2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Students’ development of their engineering identity is known to play an important role in their decision to persist within the major. The first two years of students’ experiences are particularly critical, as most students who persist beyond this point will likely remain in engineering. While identity has been explored from many different perspectives, the influence of students’ affect on identity development has not been addressed. Existing models of affect and engineering identity suggest that local affect (the changing emotions that students experience during disciplinary activity) and global affect (the broad attitudes, values, and beliefs that students hold about a discipline) have potential to influence and interact with engineering identity (performance/competence, interest, and recognition), and in turn, to influence retention.

While affect has been found to be critical to learning and problem-solving in the fields of mathematics and science education, it has not been widely explored as widely in engineering education. As much of engineering students’ early required coursework takes place in mathematics and science departments, it is important to explore students’ affective experiences not only in their engineering classes but also in mathematics and science. Further, while affect has been widely studied using qualitative methods, our parallel use of qualitative interviews and piloting of quantitative survey instruments will contribute to the development of quantitative measures of affect that can be employed by others in STEM education.

This work seeks to address gaps within our understanding of affect in engineering students, as well as to develop a model of interactions between engineering identity and affect, building primarily on Godwin’s identity model (2016) and DeBellis and Goldin’s affect model (2006). Our study aims to address three research questions:
(1) How are 1st and 2nd year engineering students’ local affect different or the same while doing engineering work vs. mathematics and science work?
(2) Over the course of their early college experiences with mathematics, science, and engineering, how do students’ global affect about mathematics, science, and engineering change?
(3) How do students’ local and global affect about mathematics, science, and engineering contribute to/interact with their identities, including engineering identity?

This study is taking a mixed-methods approach. We have recruited two cohorts of students, who have agreed to participate in interviews and/or surveys at the end of each of their first four semesters pursuing coursework towards an engineering degree at a small private university in the southwestern United States. Using case study methodology, we are developing a model of the interactions between affect and engineering identity. The survey data is being used to inform the development of quantitative instruments for measuring affect, and to contextualize the interviews. This work will improve understanding of how students’ affective experiences in mathematics, science, and engineering courses contribute to or prevent the formation of their engineering identities, which in turn contributes to their decision to pursue or leave engineering. Because we plan to examine the influence of other identities on the affect-engineering identity relationship, this work could support participation and retention of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering.