BOARD # 424: Preliminary Results-Understanding Interactions Between Affect and Identity in First-and Second-Year Engineering Students (PFE:RIEF)

Recent work has highlighted the importance of engineering students’ emotions in their ability to think critically, consider wicked problems, and complete design challenges. Work in the field of mathematics education has highlighted another potential influence: the emotions that students experience while solving problems can have cumulative effects over time on their global affect, or their more stable attitudes, values, and beliefs towards the discipline. Gaps in the literature on affect in engineering students motivated us to examine students’ affect about engineering, mathematics, and science across their first two years of undergraduate engineering coursework. Engineering identity, or a student’s sense of themselves as an engineer, is discussed as having affective components (e.g., interest). However, the specific influences of local affect and other aspects of global affect (like recognition and self-efficacy) on engineering identity formation have not been systematically explored, which motivated this study. Using a mixed-methods approach consisting of surveys and interviews, our study has followed two cohorts of students longitudinally. Our work has revealed important differences between affect towards engineering itself and towards mathematics and science, as well as interactions between affect and identity.