2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While strong evidence supports that experiential learning and developing engineering identity formation is important in college and in later career development, challenges creating robust structures for students to intentionally engage in the activities, reflect, conceptualize, and apply the lessons learned from those opportunities remain. Creating structures to support student development can be especially challenging at universities with large enrollments and/or a diverse student population. The paper will present in-progress work to identify pathways that support student development of professional competencies and engineering identity at a large midwestern college of engineering. This will be accomplished by examining student experiential learning engagement, assessing student development of professional competencies and engineering identity, and evaluating implementation and measurement strategies. In the paper, we will share plans for comparing and contrasting how a newly developed online student resource platform encourages students to leverage goal-setting and reflection to advance competencies and career readiness compared to those who do not use the platform. As we scale our efforts, this comparison will help us identify the most impactful approaches both in general and tailored for specific student populations.

Recognizing that students take multiple pathways through the curriculum and co-curriculum to develop professional competencies and an engineering identity, our study uses Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) as a theoretical framework to examine a variety of possible relationships between experiences and the formation of engineers. SCCT was selected because it aims to explain how career and academic interests develop, how career-relevant choices are made, and how performance outcomes are achieved. Our hypothesis is that the support we have in place to promote experiential learning and reflection, namely the new online student resource platform, provides important support to students for facilitating the development of professional competencies and engineering identity. We believe this approach can be done at scale and provide meaningful support to thousands of undergraduate students at the study institution. To answer our research questions, our study design involves a mixed-mode approach to data collection that includes cross-sectional and longitudinal engagement, professional competency development, and engineering identity data from students.

The use of an established framework (SCCT) for student development on a large scale also allows us to identify patterns in how specific populations develop through experiential learning engagement, elucidating what supports they may need or how they interact with institutional structures already in place at the university. Identifying these patterns can improve how we recognize and support the needs of all students, but it also provides a route to support underserved populations more equitably. Furthermore, reflection and highly tailored student engagement is a high touch activity. If our new online student resource works as the experiential learning support we expect it to be, it can serve as a rigorous (informed by learning theory) and scalable (able to reach large student populations) platform to support more meaningful student engagement in experiential learning and engineering identity formation in other contexts.