2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Broadening participation and promoting equity in engineering education remain persistent challenges despite decades of national investment. While traditional diversity efforts have emphasized access and recruitment, emerging evidence highlights the importance of understanding how psychological factors shape engagement and learning preferences. This study examines how empathy, engagement, and self-efficacy predict undergraduate engineering and STEM majors’ preferences for curriculum representations across core engineering and physics topics, including static and projectile motion, magnetic forces, and mathematical content such as the Pythagorean theorem. Grounded in a human-centered approach to engineering education, the research investigates how emotional and cognitive factors influence learners’ interactions with textual, symbolic, graphical, and pseudo-realistic visual materials. Data were collected from 964 undergraduate students at four U.S. research universities. Participants completed validated measures of affective and cognitive empathy, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement, and self-efficacy, along with a structured survey assessing preferences for 24 curriculum formats. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze relationships among six core psychological constructs and instructional representation preferences. Results indicated that cognitive empathy was associated with preferences for structured, abstract representations such as equations and diagrams, whereas affective empathy aligned with emotionally evocative or pseudo-realistic formats. Self-efficacy functioned as a moderator, with higher confidence linked to minimalist or exploratory visuals and lower confidence associated with scaffolded, visually detailed designs. Cognitive and emotional engagement predicted preferences for expressive or immersive visuals, while behavioral engagement was negatively related to passive formats. These findings demonstrate that empathy, engagement, and self-efficacy interact to shape how students engage with instructional representations. By integrating psychological and pedagogical insights, this work advances engineering education and underscores the value of empathy-informed, multimodal design for fostering inclusion, persistence, and deeper learning.