2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Research paper aims to assess the motivation level and emotion states of engineering students enrolled in a writing course. Communication has been identified as one of the important 21st-century skills. Research has revealed that engineers need to develop verbal and written communication skills to share their ideas with others. Engaging engineering students in writing activities is an effective mechanism to help them reflect and develop critical thinking skills. Scholars have argued that engineering students are reluctant and demotivated to engage in courses focused on academic or technical writing. Studies have confirmed that training engineering students in writing will help them to share disciplinary knowledge with the community. Since writing is an essential communication skill that needs to be mastered early on in the program, therefore, engineering institutions need to create courses that focus on writing. In this paper, we intend to focus on a first-year engineering course that introduces students to the art of writing. The objective of the course was twofold: i) to help undergraduate engineering students learn about the intricacies of writing, such as writing an argumentative essay, and ii) to foster a learner-centered environment to keep students motivated and allow them to freely express their ideas through writing. Since the course was targeted at first-year engineering students, instructors refrained from using technical jargon, the concepts were explained using simple English language. For example, students were not asked to propose a research question rather, they were asked to think of the problems that they wanted to solve. The instructor and mentors guided the students to modify the identified problems into research questions. The course followed a project-based learning approach, students needed to submit two final projects. In one project, they needed to identify a grand challenge and write a research proposal based on the grand challenge. For both the papers, students were provided some themes based on either daily challenges, or themes from other subjects such as Artificial intelligence and Natures’ Machines. Based on these theme, students were required to write two reflection papers. Students for both these projects worked in a groups of five and were mentored by a research assistant.
The study was conducted in an engineering University located in India. The objective of the study was to understand the motivation and emotion level of students enrolled in a first-year writing course. The study used a 5-point Likert Scale to collect motivation and emotion levels data from 130 students enrolled in the course. The results of the study demonstrated that students showed a moderate to high level of motivation (M=3.62, SD=0.55), moderate to high level of positive emotions, they are enjoyment, hope, and pride (M=3.86, SD=0.66), and lower levels of negative emotions they are anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, boredom (M=2.64, SD=0.76). Further, we conducted multiple regression to assess the relationship between motivation and types of emotions they are enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom. The results indicated that enjoyment, anxiety, and shame were the predictors of student motivation [F(8, 121) = 15.19, p < .001, R2 = 0.50, R2adj = 0.47)]. The results confirmed that enjoyment had a positive impact on student motivation, whereas anxiety and shame were the negative predictors. Overall, the study showcases that helping students to develop positive emotions can lead to higher motivational levels among students. Therefore, instructors need to create learner-centered writing courses that allow the students to express their ideas and feel motivated.