2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

When students struggle in their engineering studies, they tend to seek out means to improve their cognitive performance. Such assistance includes attending office hours for extra help, joining a study group or seeking out tutoring. Universities similarly focus on helping students through cognitive means, such as encouraging faculty to improve teaching methods, upgrading or improving technology resources or developing tutoring for specific courses. What is often not supported are students’ non-cognitive competencies, which have been shown in previous studies to be related to academic performance. Such non-cognitive and affective (NCA) competencies include, for example, mindset, motivation, self-control, study strategies and environment, and stress. Other NCA factors are less obvious than these and include meaning and purpose in life, gratitude, mindfulness, engineering identity, sense of belonging and perceptions of faculty caring. In this work-in-progress paper, we describe our ongoing work studying the impacts of a large set of NCA factors on student performance and student thriving. Our results to date, based on a large sample of undergraduate engineering students from across the U.S., show that most students can be grouped into one of four clusters, with each cluster having a similar NCA profile or set of factor scores. These cluster assignments have a strong and lasting influence on student performance as measured by the grade point average (GPA). In addition, through a longitudinal study of a subset of this sample, we find that five NCA factors change significantly over time, with these changes occurring between the students’ first and second years of study. These factors are sense of belonging, engineering identity-interest, expectancy, stress due to changes and reactions to stressors. Unfortunately, these factors all change in the direction that prior studies have shown to lead to poorer performance. These adverse changes notwithstanding, these students’ GPAs are still quite strong, indicating that, if universities can help students improve their NCA competencies, students can begin to experience thriving rather than surviving.