2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As students begin their undergraduate studies, they are typically trying to choose a major and career. For students who study engineering, much of their early coursework is often situated in other departments to establish foundations in science and mathematics. A student’s decision about whether to persist in the engineering major is necessarily influenced by their experiences in their classes.

Recent work by Ge, Kellam, Lönngren, Villavicencio, and others has highlighted the importance of engineering students’ emotions in their ability to think critically, consider wicked problems, and complete design challenges. Work by DeBellis and Goldin in the field of mathematics education has highlighted another potential influence of such emotions: the emotions that students experience while solving problems (local affect) can have cumulative effects over time on their global affect, or their more stable attitudes, values, and beliefs towards the discipline. Gaps in the literature on affect in engineering students motivated us to design a study that was funded through PFE:RIEF to answer the following 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?
Moreover, engineering identity, or a student’s sense of themselves as an engineer, is discussed as having affective components such as the interest component of Godwin’s widely-employed social identity model of engineering identity. However, the specific influences of local affect and other aspects of global affect like recognition and self-efficacy in engineering as a subject have not been systematically explored, which motivates our third research question:
3) How do students’ local and global affect about mathematics, science, and engineering contribute to/interact with their identities, including engineering identity?

Using a mixed-methods approach, our study has now followed one cohort of students for over two years and a second cohort for over one year. We have invited students to complete surveys and interviews at the end of each semester, in order to understand their local and global affect in their mathematics, science, and engineering coursework and how these interact with their developing engineering identities.

Our case study analysis has revealed differences between engineering students’ affect towards engineering coursework and the required mathematics and science coursework taken early in the major; students who do not enjoy engineering coursework tend to leave the major, while students can persist in engineering despite strong negative emotions and global attitudes related to mathematics and science, as long as the negative affect is balanced by strong positive affect towards engineering and/or strong engineering identity development. In addition to obvious interactions between global affect and identity (e.g., interest), we have found that local affect has the ability to influence students’ performance and competence beliefs. An important theme that has emerged from this work is the importance of meta-affect, students’ cognition and emotions about their own affect, in determining how students respond to and reframe negative local affect.