Assessing Happiness in Undergraduate Engineering Students

This research Work in Progress explores establishing a baseline for a measure of 'happiness' as a noncognitive construct, and how it might change over the school year for engineering students, and begins to explore how it may relate to other noncognitive attributes. Affective characteristics of engineering students have been studied in different contexts. Studies have attempted to assess the effect of affective and cognitive characteristics on retention, success, motivation, etc. Little if any research has been done on happiness of engineering students as an affective construct, or a trajectory of happiness within engineering cohorts. This work-in-progress builds upon prior research at a large, mid-Atlantic university. As the COVID pandemic began, multidisciplinary engineering students were given an open-ended prompt to submit an artifact that illustrated how the pandemic was affecting them. There were no restrictions, other than the assignment had to be capable of being submitted in the existing learning management system. Students submitted a wide variety of creative artifacts, from poems to movies to paintings. These submissions were analyzed based on the type of submission and emotion mentioned or conveyed in the assignments. Submissions were coded to glean characteristics such as happiness, sadness, and other emotions from the students' submissions. This was created in a snapshot in time, within the first few weeks of COVID and before the effects of COVID on students or society was evident. The COVID-19 pandemic had undoubtedly impacted any measure of happiness among engineering undergraduates (which was the impetus of the project). From this initial study, two research questions emerged: a) what is the happiness level of engineering students as they begin the academic year, and b) what is the trajectory over the course of the year? For further consideration, does a quantitative measure of happiness correlate to fixed vs. growth mindset? The Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) was administered at the beginning of the academic year, at the end of the first semester, and at the end of the year at a small, private, Midwest university. This study hopes to establish a baseline to understand how interventions might be designed to positively affect happiness within students. This paper will discuss the initial results of administering the SHS to undergraduate engineering students, with a comparison to results from a similar instrument measuring fixed vs. growth mindset.