2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Evaluating Students’ Entrepreneurial Mindset Attributes in First-Year Design Projects

Presented at First-Year Programs Division (FYP) - Technical Session 3: Evaluation & Assessment

Engineering education has been focusing on incorporating the Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) into First-Year Engineering Programs (FYEPs) due to evolving employer expectations and the benefits that develop from engineers equipped with an EM. The Ohio State University honors FYEP includes a semester-long design project to help students synthesize engineering concepts, create a coherent product, and further their EM development. Two of these first-year design projects are a robot design project and a nanotechnology research project. For the robot design project, students develop autonomous robots that complete a series of tasks within a two-minute period. For the nanotechnology research project, students design a lab-on-a-chip and explore nanotechnology applications in medicine. Both projects provide a vast number of experiences that support the development of an EM.

The goal of this complete research study was to evaluate the efficacy of how these projects further an EM in the honors FYEP. We focused on one specific attribute of EM which was making connections. Our primary research question was: Are there differences in students’ ability to make connections between different first-year engineering design projects? The purpose of the comparison was to determine whether both projects provided equal value to the first-year students regarding their ability to learn to make connections. To answer our research question, we used concept maps developed during the 2021-2022 academic year. We scored a subset of 22 maps (n = 11 from the robot design project, n = 11 from the nanotechnology research project) with an adapted traditional scoring method to assess the concept map structure, and we used inductive coding to assess concept map content.

Although there was no difference in the adapted traditional scoring method scores between the robot and nanotechnology projects, the coding exhibited a clear distinction in how robot and nanotechnology students differed when identifying content in the concept map activity. The most common code was Engineering Design Process, while the least common code was Exploration. Our findings suggest that both projects generally cultivate equal amounts of connection-making ability from students. Future work should investigate how our inductive coding findings translate to established categorical scoring methods for concept maps, particularly in the space of EM.

Authors

Nicholas H. Cheong
Dr. Meagan Eleanor Ita http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3737-0596 The Ohio State University [biography]

Dr. Meagan Ita is a Research Scientist at Arvinas working to develop disease modifying therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Her career passion is to develop novel biotechnologies and therapeutics to better understand human physiology with the goal of equitably extending healthspan, ideally at the intersection of healthcare and STEM education. Meagan has experience as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Engineering Education from The Ohio State University (OSU), earned a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.S. and B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from OSU.
Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9745-1921 The Ohio State University [biography]

Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Ohio State and earned her Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on the intersection between motivation and identity, first-year engineering programs, mixed methods research, and innovative approaches to teaching. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Identity and Motivation in Engineering (RIME) Collaborative.
Dr. Krista M. Kecskemety http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1192-4172 The Ohio State University [biography]

Krista Kecskemety is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University and the co-Director of the Fundamentals of Engineering Programs. Krista received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University in 2006 and received her M.S. from Ohio State in 2007. In 2012, Krista completed her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State. Her engineering education research interests include investigating first-year engineering student experiences, faculty experiences, and the research to practice cycle within first-year engineering.
Mr. Ethan Cartwright The Ohio State University
Miss Amanda Marie Singer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7251-0067 The Ohio State University [biography]

Amanda Singer is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She graduated in 2021 from Michigan Tech with a Bachelor's and Master's of Science in Environmental Engineering. Her current research interests include engineering identity formation, community college engineering education, and mixed methods research.

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