Can Disciplinary Integration Promote Students' Lifelong Learning Attitudes and Skills in Project-Based Engineering Courses?

Today's engineering graduates face an evolution of global priorities that places a greater emphasis upon sustainability, community, and well being. Overcoming the complex challenges of this shift will require engineers to display agility, resilience, intrinsic drive, and an ability to continually grow and develop-capacities that are currently underemphasized in engineering degree programs. Despite a growing recognition of the importance of socially responsible technological development, many engineering programs continue to prioritize decontextualized technical content learning over broad competency development. As a result, students may have difficulty identifying either personal or societal value in their engineering activities. Wesuggest that the integration of engineering and humanities perspectives can help students situate their technical studies within the larger human system while simultaneously offering measurable improvements in students' motivations and lifelong learning skills. In this paper, we report findings from an investigation of the effects of disciplinary integration on student motivation and learning engagement in introductory materials science courses. The quantitative results show that integrating materials science with humanities through a project-based course effectively supports increased student motivation and engagement in self-regulated learning strategies. Compared to students in non-integrated project-based courses, students in integrated project-based courses show higher intrinsic motivation and task value. Students in the integrated materials science-history course also report significantly higher use of critical thinking strategies in their project work, indicating that an emphasis on societal context may help students cognitively engage in their engineering studies. Findings also indicate that disciplinary integration offers particular benefits to women engineering students. Compared with the non-integrated course, women in the integrated course report more significant motivational and self-regulated learning gains. This research suggests that putting human contexts at the center of engineering learning can help all engineering students, and especially women engineering students, build a sense of societal relatedness that promotes better learning.