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This research explores the intersection of mindfulness and engineering education. Among the reported benefits of mindfulness are enhanced cognitive flexibility, improved concentration, and increased emotional intelligence. These characteristics may be beneficial to engineers as they tackle increasingly complex and interdisciplinary challenges. This research looks at trait mindfulness of 75 students in an introductory engineering course. Results show that mindfulness correlates with business skills self-efficacy (including interpersonal skills) but not with mechanics self-efficacy or final grade. There is also a correlation between mindfulness and the intent to pursue a career in a small company or in an entrepreneurial start-up company. Implications of this research suggest that mindfulness-based classroom activities may help broaden the engineering education experience. (This paper earned the FiE Dasher Best Paper Award.) 

In order be successful, engineers must ask their clients, coworkers, and bosses questions. Asking questions can improve work quality and make the asker appear smarter. However, people often hesitate to ask questions for fear of seeming incompetent or inferior. This study investigates: what characteristics and experiences are connected to engineering students’ perceptions of asking questions? We analyzed data from a survey of over a thousand engineering undergraduates across a nationally representative sample of 27 U.S. engineering schools. We focused on three dependent variables: question-asking self-efficacy (how confident students are in their ability to ask a lot of questions), social outcome expectations around asking questions (whether students believe if they ask a lot of questions, they will earn the respect of their colleagues), and career outcome expectations (whether they believe asking a lot of questions will hurt their chances for getting ahead at work). We were surprised to find that question-asking self-efficacy or outcome expectations did not significantly vary by gender, under-represented minority status, and school size. However, students with high question-asking self-efficacy and outcome expectations were more likely to have engaged in four extracurricular experiences: participating in an internship or co-op, conducting research with a faculty member, participating in a student group, and holding a leadership role in an organization or student group. The number of different types of these extracurricular activities a student engaged in correlated with question-asking self-efficacy and positive outcome expectations around asking questions. The results illustrate the relationship between extracurricular activities and students’ self-efficacy and behavior outcome expectations. The college experience is more than just formal academic classes. Students learn from experiences that occur after class or during the summer, and ideally these experiences complement class-derived skills and confidence in asking questions. 

An open, receptive, and curious (mindful) mindset is often cited as important in innovation. Yet, engineering education typically focuses on narrow analytical training at the expense of fostering expansive thinking. To specifically explore the relationship between a mindful attitude (open, receptive, curious) and innovation, we examined the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and innovation self-efficacy in a sample of 1,460 engineering students and recent graduates who completed the Engineering Majors Survey. Using social cognitive theory to frame our analysis, we found that a mindful attitude is correlated with innovation self-efficacy and that students with a highly mindful attitude tend to participate in learning experiences related to design and innovation. These results lay the groundwork for how mindfulness may promote foundational skills for successful entrepreneurship such as innovation, learning, and motivation. 

When survey time is limited, education researchers may be faced with the choice of using an extremely brief measure of innovativeness or using no measure at all. To meet the need for a very brief measure, a 5-item innovation self-efficacy (ISE.5) scale was developed using the 19- item Dyer et al. Innovative Behavior Scale (IBS) as a starting point, adapted for undergraduate engineering students, and then condensed using confirmatory factor analysis. The ISE.5 measures innovation self-efficacy as a unitary construct drawn from Dyer et al.’s five innovative behavior components (Questioning, Observing, Experimenting, Networking Ideas and Associational Thinking) and has good internal and external validity as well as good test-retest reliability. The ISE.5 (as a measure of innovation self-efficacy) is shown to be an important mediator between innovation interests and a desire to pursue innovative work as a career postgraduation. This mediator relationship is consistent among important sub-populations of engineering students such as females, underrepresented minorities and first generation college students. While not a substitute for a full multi-factor innovation assessment tool, the ISE.5 can serve as an important indicator of innovation self-efficacy among an undergraduate engineering student population. 

This research paper presents the results of a study that uses multivariate models to explore the relationships between participation in learning experiences, innovation self-efficacy, and engineering task self-efficacy. Findings show that many engineering students participated in learning experiences that are typically associated with engineering education, such as taking a shop class or engineering class in high school (47%), taking a computer science (81%) or design/prototyping (72%) class as an undergraduate, working in an engineering environment as an intern (56%), or attending a career related event during college (75%). Somewhat surprisingly, given the rigors of an engineering curriculum, a significant number of students participated in an art, dance, music, theater, or creative writing class (55%), taken a class on leadership topics (47%), and/or participated in student clubs outside of engineering (44%) during college. There also were important differences in rates of participation by gender, underrepresented racial/ethnic minority status, and first generation college student status. Overall prediction of engineering task self-efficacy and innovation self-efficacy was relatively low, with a model fit of these learning experiences predicting engineering task self-efficacy at (adjusted r2 of) .200 and .163 for innovation self-efficacy. Certain patterns emerged when the learning experiences were sorted by Bandura’s Sources of Self-Efficacy. For engineering task self-efficacy, higher participation in engineering mastery and vicarious engineering experiences was associated with higher engineering task self-efficacy ratings. For the development of innovation self-efficacy, a broader range of experiences beyond engineering experiences was important. There was a strong foundation of engineering mastery experiences in the innovation self-efficacy model; however, broadening experiences beyond engineering, particularly in the area of leadership experiences, may be a factor in innovation selfefficacy. These results provide a foundation for future longitudinal work probing specific types of learning experiences that shape engineering students’ innovation goals. They also set the stage for comparative models of students’ goals around highly technical engineering work, which allows us to understand more deeply how “innovation” and “engineering” come together in the engineering student experience.