Tracking First-Year Engineering Students' Identity Metrics

The first year of any engineering curriculum is critical. It has the potential to provide a strong foundation in the engineering discipline and positively impact a student's engineering identity. Specifically, increases in engineering identity have been shown to increase student persistence within the engineering field, along with other benefits. However, despite the importance of engineering identity, little is known about how First-Year Engineering (FYE) programs impact identity development. In order to provide insight on identity development, we examined the changes in a set of identity-related constructs (major choice, career choice, engineering identity, belonging in engineering, and engineering expectancy/ability) of FYE students at two different institutions with differing FYE structures. We gathered and analyzed results from three surveys administered across the first year of engineering. Three hundred students completed the initial survey, ninety of those three hundred completed the second survey, and fifty-one of the ninety completed the third and final survey. Our results indicate an increase in all the constructs from the beginning to the end of the year for students at both institutions. However, we observed a decrease in most constructs from the second to the third surveys. We also observed differences in career choice and engineering expectancy/ability across the two institutions. Additional research is needed to better understand the reason behind these changes; however, we believe this work has laid the foundation for better understanding changes in identity-related constructs for students in FYE.