Research Initiation: Promoting first year engineering students agency to navigate their college experience through time management and metacognition skills

The student body in higher education keeps changing, making it critical to pay attention to the plethora of challenges that new generations face to achieve their academic goals. To honor our commitment to support their success, we need to capitalize on their strengths as well as supporting the navigation of their challenges. In addition, the weed-out culture of engineering needs to be replaced with a culture that supports the success of a wider diversity of students and a larger conceptualization of what it means to be successful. As the proportion of students having to work to pay for college keeps increasing, it is important to equip students to make the best of their scarce time. The learning of time management skills would go a long way to support that goal. Similarly, the development of metacognitive skills, the ability to think about one's thinking, is essential for students to engage in cycles of success. This research project will investigate the potential link between time management and metacognition skills on student agency and subsequent success as measured by traditional metrics such as grades, GPA, and retention, as well as non-traditional approaches to success, like wellbeing. The significance of this project is that it aligns with the goal of diversifying pathways to and through engineering, as it is designed to support a wider range of diverse students’ success through their engineering training. In addition, will allow the Principal Investigator, a well-established researcher in a traditional engineering field, to formally engage in engineering education research through a mentored experience with experts in the field. This project will explore the research to practice translation towards supporting the success of an increasingly diverse body of students. The project is designed to explore to what extent gains in time management and metacognition skills of engineering students advance their holistic success in the field. Therefore, we frame this research within a redefinition of success that includes measures of traditional success (e.g. grades, retention) as well as non-traditional measures (e.g. wellbeing). Our design relies on a first intervention involving students’ imagining their possible successful selves in order to generate a plan to achieve it. An intervention to provide students with metacognitive skills and enhance their time management skills will follow. Repeated measures with established instruments will be taken through one semester to explore the longitudinal development of such skills. In addition, the retention of such knowledge and skills will be gauged during the second semester of their first year to explore the effectiveness of the interventions. Finally, students’ perceptions of the impact of such interventions and their persisting challenges to the development of the targeted skills will be explored qualitatively through interviews. The research design will allow for two iterations of the research cycle which will provide refined materials that can be disseminated to other institutions for their use to promote metacognitive and time management skills of engineering students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.