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In this research paper, we sought to understand how meta-affect influences the strength of engineering identity in first-year students, since strong engineering identity is correlated with retention. Meta-affect refers to affect about affect, cognition about affect, and monitoring of affect. Goldin’s research on meta-affect has suggested that there is a cycle wherein students’ beliefs establish meta-affective contexts that in turn shape the experience of affective pathways. We analyzed transcripts of interviews conducted with students during their first year in an engineering program. The primary goal of the interviews was to gain insight into engineering students’ affect towards math, science, and engineering and their engineering identity. For this comparative case study, we focus on three students with different engineering identities. Our goal was to investigate and provide evidence for the trends and relationships between beliefs, meta-affective-context, and affect and their influence on engineering identity. We found relationships between meta-affect and engineering identity related to specific beliefs: beliefs concerning getting help, the challenges of engineering, and performance ability. These relationships had different implications for the students’ identities depending on the students’ meta-affective contexts and affect. Understanding the relationship between these factors can help instructors promote more productive beliefs and meta-affect. This could potentially help strengthen engineering identity and increase retention of students within engineering. 

The purpose of this complete research paper is to analyze the impacts of an open makerspace on the development of students’ engineering identities. This paper seeks to build upon current belonging analyses about makerspaces and shift the focus towards students’ engineering identities. Our team interviewed 17 first-year engineering students attending a small, private university located in the American southwest. During the interviews, they were asked to reflect on their experiences in classes and involvement in engineering related activities. Some of the interview questions are influenced by previous models of engineering identity. Our research team noticed a pattern of students spending personal time using the Makerspace in their engineering department. This is an open workshop where students have access to free supplies to do what we’ve called “make” which is the act of problem solving, designing, and building using the tools provided. The high rate at which this space is mentioned in tandem with the students’ successes during the two semesters exemplifies the impact it has on student retention rates. We noticed a trend that students who have strong engineering identities tend to spend time making in the Makerspace. Any mention of the Makerspace itself or any connective context pieces relating to activities of the Makerspace spoken by the group of students were collected by our research team. This paper will examine how heavy of an impact, if at all, the Makerspace has on the further development of a student's ability to recognize themselves as an engineer if they came into college with an initial interest in making. Our analysis suggests the Makerspace provides an opportunity for students to display performance when making. This in turn causes students to see themselves as engineers when they experience internal and external recognition from being in the Makerspace. The results of this analysis will aid in the creation of effective intervention methods universities can implement during the first year engineering curriculum to increase retention rates. 

This research paper analyzes the emotions that students experience while completing ill-defined complex problems called Open-Ended Modeling Problems in their engineering courses. Students are asked to make their own modeling decisions, rather than being given those assumptions, as is the case in most textbook problems. There are many approaches they can take, and having to make decisions and assumptions that impact the problem has been found to generate strong emotions. Goldin’s research on mathematics education asserts that students tend toward affective pathways while completing problems. An affective pathway is the sequence of emotions that a student goes through while solving a problem. Goldin theorizes that there are two main categories of affective pathways that students fall into: positive pathways and negative pathways. This paper builds on our previous work on the development of a survey instrument to quantitatively measure affective pathways. The survey asked students to drag and drop emotions into the order they experienced them during their problem solving process. In this study, we sought to improve upon our survey instrument. Based on our previous research, we added several emotions and alphabetized the list to see whether the order of words impacted the responses. Here, we examine the results from an updated survey question as well as a small set of interviews conducted to investigate how students approach answering the survey question by having them think aloud while completing it. The survey was sent to six classes at five universities, and interviews were conducted with six students at two of those universities. Through our analysis, we found that most students feel confused or frustrated at some stage, and that their emotions change as they continue from start to finish, which is in line with the findings of the previous version of the survey instrument. We are looking further into whether the students turned their frustrations into the positive or negative pathways that Goldin describes. From the interviews, we found most of the verbalized pathways matched what was submitted through the survey instrument. However, there were instances where the submitted and verbalized pathway did not match, suggesting further changes to the question’s implementation. Developing a reliable method for measuring affective pathways will enable future study of why and when positive or negative pathways occur, as well as potential actions that engineering educators can take to help students interrupt negative pathways. Goldin’s work suggests that negative pathways influence students’ global affect, which could impact retention in engineering. 

Abstract BackgroundReal‐world engineering problems are ill‐defined and complex, and solving them may arouse negative epistemic affect (feelings experienced within problem‐solving). These feelings fall into sequenced patterns (affective pathways). Over time, these patterns can alter students' attitudes toward engineering. Meta‐affect (affect or cognition about affect) can shape or reframe affective pathways, changing a student's problem‐solving experience. Purpose/Hypothesis(es)This paper examines epistemic affect and meta‐affect in undergraduate students solving ill‐defined problems called open‐ended modeling problems (OEMPs), addressing two research questions: What epistemic affect and transitions between different affective states do students report? And, how does meta‐affect shape students' affective experiences? Design/MethodWe examined 11 retrospective interviews with nine students performed across two semesters in which students completed OEMPs. Using inductive and deductive coding with discourse analysis, we systematically searched for expressions conveying epistemic affect and for transitions in affect; we performed additional deductive coding of the transcripts for meta‐affect and synthesized these results to formulate narratives related to affect and meta‐affect. ResultsTogether, the expressions, transitions, and meta‐affect suggest different types of student experiences. Depending on their meta‐affect, students either recounted experiences dominated by positive or negative affect, or else they experienced negative emotions as productive. ConclusionsIll‐defined complex problems elicit a wide range of positive and negative emotions and provide opportunities to practice affective regulation and productive meta‐affect. Viewing the OEMPs as authentic disciplinary experiences and/or the ability to view negative emotions as productive can enable overall positive experiences. Our results provide insight into how instructors can foster positive affective pathways through problem‐scaffolding or their interactions with students.