Impacts of engineering engagement activities for first-year students

Serving the demands for future engineering professionals in our society requires increasing retention of students in year one. This study is focused on students enrolled in Innovation in Design, which is a semester-long introduction to engineering course for freshmen students at a large research university in the northwest. The course is an interactive, hands-on experimental introduction to several engineering discipline projects and employs a flipped classroom approach to explain fundamental engineering concepts before students apply and test those concepts in the classroom experiments. This structure exposes students in year one to engineering applications, with an additional piece of the course designed to further engage students in the engineering school and research activities. The Engineering Engagement assignment, which is the focus of this study, is posed to broaden student exposure to engineering outside of the classroom. Our approach consists of two types of engagement, where students choose between attending a research seminar or a club meeting. Assessment of the effect of engagement activities on motivation was performed with the Science Motivation Questionnaire II, adapted to engineering courses. Test results were analyzed using three engineering engagement activities: research seminar, club meeting, and senior presentations as independent variables and the five motivation constructs from the SMQ-II as dependent variables. None of the constructs showed statistical significance.