2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This project aims to serve the national interest by studying how engineering students make career and major of study decisions and implementing a web-based platform that helps first year undergraduate engineering students in deciding about their major of study. Three overarching goals for this NSF IUSE Level I Engaged Student Learning project are: 1) to advance understanding of the field in what information is used by students to make academic major decisions, 2) to refine available decision-making theories and models for major-selection decisions, 3) to develop an online, interactive infrastructure grounded in knowledge and theory about academic major selections to aid students in making informed major selection decisions. This works in progress paper will outline formation of a survey instrument to obtain understanding of the decision-making processes that first year students use to make decisions in selecting a major field of study related to goals 1 and 2.

The project uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to determine trends and differences in student decision making processes for selecting a major. The project leverages Social Cognitive Career Theory and Cognitive Information Processing as frameworks for forming an understanding of career related decision making. Students’ attitude towards different majors and career selection outcomes are tracked through surveys and interviews at two large midwestern universities enrolling a diverse class of students. The survey was designed with 58 Likert-type questions categorized into Career Decision Making Outcomes, Career Exploratory Plans, Career Environmental Exploration, Career Self Exploration and Career Thoughts Inventory. The IRB approved survey was sent to 2000 students across the two universities and across 13 different engineering majors with a response rate of 20%. Qualtrics was used for data collection and Python was used for data analysis. Initial analysis was performed to determine areas of significance. Interview questions related to theories of decision making and career exploration behavior formed the basis for semi-structured interviews. Early quantitative findings from 400 respondents were presented to the research team to inform additional questions for the qualitative portion of the study. Clustering was performed from the survey results to determine 20 candidates for interviews based on numeric and categorical variables such as major, race, domestic or international student status, and sub-scores of the survey. Semi-structured interviews were conducted via Zoom to add to the understanding and nuances of differences in student decision-making processes. Interviews were coded using grounded theory to identify themes related to career exploration and career decision making.

This paper illustrates the methods used and early results of an exploratory research project that tries to understand student choice in selection of majors and career paths. Subsequently, a comprehensive tool will be developed based on the quantitative results from the surveys and qualitative information gained from the interviews.