2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In general, engineering programs aspire to offer curricula that are rigorous enough to produce competent graduates as well as engaging enough to attract and retain undergraduate students. From evidence collected in the literature, about half of students who enter an engineering program leave within the first two years, often because they develop a dislike for engineering or lose interest in the profession altogether. These findings suggest a disconnect between students’ perceptions of engineering and the reality of engineering education they encounter in their early years of study. This research aims to explore how contextualizing the practice of engineering can improve students’ commitment to their degree program, especially among underrepresented minorities and women who historically have lower retention rates in the discipline. With this understanding, changes to undergraduate engineering education can be made to ideally improve student retention. Additionally, this work, funded through the PFE:RIEF program, will provide insights into how students’ perceptions of engineering practice evolve when exposed to different types of contextualization (e.g., historical or technical). It will also shed light on how undergraduate students link engineering science and judgment with engineering practice, particularly in terms of how these aspects serve the design process.

One important opportunity to improve curriculum lies with the engineering science courses that occupy the middle two years of a program. These courses often utilize traditional lecture-based pedagogy and simplified close-ended textbook problems that do not typically allow students to engage in the kind of decision-making that is essential to developing engineering judgement. This work proposes a teaching pedagogy intended to provide students with technical context for how engineering science concepts are implemented in authentic engineering practice and how engineering judgement is essential in that implementation. This pedagogy was implemented during the Spring 2024 semester in an introductory dynamics course required for multiple engineering subdisciplines at [name of university]. Moreover, this work employs another teaching pedagogy to provide a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. This pedagogy was implemented during the Fall 2023 and Fall 2024 semester in a required seminar course for mechanical engineering sophomores at [name of university]. This work will advance the field of engineering education research by studying how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program. Additionally, this work will address how these educational activities can shape that progress and reframe their beliefs about their education and training. Preliminary results from semi-structured interviews will illustrate students’ perceptions of engineering practice and whether the aforementioned educational activities influence that trajectory. Furthermore, data analysis will also be presented with respect to a larger group of students that were invited to participate in surveys.