2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Measuring Secondary School Students’ Engineering Identity and Engineering Habits of Mind in the Next Engineers Programs (Work in Progress)

Presented at Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) Technical Session 4: Beyond Skills: Identity, Confidence, and Social-Emotional Learning in STEM Programs

This Work in Progress paper aims to develop reliable and valid tools for engineering educators and researchers to assess secondary school students’ engineering identity and engineering habits of mind to support students’ future engineering career goals. Although it is critical to prepare secondary school students to explore and build their identity in engineering, most research on engineering identity development and on expanding the engineering workforce focuses on postsecondary students in higher education. Our Next Engineers programs bridge this gap and focus on supporting younger students in seeing engineering as a potential career in their early educational experiences. In this paper, we describe the development of measures of engineering identity and engineering habits of mind that are appropriate for secondary school students. These measures are designed to assess the impact of the Next Engineers programs and to be applicable in a broader range of pre-college engineering learning contexts. We present the measure development process and report preliminary results from initial analyses.

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