2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Chemical engineers are expected to complete a sequence of chemistry and life science coursework before they enter their major program. As core pre-requisites, these courses serve as the foundational knowledge of chemical engineering work, but their role in contributing to the professional development of chemical engineers is perhaps not well understood. Drawing on research from a design-based implementation study funded by the NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program, we follow chemical engineers through three introductory courses to observe how and if their individual beliefs about engineering identity change over time. We present results from within courses to observe how students’ beliefs might change during a semester as well as results that observe the sequential and cumulative impact of course-taking on students evolving beliefs about their competency as engineers using Godwin’s scale [1].
The result for this poster draw upon a larger study of personalized feedback in sequential course-taking among life science, engineering, and non-STEM majors. As we have students from all three groups enrolled in the course sequence, we are also able to offer insight into changing science identity and engineering identity beliefs among students with different motivations and aspirations. Although these groups don’t serve as a counterfactual, they illustrate differences in how students respond to introductory coursework given their distinct goals. We also account for individual motivation within the course using Perez’s adaptation of Eccles’ Expectancy Value Scale for STEM courses [2]. Our sample (n=2819) is composed of students who took 1-3 courses in the Chemical Engineering sequence: Introductory General Chemistry, Advanced General Chemistry, Material and Energy Balances (Chemical Engineering). Our data collection ran from Fall 2020 to Fall 2022, includes 5 semesters and three potential cohorts of students who completed the sequence. In general, the majority of Chemical Engineers complete the sequence in order and on time (about 63% of the eligible students in our data). At the start and end of each semester, students received a brief survey that asked about their motivations for taking the course, their attitudes towards Chemistry, their engineering or science identity beliefs (based on their major), and their coursework strategies.
Among the Chemical Engineers in our study, our initial descriptive results suggest that on individual measures of Engineering identity related to interest, enjoyment, and fulfillment, engineering students’ beliefs marginally increased (∆Interest = 0.23 on a seven-point scale; ∆Enjoyment=0.07; ∆Fulfillment=0.1). In general, Engineers experienced relatively low levels of changes in their subjective Engineering identity beliefs (when compared to life and natural science students on an identical measure of Science Identity) within individual courses. In our poster and full paper we will present analyses that identify the impact of changes in subjective belief across coursework on persistence and academic momentum (operationalized as credits taken) across the sequence of chemistry engineering courses.