2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Motivation: This complete theory paper explores the nature of honors programs in engineering and STEM in both the first-year experience and beyond at the undergraduate level. Honors and high-achieving students are important topics within the first-year classroom, given that coming out of high school students have extremely diverse experiences and prior coursework. Additionally, honors programs are becoming more prevalent at the university level within specific STEM and engineering disciplines. This is especially at the first-year level, where many honors programs are often highly concentrated. Understanding concepts such as how to engage with high-achieving students, how to structure the classroom, and how to close participation gaps within high-achieving and honors programs are critical to building the diverse engineering workforce needed to solve the complex problems of tomorrow. And much of this effort starts with understanding engineering and STEM students from the moment they arrive on campus.

Background: The topic of honors and high achieving within engineering and other STEM fields has been studied extensively. Many researchers from across fields and disciplines have discussed how to design a classroom experience and the unique motivations of high-achieving or honors students. However, putting all of this into a cohesive narrative to give concrete recommendations to practitioners is needed to bring this body of literature to practice. This practice should include curricular principles derived from the literature that contribute to learning, student motivation, and increasing participation in engineering and STEM more broadly (which honors programs have traditionally struggled with). The goal of this literature review is to identify successful curricular themes and student motivations that have been derived across the literature for this unique population.

Methods: This study conducts a systematic literature review to answer three primary questions: (1) What educational theories and pedagogical tools have been seen to be successful in high-achieving students? (2) What motivations do high-achieving engineering students have when transitioning to, and continuing in undergraduate studies? (3) What strategies have been helpful in closing participation gaps in high-achieving engineering programs? The review utilizes multiple databases such as Compendex, ERIC, and Education Source to identify relevant research papers. The results are then filtered through inclusion and exclusion criteria to identify the most relevant studies to the research questions. The resulting set of papers (n=26) was then analyzed for themes relating to each of the three research questions. Additionally, the resulting papers were analyzed for the metadata (years, authors, journal) as well as the basic definitions of “high-achieving” or “honors” to understand who is often included in these definitions. After the themes were generated, they were condensed into useful principles for educational practitioners in the field.

Results: The results indicate some fascinating findings about the state of education for honors and high-achieving engineering and STEM students. First, who gets defined as “high-achieving” or pathways into honors programs are incredibly diverse. Understanding who is getting included in these definitions also gives key insights into who is being left out. Additionally, the ways learning objectives are structured for high-achieving and honors programs often include topics far past just engineering and mathematics, with topics such as entrepreneurship, leadership, ethics, social concerns, and creativity showing up often. The paper discusses why this may be the case and whether or not these are topics that should be included more broadly. The results also indicated that instructors take a host of different pedagogical approaches, with some common themes being smaller class sizes, application of materials, project-based learning, and using industry or academic mentors. The discussion of this paper connects these to current learning theories and why the results in the literature make sense. And finally, the themes of motivation for high-achieving and honors students showed that there are ways in which these students are motivated that differ from the broader body of students, and give key insights into how to create a more inclusive environment within high-achieving and honors programs, especially at the first-year level where retention is so critically important.