2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Recent data suggests that a little more than half of students who start in an engineering program leave after the first or second year and that many of those students came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession. These findings indicate a potential mismatch between what incoming students think engineering practice is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. Unlike the other major professions with which engineering shares a common set of principles (e.g., medicine and law), there are very few examples of engineering in popular American culture, and fewer still that are realistic. Thus, a limited number of studies have considered the impacts of exposing students to the history of the profession on students’ perceptions of engineering practice. The overall aim of this project is to understand how historical contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can improve students’ intentions to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students. A secondary aim is to contribute new knowledge about students’ understanding of what it means to practice engineering and how that understanding changes with additional context for the careers for which they are preparing.

This work provides second year mechanical engineering students with a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing them to the history of the profession. This work aims to advance the field of engineering education research by studying how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program, and how this activity can shape that progress and/or reframe their beliefs about their education and training. For example, students are educated about how the Morrill Land Grant Acts were essential to the growth of engineering at higher education institutions, but at the considerable cost of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from the lands provided to those institutions. Additionally, students are educated about the differences between professions and occupations, and how their technical competence is intimately connected with their ability to make ethical engineering decisions. Planned semi-structured will reveal how students’ perceptions of engineering practice change longitudinally and whether the aforementioned educational activity influences that trajectory.