2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Examining the Engineering Self-Efficacy, Design Self-Efficacy, Intentions to Persist, and Sense of Belonging of First-Year Engineering Students through Community-Partnered Projects

Presented at First-Year Programs Division Technical Session 5: Identity & Belonging

One of the strongest motivations for studies focusing on first-year engineering programs is a desire to reverse the trend of students leaving engineering after the first year. While the student retention literature has extensively described various models of reducing student attrition, many of the institutional factors described in the literature may come a second too late for students struggling with engineering identity formation, lack of motivation, and considering leaving engineering in their first year. Community-partnered projects are very popular avenues for stimulating students' interests in engineering as they get to work on real-world problems, engage in problem-solving, and confer with local community partners. Sadly, many students fail to experience the excitement of working on CPPs until their final year capstone projects.

The context for this research paper involves community-partnered projects hosted at a large public university in the US. In a parallel paper, we are interested in factors that influence first-year engineering students' perceptions. In this paper, our aim is to do a deeper dive into students' perceptions of learning while engaging in CPPs in a first-year engineering course. Specifically, we set out to answer the following research question - ‘How does implementation of community-partnered projects in first-year engineering influence students’ motivations, learning, sense of belonging, and engagement?’

A qualitative research design approach will be used in this study to investigate the influence of CPPs on first-year engineering students. Eight to ten semi-structured interviews will be conducted online using Zoom. The interviews will be audio-recorded and later transcribed for analysis. The transcripts will be (re)read to fix errors (if any) that might have occurred in the transcribing process. The data will be collected by the end of November 2023 and the analysis will follow. The qualitative data will be coded using NVivo. An open coding method will be used to code the data and grounded theory approach will be used to find the emergent themes. A codebook will be created as the coding progresses. More details on the participant demographics, interview questions, themes emerging from the qualitative data will be presented in the full paper. The findings of this study will be relevant and timely as engineering education is growing and witnessing increasing students with diverse needs. Learning through community-partnered projects at first year of engineering is a potential step moving forward in that direction.

Authors

Dr. Javeed Kittur http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6132-7304 University of Oklahoma [biography]

Dr. Kittur is an Assistant Professor in the Gallogly College of Engineering at The University of Oklahoma. He completed his Ph.D. in Engineering Education Systems and Design program from Arizona State University, 2022. He received a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and a Master’s in Power Systems from India in 2011 and 2014, respectively. He has worked with Tata Consultancy Services as an Assistant Systems Engineer from 2011–2012 in India. He has worked as an Assistant Professor (2014–2018) in the department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, KLE Technological University, India. He is a certified IUCEE International Engineering Educator. He was awarded the ’Ing.Paed.IGIP’ title at ICTIEE, 2018. He is serving as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Engineering Education Transformations (JEET).

He is interested in conducting engineering education research, and his interests include student retention in online and in-person engineering courses/programs, data mining and learning analytics in engineering education, broadening student participation in engineering, faculty preparedness in cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains of learning, and faculty experiences in teaching online courses. He has published papers at several engineering education research conferences and journals. Particularly, his work is published in the International Conference on Transformations in Engineering Education (ICTIEE), American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), Computer Applications in Engineering Education (CAEE), International Journal of Engineering Education (IJEE), Journal of Engineering Education Transformations (JEET), and IEEE Transactions on Education. He is also serving as a reviewer for a number of conferences and journals focused on engineering education research.
Dr. Moses Olayemi http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-1396-280X University of Oklahoma [biography]

Moses Olayemi is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Pathways at the University of Oklahoma. He is a graduate of Chemical Engineering from the University of Lagos. He was awarded the 2022/2023 Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship by Purdue's School of Engineering Education and he has a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from the same university.

For his dissertation, he employed an embedded sequential explanatory mixed methods design to understand culturally relevant engineering education in multiple settings, focusing on the Federal Republic of Nigeria as the Case Study. For his work, his paper, "Telling half a story: A mixed methods approach to understanding culturally relevant engineering education in Nigeria" was awarded the best DEI paper in the International Division of ASEE at the 2023 Conference.

He is the Founding President of the African Engineering Education Fellows in the Diaspora, a non-governmental organization that leverages the experiences of African scholars in engineering education to inform and support engineering education policy, practice, and pedagogies in Africa.

His research revolves around the professional development of STEM educators and researchers in low-resource contexts for which he employs culturally relevant pedagogy and the contextualization and validation of measurement instruments with a keen interest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Tierney Harvey University of Oklahoma [biography]

Harvey earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering focusing on hydrology and fluid dynamics from Duke University. She has been teaching for about 10 years with a focus on first year engineering courses.
Haley Taffe University of Oklahoma [biography]

Haley Taffe is an Accelerated Masters student in Biomedical Engineering at The University of Oklahoma. She focuses on first year students and self-reflection opportunities within the classroom to enhance learning.

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