Abstract: 

Identity is a powerful underlying narrative shaping how individuals interpret experiences, make sense of challenges, and decide how to act in the world. In engineering, identity influences who sees themselves as an engineer, who feels they belong, and who persists when learning becomes difficult. In this invited talk, I frame my career pathway as an evolving identity story—one shaped by liquid nitrogen, P&IDs, sport coats, and a series of serendipitous emails—and show how these experiences have guided my research agenda in engineering education.

A persistent question has guided my research agenda: what educational approaches work, for whom, and why? That question has increasingly drawn my attention to assessment and how students experience struggle and failure as powerful (but often misaligned) levers in engineering education. Failure is one of the most impactful ways humans learn and is part of the human experience, yet it is often treated as a path function, where every assessment permanently shapes the final grade along an instructor-defined learning progression, leaving no room for the individual learning journeys students actually take. I will introduce meaningful failure as a framework for engineering learning that positions struggle, uncertainty, and setbacks as essential and productive components of the learning process rather than signals of deficit, especially when the tasks are connected to who students are, through two studies.

First, a course‑level example from a first‑year chemical engineering class, where alternative assessment structures were designed to reward iteration, feedback use, and academic risk‑taking. These changes increased student motivation, supported identity development, and reduced stress, particularly for students historically marginalized in engineering. Building on this foundation, I then describe a newer thread of research focused on personalizing engineering learning by detecting and supporting meaningful failure in real time. Through a multi‑institutional collaboration, we collect multimodal data, including psychosocial surveys, observations, interviews, and physiological signals, in both laboratory and classroom settings. Preliminary findings suggest distinct learner profiles associated with adaptive and maladaptive responses to failure, pointing toward the potential for personalized supports that align with students’ identities, motivations, and sense of belonging.

Bio: 

Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin ’67, ’68 Professor in Engineering Education Research in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. She also serves as the Associate Director for the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility and the inaugural Associate Director of the Duffield Engineering Education Research Institute. Her research focuses on how psychosocial factors (e.g., identity, motivation, and belonging) shape student experiences and outcomes in undergraduate engineering education. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned a 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing underlying attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research, including the 2021 Journal of Civil Engineering Education Best Technical Paper, the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, the 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Research.