CAREER: Student motivation and learning in engineering

This study seeks to identify factors that contribute to students' motivation to pursue engineering, and to correlate these motivational attributes to problem-solving and knowledge transfer. Understanding these relationships will address one of the greatest challenges facing engineering educators: preparing students for a future of complex problem solving in the face of rapid technological change and globalization. The study population is drawn from bioengineering (BioE) and mechanical engineering (ME), thus allowing comparisons between two disciplines that have similar content and skill sets but different student demographics and career goals. Quantitative methods were applied to explore differences in motivation for students in different majors in the initial phase of the study. Results showed subtle differences between student motivations in different majors, and indicated the need to explore motivation factors more deeply through mixed methods. Data from a survey on student motivation and problem solving selfefficacy and two interviews (one related to motivation and the other to their problem-solving approaches) were analyzed. The motivation interviews revealed differences in students' perceived future possible selves, which affect their perceptions of the relevance of present activities. Ongoing problem solving interview data analysis will further reveal how motivation differences affect students' actual problem solving practices.