2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This theory work-in-progress paper utilizes multiphase mixed methods to study the alignment of undergraduate engineering student smartness beliefs with the perceived smartness beliefs valued and upheld by the field of engineering. The perception of who constitutes an engineer varies across people, but a commonly affixed view of engineers is that they are smart and must be to succeed in engineering. Smartness beliefs are the encapsulation of individual characteristics and interpretive perceptions with the wider cultural values and attitudes that surround the individual.. The basis for what distinguishes someone as “smart” is socially constructed and has been leveraged in problematic ways, such as gatekeeping who can be an engineer through social norms and practices or unfairly recognizing some students as smarter than others. This stratification of students contributes to persistent challenges and barriers for success in engineering. Prior work has illustrated commonly held beliefs used by students to define someone as “smart” in the context of the engineering classroom, such as succeeding with minimal effort or solving complex problems. However, work on smartness beliefs has yet to 1) leverage quantitative methods to develop a survey instrument to more broadly study student smartness beliefs across engineering students, and 2) examine how the alignment, or lack thereof, of students’ smartness beliefs with their beliefs about how the broader field of engineering defines and upholds smartness. The results of this work can better inform engineering identity development and subsequent distal outcomes like retention.

This paper discusses the initial process of developing a quantitative instrument to capture this alignment. In the instrument development process, we leveraged prior qualitative work that defined 11 overlapping smartness beliefs to use as the basis for the constructs of our instrument guiding item generation for our study. We also outline the second phase of the study that uses follow-up interviews after survey deployment to modify and hone the quantitative instrument based on user feedback. The results of this work is an initial survey that can probe students’ personal beliefs about smartness and their beliefs about how smartness is valued in engineering. In addition to these newly developed items, we also intend to collect theoretically similar measures to understand the convergent and discriminant validity evidence for the use of these measures in comparison to existing literature. We intend to utilize the survey data to model broader outcomes through the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) or latent profile analysis (LPA) to connect student beliefs alignment with certain engineering outcomes. The results of this work will create new measurement tools to better understand this important phenomenon in engineering and its subsequent effects on equitable student development and outcomes in engineering.