Interests

While no longer pursuing a tenure track research agenda, I am still interested in understanding how to better educate and prepare undergraduate engineering students through the lens of applied sociology. My particular focus is on the development of an engineering identity and how educators can provide time-oriented support that meet students where they are in their undergraduate program. Additionally, I am interested in seeing how these engineering identities are supported and sustained as students enter industry and start their careers as mechanical engineers. I apply qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to understand how students come to see themselves as engineers with an emphasis on longitudinal work.

Societal Impact

The degree to which a student sees themselves as an engineer is the most predictive and influential factor in how they persist, are motivated, and learn engineering content. By better understanding how students see themselves as engineers, we can better tailor our pedagogical and programmatic practices to support students from a variety of backgrounds as they come to see themselves as an engineer.

Background

Dr. Scalaro received her PhD in Engineering Education at the University of Nevada, Reno where her dissertation took a longitudinal, phenomenological look at how students feel they are recognized as engineers in support of the development of an engineering role identity. Prior to this appointment, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Cornell University with the STRIDE laboratory doing engineering education research focusing on education-based practices, identity, and instrument development. Before her graduate school experiences, Dr. Scalaro received a bachelor's and masters in mechanical engineering and worked in the aerospace industry for 5 years before pursuing academia.