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Engineering programs have long struggled with balancing curricula that are rigorous enough to prepare graduates to be capable practitioners and educational experiences that are engaging enough to retain undergraduate students. Over the past 60 years, data collected from a variety of institutions across the United States capture an alarming trend – only about half of students who start in an engineering program will actually graduate with an engineering degree. Several studies found that the first-year engineering curricula, which traditionally consist of physics, chemistry, and mathematics courses, are ineffective in motivating students to persist in a program. Many students who leave after their first or second year explain that they came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession altogether. Together, these findings suggest a mismatch between what incoming students think engineering is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. To address retention issues in the first year of an engineering program, many institutions now employ a first-year design experience intended to expose students early on to the true nature of engineering [4]. However, the engineering science courses that occupy a significant proportion of the middle two years of a program still most often utilize traditional lecture-based pedagogy and simplified close-ended textbook problems, which do not typically allow students to make the connection between these classes and the engineering design process or the engineering profession. These types of closed-ended problems also do not provide students with the opportunity to engage in the kind of decision-making that leads to developing sound engineering judgement. Recent work developing and studying the effects of open- ended modeling problems define an opportunity to provide students with challenging problems that simultaneously reinforce their understanding of course material and expose them to the realities of engineering practice. This NSF-funded work proposes introducing two different pedagogies into a Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Iowa. The first pedagogy is designed to provide a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. The second instructional technique is intended to provide students with context for how engineering science concepts are implemented in authentic engineering practice and how engineering judgement is essential in that implementation. This work will aim to understand how historical and/or technical contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can influence the intentions of students, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women, to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students. 

Engineering programs have long struggled with balancing curricula that are rigorous enough to prepare graduates to be capable practitioners and educational experiences that are engaging enough to retain undergraduate students. Data show a little more than half of students who start in a program leave after the first or second year, and that many of those students came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession. These findings suggest a mismatch between what incoming students think engineering practice is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. This work will aim to understand how contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can improve the intentions of students, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women, to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students. In addition, this work will contribute new knowledge about students’ understanding of what it means to practice engineering and how that understanding changes with exposure to different types of contextualization (e.g., historical or technical). It will also contribute new knowledge about how undergraduate students associate engineering science and judgement with engineering practice, particularly with respect to how these facets of engineering practice are directly in service to design. Engineering science courses that occupy the middle two years of a program most often utilize traditional lecture-based pedagogy and simplified close-ended textbook problems, which do not typically allow students to engage in the kind of decision-making that is essential to developing engineering judgement. This work proposes a teaching pedagogy intended to provide students with context for how engineering science concepts are implemented in authentic engineering practice and how engineering judgement is essential in that implementation. Moreover, this work will aim to employ another teaching pedagogy to provide a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. This pedagogy was implemented during the Fall 2023 semester in a required seminar course for mechanical engineering sophomores at [name of university]. This work will advance the field of engineering education research by studying how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program, and how these educational activities can shape that progress and/or reframe their beliefs about their education and training. Semi-structured interviews will reveal how students’ perceptions of engineering practice change longitudinally and whether the aforementioned educational activities influence that trajectory. In addition, a larger group of students will be invited to participate in surveys, which will enable drawing inferences from a broader sample about intention to persist as well as baseline levels of familiarity with engineering in general.