2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The frequency and cost of emergencies, disasters, and crises continue to increase in the United States, with hundreds of weather-related disasters since 1980 and total damages measured in the trillions of dollars. Engineers and engineering organizations play critical roles in preparedness, response, and recovery, yet structured emergency, disaster, and crisis management education remains uncommon in engineering curricula. To address this gap, we designed and implemented a three-week instructional module that introduces engineering students to EDCM standards and guidelines, foundational concepts, and professional practices aligned with the National Incident Management System. The module was implemented in Spring 2025 within an Advanced Systems Safety Engineering course at a large public Hispanic-Serving Institution in the United States.
This Work-in-Progress paper examines intrapersonal factors that may shape how students engage with and benefit from the module. Specifically, we investigate students’ self-regulated learning (SRL) focusing on motivational orientations and learning strategies, and their achievement emotions during module learning activities. Understanding how SRL and emotions co-occur, and whether patterns differ by demographic characteristics, is especially important for equitable module redesign and assessment.
Participants included 53 students (undergraduate seniors and graduate students) who completed all study measures. Students completed (1) a pre-test assessing baseline EDCM knowledge, (2) an adapted subset of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) capturing motivational orientations (administered prior to the module) and learning strategies (administered mid-module), and (3) an adapted Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) aligned with the engineering course context (administered after module completion). Analyses included handling minimal missingness via mean replacement, F-tests and post-hoc comparisons to examine demographic variation, and Pearson correlations to examine relationships among SRL, emotions, and baseline knowledge.
Preliminary findings indicate statistically significant differences across racial groups in motivation, learning strategies, and both positive and negative emotions, while differences by gender were not statistically significant. Correlation analyses show that motivation and learning strategies are positively associated with positive emotions (notably enjoyment and pride), and motivation is negatively associated with multiple negative emotions. Baseline EDCM knowledge showed limited direct association with SRL and emotions, though it was significantly related to enjoyment. These results motivate targeted module revisions to more explicitly scaffold SRL and promote positive, activating achievement emotions, particularly for students who may enter with lower baseline EDCM familiarity.