2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Exploring Faculty Engagement in a Pre-College Engineering Outreach Program: Motivation, Facilitating Factors, and Barriers (Fundamental)

Pre-college engineering outreach programs play an important role in broadening participation in STEM. Engineering faculty are key stakeholders in outreach programs, even though in many cases undergraduate or graduate engineering students participate more actively. Greater faculty involvement could improve outreach quality and sustainability, but faculty engagement is often limited by time constraints and competing academic responsibilities. This study examines how engineering faculty members describe their motivations for participating in a pre-college engineering summer camp and how they perceive factors that facilitate or hinder their engagement. A basic qualitative research design was employed for analyzing semi-structured interviews with five engineering faculty members who served as instructors in a week-long summer camp for middle school students.

Findings show that faculty engagement was constructed by motivations operating across multiple levels, including personal interest in working with youth, alignment with academic roles and disciplinary expertise, departmental goals related to community engagement, and broader educational purposes associated with outreach teaching. Faculty engagement changed during the camp through interactions with students, undergraduate lab assistants (LAs), and the instructional context. Student enthusiasm and peer support facilitated engagement, while challenges related to teaching middle school students, classroom management, limited coordination with LAs, and logistic constraints hindered it. Additionally, instructional autonomy functioned as both a facilitator and a barrier, fostering creativity while also increasing uncertainty, particularly at the outset.

This study conceptualized faculty engagement as a dynamic, multi-level meaning-making process. The findings suggest that sustainable faculty participation in pre-college engineering outreach requires an organizational support environment that complements individual motivation and autonomy at work.

Authors

Hyena Cho http://orcid.org/0009-0003-6244-9778 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Hyena Cho is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in Human Resource Development. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in Education from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Her research focuses on learning and development in engineering education contexts, using quantitative and qualitative methods to examine workplace and organizational learning that supports safe, inclusive, and learning-friendly environments. She is particularly interested in STEM and medical education, with an emphasis on student and faculty learning, creativity, and professional identity formation.
Yang Victoria Shao University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Yang V. Shao is a Teaching Associate Professor in electrical and computer engineering department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned her Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. She has worked with University of New Mexico before joining UIUC where she developed some graduate courses on Electromagnetics. Dr. Shao has research interests in curriculum development, assessment, student retention and student success in engineering, developing innovative ways of merging engineering fundamentals and research applications.
Prof. Yuting W. Chen http://orcid.org/0009-0002-7513-9712 University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Dr. Yuting W. Chen is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also leads the Women in Engineering program as the Director. She earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Her current interests include recruitment and retention of under-represented students in STEM, professional development for graduate students, service-learning, and curriculum innovation in electrical and computer engineering.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026