Navigating Transitions: Challenges for Engineering Students

As college students enter engineering, they face challenges when they navigate across various transitions. These challenges impact whether a student can successfully adapt to the rigorous curricular requirements of an engineering degree and to the norms and expectations that are particular to engineering. This article focuses on the transitions between disciplinary literacies, primarily addressing how ideas are communicated and which types of semiotic representations are valued, required, and ignored by the different cultures that come into play both prior and during a student’s engineering education. Specifically, it addresses navigation: Across secondary to postsecondary institutional expectations, contrasting common curricular experiences of secondary students and postsecondary curricular expectations. Between and within disciplines (including mathematics and science), which often have different ways of communicating and representing a single concept, especially in theoretical applications and practical calculations.From the traditional pedagogies of classrooms to the different methods and expectations of laboratory settings (for example, collaborative engagement in planning, experimentation, an understanding of experimental error, and an understanding of how all three are communicated and represented).