Background: Promoting engagement and motivation in early engineering experiences is important for fostering interest and retention in engineering. One method that has been effective for doing so is facilitating transformative experiences (TEs), which occurs when students apply academic content to everyday experience. Our goal was to explore the…

Background: Increasing the persistence of engineering transfer students can help meet the US national priority of increasing the number of engineering graduates. Many transfer students experience a decrease in their grade point average (GPA) at their receiving institution, known as transfer shock, which can lead to them leaving the institution.…

Background: Student persistence in undergraduate engineering majors often depends on how they perform in foundational engineering courses. Although mastery of prerequisite knowledge affects how students perform in these courses, research suggests that achievement goal orientations and task-value and self-efficacy beliefs play prominent roles in…

Background: Although most engineering colleges offer a variety of co-curricular and extracurricular activities to enrich students' sense of belonging to the college, existing literature has not fully captured whether and how the various activities serve to support students' sense of belonging and predict student outcomes. Purpose: We investigated…

Background: Demographic characteristics are known to influence participation in cocurricular activities. Less studied are the effects of other background characteristics. Purpose: We hypothesize that considering college knowledge and students' proactive behaviors in tandem with demographics provides better models for predicting such participation.…

Background: Given the importance of engineers to a nation's economy and potential innovation, it is imperative to encourage more students to consider engineering as a college major. Previous studies have identified a broad range of high school experiences and demographic factors associated with engineering major choice; however, these factors have…

Background: Graduation rates in engineering programs continue to be a concern in higher education. Prior research has documented an association between students' experiences in first-year mathematics courses and graduation rates, but the influences of the mathematics courses completed and the grades earned are not fully understood. Purpose: The…

Background: Mindsets are based on two basic assumptions: some people think that their intellectual abilities can be developed through hard work and instruction (i.e., a growth mindset), whereas others believe that nothing can change their level of intellectual ability (i.e., a fixed mindset). The association between mindsets and academic…

Background: Creativity is increasingly recognized as an important skill for success in the field of engineering, but most traditional, post-secondary engineering education programs do not reward creative efforts. Failing to recognize creativity or creative efforts can have particularly negative effects for those students with attention deficit…

Background: In recent years, technological innovation and entrepreneurship have been emphasized in engineering education. There is a need to better understand which individual- and contextual-level factors are related to engineering students' entrepreneurial intentions. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study explores individual and contextual predictors…

Background: The first semester in undergraduate engineering is often challenging for students, making this a potentially fruitful time period for exploring motivational changes and relations between motivational beliefs and achievement. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of the current study was to examine changes in implicit beliefs about…

Background: Increasing human resources in engineering is a key concern for the United States. While some research has considered pathways to doctoral study, there is no clear empirical evidence on the role of undergraduate experiences in motivating engineers to continue to graduate school, both in engineering programs and more broadly.…

Background: Encouraging student involvement in undergraduate research may be a way institutions can foster pursuit of research as a career. This article examines how engineering students' interests combine with perceived faculty encouragement to influence their plans for involvement in undergraduate and professional research. Purpose/Hypothesis:…

Background: Prior to college, many students have no experience with engineering, but some ultimately choose an engineering career. Women choose engineering at lower rates than men. This article uses critical engineering agency (CEA) to understand first-year students' attitudes and self-beliefs to predict the choice of an engineering career.…

Background: Sustainability is increasingly a vital consideration for engineers. Improved understanding of how attention to sustainability influences student major and career choice could inform efforts to broaden participation in engineering. Purpose: Two related questions guided our research. How do career outcome expectations related to…