2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work-in-Progress: Relevance, Responsibility, and Agency in Laboratory Experiments Predict Engineering Identity

Presented at WiP: Student Indentity, Support, and Success

In chemical engineering, laboratory experiments play a critical role in shaping students’ understanding of the profession, offering students opportunities to make decisions – to use their agency. However, such experiments vary greatly in their relevance to the work of chemical engineers and in the consequentiality of the decisions students can make. We investigate the role that having consequential agency has on students’ perceptions and development. Students completed surveys as part of their post-lab assignments that measured persistence intentions, engineering identity, demographics, relevance, agency in four domains: (1) experimental design; (2) experimental oversight and data collection; (3) data analysis and interpretation; and (4) communication of results. Using regression modeling, we found that engineering identity strongly and positively predicted persistence intentions. Relevance and consequential agency over experimental design (Domain 1) and communicating (Domain 4) predicted engineering identity. We will report the implications in a regular session.

Authors

Prof. Stephanie G Wettstein Montana State University - Bozeman [biography]

Stephanie Wettstein is an Associate Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering department at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT. She has been the faculty advisor of the MSU SWE chapter since 2013 and is an Associate Director of the Montana Engineering Education Research Center.
Dr. Jennifer R Brown Montana State University - Bozeman [biography]

Jennifer Brown is a Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Montana State University in Bozeman MT.
Prof. Eva Chi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7448-9943 University of New Mexico [biography]

Eva Chi is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at the University of New Mexico. The research in her lab is focused on understanding the dynamics and structures of macromolecular assemblies including proteins, po
Ms. Catherine Anne Hubka http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8892-6948 University of New Mexico [biography]

Catherine (Cat) Hubka, MFA, is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Writing. Her focus is Writing in the Disciplines (WID), specifically in STEM environments. She is a research assistant in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, where she has taught writing in the labs and worked closely with faculty on developing writing assignments and approaches to disciplinary writing.
Mx. Madalyn Wilson-Fetrow http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0509-2720 University of New Mexico
Dr. Vanessa Svihla http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4342-6178 University of New Mexico [biography]

Dr. Vanessa Svihla is a Professor in Organization, Information & Learning Sciences and in Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Svihla received the National Academy of Education / Spencer Postdoctoral Scholarship and the NSF CAREER Award, which President Biden also recognized with a PECASE. Their scholarship has been recognized for its contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion by the American Society for Engineering Education and the Professional and Organizational Development Network. Dr. Svihla, a disabled and chronically-ill scholar, studies how people learn as they frame problems in power-laden systems and how these activities relate to identity, agency, creativity, equity, and organizational change.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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