2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Curiosity, an ability vital to the process of invention and innovation, has also been correlated with a variety of desirable outcomes in education and is recognized as a desirable characteristic in engineering students and practicing engineers. Thus, developing and integrating a curriculum that instills and fosters curiosity in engineering students is essential. To assess student development of curiosity, a direct and an indirect assessment for curiosity were integrated into the curriculum for a first-year engineering honors program at a large midwestern university. The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale (5DC), a 25-item instrument developed by Kashdan and colleagues, was implemented as the indirect assessment. The direct assessment for curiosity was developed by the research team and tasks students to brainstorm about a topic and then write 10 distinct questions about that topic. Both assessments were administered at two time points in the academic year. A subset of data of 54 students, randomized across course sections, was selected for analysis.

For the indirect Likert-type survey data, means were computed for each of the five constructs per participant, and pre and post responses were compared using a paired t-test or Wilcoxon signed rank test based on data set normality. To evaluate the direct assessment data, the 10 questions generated by students were analyzed using a deductive coding approach which was guided by a codebook derived from the 5DC. Differences in the frequency of the question codes between pre and post implementations were tested using Pearson correlation tests.

We found a significant increase (p<0.05) in student self-reported pre post scores for Social Curiosity and Thrill Seeking constructs over the first year. Despite those constructs increasing, students generated questions pertaining to Information Seeking and Stress Tolerance constructs most frequently in the direct pre and post assessment, with approximately 60% and 25% of questions coded into those categories, respectively. The frequency of codes was not different between the pre and post assessments. These findings suggest that further work is needed to understand discrepancies between how students perceive their curiosity personality and how they exercise that curiosity in an academic context. This paper explores the direct and indirect assessment data sets and discusses implications for our findings on pedagogical approaches to fostering curiosity in first-year engineering.