2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

At the university level, there has been extensive work recently in engineering education to provide students with authentic, open-ended experiences that will develop the sociotechnical skills they need in practice. However, students enter those experiences from a K12 system that too often focuses on the constrained and contrived problems that mirror the standardized tests students will need to complete. One outlier from this trend are Career and Technical/Vocation Education (CTE) programs at the high school level.

CTE students learn both as students and as semi-professionals (DESE, 2023). CTE focuses on building competence within a given discipline through disciplinary instruction, framing, and practices (DESE, 2010). In the US, states set up frameworks - for certifying students within offered disciplines - with industry leading professionals, educators, and CTE alumni (DESE, 2023; DESE, 2010).

This study investigates the perceptions of preparation from recent CTE high school graduates to understand the ways that CTE high school graduates perceive that system as contributing (or not) to post-high school career experience. Participants are CTE high school alumni from Massachusetts currently enrolled in university education or professionally employed, full time across a variety of engineering and engineering related disciplines. Participants completed a basic demographic survey to situate them regarding gender, discipline major in high school, college or work enrollment, and year of graduation. Participants then participated in a semi-structured interview about their high school experience in CTE and their current career situation. The interviews were recorded and the transcripts form the primary data source for this study.

This study uses Communities of Practice and Landscapes of Practice (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014) to situate the alumni interviews. Analysis consists of emergent qualitative coding conducted in rounds. During each round, coding become more focused in scope and combined categories deemed similar. The process may be described as conducting initial coding, a review of initial coding, modification of initial coding, conducting round two coding, and so on. The preliminary analysis suggests that immersive exposure during high school to engineering practices, including technical and communication skills, and expanding engineering landscape knowledgeably - such as differences in practices between Civil and Electrical Engineering - through active participation were the most preparatory and impactful regarding engineering engagement after high school. Interviews suggest that competency of practices taught in high school gave a competitive edge at the university level in engineering classes, and that increased knowledgeably of engineering reduced stress surrounding the high school-college transition.

Moving forward, we seek to increase the participant pool in terms of individual participation and number of origin high schools, and to continue in-depth emergent qualitative coding and analysis.