2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Characterizing Personal Cultural Orientations of First-Year Engineering Students by Latent Profile Analysis: A Person-Centered Approach

Presented at ERM WIP IV: Examining Undergraduate Recruitment & Retention

This work-in-progress research paper adopts a person-centered approach to explore latent cultural profiles of first-year engineering (FYE) students, contributing to culture-centered engineering education research. Despite several previous works investigating the role of culture on engineering student experiences and learning, there is still a need to better characterize the cultural profiles of engineering students and professionals, especially with the proper application of established frameworks and models. Grounded in Hofstede's cultural value model, this work seeks to characterize personal cultural orientation (PCO) profiles of FYE students via latent profile analysis. We surveyed over 1,700 FYE students at a large Midwestern University with Sharma's 2010 PCO instrument. Data were processed via latent profile analysis with three steps: 1) conducting confirmatory factor analysis; 2) clustering data using weighted factor loadings and evaluating potential results via model fit statistics; and 3) interpreting the final chosen result based on PCO profiles and demographic data. The findings reveal five distinct cultural profiles existing among FYE students, where four cultural dimensions (gender equality, social inequality, interdependence, and power) exhibit the most prominent variations to distinguish profiles. This work expands our understanding of FYE students from a cultural perspective and lays a foundation for advancing culture-based scholarship in engineering education, fostering equitable and inclusive practices.

Authors

Dr. Siqing Wei http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-7086-5953 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. Siqing Wei received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education program at Purdue University as a triple boiler. He is a postdoc fellow at the University of Cincinnati under the supervision of Dr. David Reeping. His research interests span three major research topics, which are teamwork, cultural diversity, and international and Asian/ Asian American student experiences. He utilizes innovative and cutting-edge methods, such as person-centered approaches, NLP, ML, and Social Relation Models. He studies and promotes multicultural teaming experiences to promote an inclusive and welcoming learning space for all to thrive in engineering. Particularly, he aims to help students improve intercultural competency and teamwork competency through interventions, counseling, pedagogy, and mentoring. Siqing received the Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award in 2024 from Purdue College of Engineering, a Bilsland Dissertation fellow in the 2023-24 academic year, and the 2024 FIE New Faculty Fellow Award.
Alexander V Struck Jannini PhD http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8661-7962 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Dr. Jannini is a postdoctoral associate at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He currently works under Dr. Eunsil Lee, focusing on sense of belonging and synthesis research. He graduated from Purdue University with his PhD in Engineering Education, where he focused on using motivational theories in engineering education. He also holds a Master's in Chemical Engineering from Rowan University, and Bioengineering from Syracuse University.
Dr. David Reeping http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0803-7532 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. David Reeping is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering and Computing Education at the University of Cincinnati. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He received his B.S. in Engineering Education with a Mathematics minor from Ohio Northern University. His main research interests include transfer student information asymmetries, threshold concepts, curricular complexity, and advancing quantitative and fully integrated mixed methods.

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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