2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Learning is a lifelong process exercised within and beyond the classroom, and a vital skill in almost all technical professions. Engineers, in particular, are impacted by rapidly evolving technologies and practices that require continuous learning and adaptation long after their training and the initial transition into their professional careers. However, despite the critical role of learning in their academic success and profession, engineering students experience academically rigorous and challenging courses with minimal emphasis or conscious focus on learning strategies that power effective learning.
Often-used learning strategies such as rereading, highlighting, repetition, and memorization are intuitive for many students, yet do not facilitate the higher-order thinking required to solve difficult engineering problems and understand concepts. As a result, weak learning strategies are an important factor in why students often initially struggle in their courses to reach the level of concept mastery and the ability to synthesize, apply, and evaluate problems using engineering principles; and why they may continue to struggle as lifelong learners. The consequences of ineffective learning are already transcending in students’ academic careers: slowing their curricular progress and affecting their ability to adjust to university life, build self-regulatory skills, and gain a sense of control over their learning experiences.
These challenges stem from the fact that the engineering curriculum has traditionally emphasized teaching content and material while assuming that students can manage their own learning. Integrating self-regulated learning skills into the engineering curriculum holds great potential to promote students’ learning skills and growth mindset. The aim of this NSF IUSE-funded project is to develop, implement, and evaluate course-integrated self-regulated learning skills training interventions.
One challenge of such interventions is to have a thorough understanding of how engineering students are learning, and what learning strategies and learning behaviors they most engage with, so we can develop a targeted intervention to promote engagement of effective learning strategies/ behaviors and move away from ineffective learning strategies and behaviors. Although there is a range of literature that developed surveys and empirical studies to understand various components of students’ self-regulated learning skills, such as motivation, learning strategies inventory, metacognition, and growth mindset, there is no single survey and study that covers all these aspects. In addition, the majority of the empirical studies about learning strategies' utility were conducted in psychology, math, physics, and biology classes, with limited data on engineering students. Thus, as the first step of our project, we developed a complete set of survey questions to understand all three dimensions of students’ self-regulated learning (growth mindset, cognitive strategies, metacognition), with some questions adapted from existing validated surveys, and some newly developed questions. Using the convenience sampling method, in a pilot study, the surveys were sent to 831 engineering students in five mechanical and electrical engineering courses, which were taught by the four instructors who are NSF project team members. In this paper, we demonstrate the survey results with a general descriptive analysis for the general students' sample, as well as for various demographics groups, such as gender, first-generation college students, transfer students, and other underrepresented groups.