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Recent data suggests that a little more than half of students who start in an engineering 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 indicate a potential mismatch between what incoming students think engineering practice is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. Unlike the other major professions with which engineering shares a common set of principles (e.g., medicine and law), there are very few examples of engineering in popular American culture, and fewer still that are realistic. Thus, a limited number of studies have considered the impacts of exposing students to the history of the profession on students’ perceptions of engineering practice. The overall aim of this project is to understand how historical contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can improve students’ intentions to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students. A secondary aim is to contribute new knowledge about students’ understanding of what it means to practice engineering and how that understanding changes with additional context for the careers for which they are preparing. This work provides second year mechanical engineering students with a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing them to the history of the profession. This work aims to advance the field of engineering education research by studying how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program, and how this activity can shape that progress and/or reframe their beliefs about their education and training. For example, students are educated about how the Morrill Land Grant Acts were essential to the growth of engineering at higher education institutions, but at the considerable cost of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from the lands provided to those institutions. Additionally, students are educated about the differences between professions and occupations, and how their technical competence is intimately connected with their ability to make ethical engineering decisions. Planned semi-structured will reveal how students’ perceptions of engineering practice change longitudinally and whether the aforementioned educational activity influences that trajectory. 

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.