2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Rapid socio-economic and technological transformation is reshaping expectations of future engineers, elevating not only technical competence but also interdisciplinary thinking, creativity, collaboration, and responsible professional judgment. These shifts foreground the need for educational models that develop not only knowledge and skills but also motivation and adaptability, particularly in the early years when students are forming initial professional identities and deciding whether to persist in the major.
Yet early-year engineering students often enter university with externally regulated participation, uneven tolerance for ambiguity, and limited readiness to navigate critique, setbacks, and collaborative demands. Although emotional and motivational factors are increasingly recognized as consequential, early-year curricula and widely used frameworks (e.g., CDIO 3.0, KEEN 3Cs, PBL/TBL, maker-centered learning) still only partially address the comprehensive and progressive nature of Emotional Readiness.
A central challenge is that Emotional Readiness is both developmental and heterogeneous: students’ emotional demands shift across interest exploration, technical challenge, teamwork, and professional meaning-making, while cohorts show uneven readiness profiles. This yields three design implications: instruction should be organized around evolving learner needs, emotional empowerment should be treated as an explicit learning goal, and supports should be differentiated across emotion awareness, stress management, resilience, and self-efficacy.
Guided by a reverse developmental analysis of stage-based psychological needs, we articulate a trajectory from safe exploration of interests and future selves, through individual and collaborative challenge engagement, to professional self-authorship and sustained intrinsic motivation and adaptivity. To operationalize this trajectory within existing curricula, we propose ICARE, a staged instructional architecture (Inspire–Challenge–Accompany–Redefine–Empower), that sequences instructor facilitation to progressively cultivate Emotional Readiness and guide students’ role transition from compliance-driven participation toward value-led engagement and adaptive professional growth.
We demonstrate ICARE in a first-year Engineering Graphics course using an artifact-based Double Diamond workflow, and frame assessment through triangulated evidence from deliverable traces, cohort patterns, continuity beyond the course, authentic-audience outcomes, and student-reported perceptions. Collectively, the paper contributes a curriculum-compatible pathway model and an evidence-oriented implementation approach that make early-year emotional motivational development explicit, staged, and assessable, positioning gateway courses as a leverage point for cultivating the readiness conditions that sustain motivation and adaptability over time.