2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Retention, recall, comprehension, and measurable skills are mainstays of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and yet they represent only a fraction of what engineering educators hope to achieve through education. The development of self-efficacy, for example, is a common goal and is often measured as a psychological construct. Less commonly measured constructs that are nonetheless commonly valued by educators are the development of creativity, perseverance (grit), and self-concept.
Self-concept is particularly interesting in the context of career goals. Biomedical engineering undergraduates are often drawn to clinical practice rather than to careers in engineering – 54% according to one study. This implies an equivalent self-concept among BME majors as clinicians than as engineers. Indeed, this has been shown to be the case in previous work. These data sets were small, however, and they left unknown how malleable self-concept may be over the course of a single semester, for different groups, or in different learning environments.
We performed a multi-year study of BME students’ career self-concept as engineers and as clinicians. The goal was to determine (a) if career self-concept, either in the absolute sense or in its change over time, differed by demographic group; and (b) whether career self-concept was influenced by learning modality. The pedagogical changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic served as a natural experiment for the latter.
Over the course of six contiguous semesters spanning Fall 2019 to Fall 2021 we measured absolute and relative self-concept (engineer versus clinician) from 333 students via explicit declaration, and via an implicit attitudes test (IAT). The IAT is a psychological test that relies on repeated measures of response latency in a subject’s association of two concepts – in this case, between the concepts of self and other, and the concepts of clinician and engineer. We interpreted the resulting measure of implicit bias as a measure of career self-concept.
The data suggest that career self-concept is, on average, remarkably stable with modest and oftentimes insignificant changes over the course of a single semester, and with few or no trends across the pre-, mid-, and post-pandemic timeframe. It varies greatly between individual students, however, and can change greatly over the length of a single semester, though students gaining in engineering career self-concept are balanced by students losing in engineering self-concept. We identified differences in self-concept change between racial/ethnic groups and between first-generation and continuing-generation students. We also found that students cannot accurately judge their own changes in engineering career self-concept.