2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete research paper discusses findings from the implementation of three indirect assessments to measure first year engineering (FYE) student ability to exercise an entrepreneurial mindset (EM) via the 3C’s: curiosity, making connections and creating value. Higher education institutions continually face calls from industry to graduate engineers who are prepared to work in a globalized market. One way to help prepare future engineers for this environment is to equip them with an EM. At our institution, we have integrated the 3C’s into our FYE program to begin nurturing these skills and prepare students to enter industry upon graduation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts, direct and indirect assessments were designed and implemented to holistically assess student ability to demonstrate each of the 3C’s. In this paper, we focus on student responses to all three indirect assessments.

Likert-style indirect assessments for each of the 3Cs were deployed to students in the honors sequence of our FYE program during the 2022-2023 academic year. Kashdan’s Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale, which contains five distinct curiosity constructs (i.e., joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, thrill seeking, social curiosity) was utilized as the indirect assessment of curiosity. Indirect assessments for creating value and making connections were developed previously by our research team. Previous work details the factor analysis conducted which resulted in three constructs for creating value (i.e., creating value within engineering design; attitudes and approach toward value creation; create value for others) and four constructs for connections (i.e., integrate outside information; consider social, economic and environmental factors; define connections; make connections within engineering design). The assessments were administered in a pre-post fashion, collecting responses at the beginning of the fall 2022 semester and end of the spring 2023 semester to determine what aspects of the EM our students captured, and significant changes they exhibited over the FYE course sequence.

To analyze student responses on the indirect assessments, means were computed per participant for each of construct associated with the curiosity, connections, and creating value. These constructs and their validity are discussed in previous works. Pre and post responses were compared using a paired t-test or Wilcoxon signed rank test based on data set normality. Our results indicate a significant increase (p<0.05) in student self-reported pre-post scores for the stress tolerance curiosity construct along with all three factors belonging to the creating value assessment, and all four factors from the connections assessment. Our results also demonstrate a significant decrease in pre-post scores for the thrill-seeking curiosity construct. Collectively, these results indicate that student perceptions related to their abilities to be curious, make connections, and create value largely increased over their FYE experience.

This complete research paper will further explore the indirect assessment results and compare them to results from previous implementations of the assessment series using independent samples t-testing. Upon conducting these tests, this paper will discuss the impacts of curricular enhancements made across the two implementations and the implications of these findings on pedagogical approaches to best support students as they acquire an EM.