NSF Award
2204726
Retention in engineering programs and careers is a longstanding concern in engineering education, particularly among historically underrepresented populations. Students’ development of their engineering identity, or the sense of themselves as being an engineer, is known to play an important role in their decision to persist within the major. While the development of engineering identity has been explored from many perspectives, the influences of students’ feelings/emotions, values, attitudes, beliefs about the subject have not been addressed. This research seeks to understand how students’ feelings associated with learning engineering, science, and mathematics as well as their values, attitudes, and beliefs about those subjects, interact with students’ development of their engineering identity. This project will follow participants through their first two years as undergraduate engineering students, which is a critical time during which students decide whether to persist in engineering. This work will improve understanding of how students’ feelings about their experiences in mathematics, science, and engineering courses contribute to the formation of their engineering identities, which in turn contributes to their decision to pursue or leave engineering. Because students’ other identities shape both their affective experiences and the development of their engineering identity, we will examine the relationships between engineering identity and affect within the context of students’ other social identities. In addition to shaping instructor practices to help all students experience positive identity-building affective experiences, this work could therefore support participation and retention of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering, supporting this NSF program’s goal of making participation in engineering open and accessible to all.<br/><br/>Existing models of affect and engineering identity separately suggest that local affect (the changing emotions that students experience during disciplinary activity) and global affect (the broad attitudes, values, and beliefs that students hold about a discipline) may have potential to influence and interact with engineering identity, and in turn, to influence retention; however, these links have not been explored. This work will build on disciplinary literature in mathematics and science education about affect, as well as theories on engineering identity development, in order to contribute to a theory of how affect pertaining to science, mathematics, and engineering contributes to students’ engineering identity. Using a mixed-methods longitudinal approach that follows students across their first two years in an engineering program, researchers from Trinity University and the University at Buffalo seek to answer three research questions: RQ1: How are first- and second-year engineering students’ local affect different or the same while doing engineering work vs. mathematics and science work? RQ2: Over the course of their early college experiences with mathematics, science, and engineering, how do students’ global affect about these disciplines change? RQ3: How do students’ local and global affect about mathematics, science, and engineering contribute to/interact with their identities, including engineering identity? The research team will interview and survey engineering students in each of their first four semesters to understand these students’ affects and identities. The study will contribute a set of case studies based on the interviews, from which we will develop a model of the interactions between affect and engineering identity which also considers the influence of a range of other student identities on shaping those interactions. Additionally, the study will develop new instruments for measuring engineering affect. The instruments, model, and case studies will inform efforts to improve retention and broaden participation in engineering.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
