2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Interventions targeting undergraduate students’ motivational beliefs have shown promise for increasing persistence and retention within the engineering major. However, few studies have systematically investigated the writing component in these interventions—a key component of helping students internalize the message. To understand how students are engaging with and internalizing the intervention material, more research is needed on how to evaluate the quality of engagement in these types of motivational interventions and how its quality predicts changes in motivational beliefs. This paper aims to: (a) outline the process for creating writing prompts; (b) provide guidelines for effectively coding these prompts to understand how students are differentially engaging with the intervention; and (c) evaluate the extent to which the quality of writing prompt completion is associated with changes in motivational beliefs in a YouTube role model intervention for community college engineering students. Results provide guidelines for effectively developing and coding writing prompts that target a wide range of motivational beliefs. Further, findings show that there were no statistically significant associations between the quality of writing prompts and any of the post- motivational beliefs. Implications for developing more effective interventions by analyzing students’ writing prompt responses are discussed.