Across the country, community colleges take interventional measures to eliminate factors that thwart the retention, engagement, and success of their respective students. Among the most debilitating of these factors is the lack of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as the confidence an individual has in their ability to achieve an objective effectively. Considering that low self-efficacy is attributed to a variety of reasons, there is no standard practice to eliminate this issue for every student. A combination of approaches is used concurrently by programs in order to address common causes including diversity exclusion and gender inequality. Community college engineering programs across the country attempt to increase student success through different interventions. However, academically exceptional students often fail to delve into co-curricular activities, especially at the community colleges. Community colleges are often commuter schools and students do not feel the need to get involved with co-curricular activities. Oftentimes, students are apprehensive about appending extracurriculars to their workload with the belief that this may negatively affect their performance to an unknown degree. Although it has been shown that participation in co-curricular activities will increase confidence, leadership and belonging that will increase classroom performance, community college students opt to stay within a comfort zone of their current, solely academic workload and give up vital opportunities to develop professionally. We hypothesize that increased participation in co-curricular activities will increase self-efficacy and will improve academic performance. In this paper, we will correlate co-curricular participation to success. Utilizing personal experiences of ABC engineering students and alumni, this paper will shed light on the comfort zone dilemma and supports the concept of a compounding reward-system as means to increase the self-efficacy of undergraduate engineering students by repeatedly overcoming their comfort zones. The concept of a compounding reward system will be validated by correlating individual students’ grade point averages (GPA) and course workloads to overall time commitments and co-curricular activities per semester. Student participation will also be correlated with time to degree completion at the community college. We will use a survey and case study interviews to assess self-efficacy in relation to community college engineering students’ participation. By correlating student involvement with GPA and time to degree completion we will determine the role of the reward system in increasing student self-efficacy and, thus, student success.
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Undergraduate Socialization in Engineering: The Role of Institutional Tactics and Proactive Behaviors
Higher education literature is replete with evidence that socioeconomic variables and background characteristics inform a myriad of factors related to students’ college life. These include the institutions students choose to attend, their experiences after matriculation, differences in success rates, and even post-graduation outcomes. This is particularly true in engineering, where gaps in academic performance, persistence, and degree attainment still endure despite the litany of federal, institutional, and unit-level resources designed to address socioeconomic disparities.
In contrast to much of the literature that takes a deficit-based approach, in this work we presuppose that it is not simply differences in socioeconomic variables and background characteristics that separates highly engaged, successful students in engineering from their less engaged, unsuccessful counterparts. Rather, we suggest that an underlying set of socialization processes by which students become familiar with collegiate engineering education makes students more or less likely to engage in activities that are associated with success. We posit that students’ experiences with these socialization processes – institutional socialization tactics and proactive behaviors – may better explain patterns of participation and outcomes in engineering that go beyond the consideration of access to academic and social resources.
Drawing on Weidman’s Undergraduate Socialization framework, we developed a conceptual model for understanding the socialization processes that inform engineering students’ participation in co-curricular activities (specifically professional engineering societies and student design teams). This model is guided by three hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that socioeconomic, academic, and demographic background characteristics combine to uniquely inform students’ experiences with two socialization processes – institutional tactics and proactive behaviors. This, in turn, informs their participation in co-curricular activities, such as professional engineering societies and student design teams. Finally, students who participate in co-curricular engineering activities have different academic and social outcomes than their counterparts who do not participate in co-curricular engineering activities. We also developed a survey instrument based on this model to understand how various socioeconomic variables and background characteristics inform students’ socialization processes and, as a result, their outcomes in engineering.
Our goal is to understand the factors that shape students’ socialization into engineering, as well as their development into engineers. Ultimately, our goal is to narrow gaps in participation and success in engineering by addressing negative socialization experiences.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1640417
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10072811
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings
- ISSN:
- 2153-5868
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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