2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The recent Boyer 2030 commission report on undergraduate education at U.S. research universities emphasized "World Readiness," referring to "a vision of undergraduate education that includes and goes beyond the essential goal of near-term workforce readiness to empower students for citizenship, life, and work throughout their lifetimes" [1, p.22]. In order to optimize student learning and success towards "world readiness," we must empower students to become agents of change in their own spaces, including being able to effectively self-regulate their own learning and take responsibility to understand and apply engineering. In 2015, the Electrical Engineering Department at a large, south-eastern R1 university in the U.S. initiated the TRUE (Take Responsibility to Understand Engineering) initiative as part of a department cultural transformation program.

The TRUE initiative was one of multiple elements in the transformation, and within the initiative, the implementation of TRUE projects was a key programmatic activity. TRUE projects bring together students, faculty, industry, and community to engage in real-world problem-solving during the 4-year undergraduate program. Students take responsibility to self-regulate, learn, and apply engineering to real-world problems. While similar models of real-world engagement (e.g., EPICS) exist, they are either limited to a specific category of stakeholders, such as industry or community, or a particular program, such as capstone design. The TRUE projects allow learners across the four-year engineering curriculum to participate, while also holistically building the skills required for the projects via specialized courses, outreach programs, and mentorship.

Implementation of the TRUE initiative over the past seven years provides an opportunity to qualitatively understand the development of students' engineering self-efficacy as a result of their participation. Self-efficacy measures students' beliefs in their ability to achieve tasks [2]. In this study, it serves as a construct to understand TRUE project's utility in preparing "world-ready" engineers, since students who believe in their own capabilities also tend to engage in their work for their own mastery and find their work valuable and interesting [3]. Therefore we ask: What are the students’ perceived engineering self-efficacy as a result of participating in Take Responsibility to Understand Engineering (TRUE) projects?

We conduct semi-structured interviews with students, faculty, industry, and community representatives to gather data on their experiences in TRUE projects. Using thematic analysis, we apply inductive coding to identify themes that answer the research question. Results from this study provide insights into the efficacy of department-level reform initiatives in addressing the demand to prepare engineers who are ready to grapple with complex global problems and effectively seek nuanced understandings in 2030 and beyond.