(564d) A Novel Project-Based Course to Promote Chemical Engineering Students’ Connecting Agency and Enhance Retention

The New Directions for Chemical Engineering (2022) highlighted the need for better strategies to foster the recruitment and retention of students from systematically marginalized groups. Retention is impacted by students’ persistence, self-efficacy, and engineering identity (Geisinger & Raman, 2013). These individual factors may be negatively affected by students’ experiences in foundational courses such as mathematics and physics, where the content is typically taught with minimum reference to engineering and relevant examples (Harris et al., 2015). This disconnection between the course content, the engineering practice, and students’ experiences affect students’ beliefs and may persuade them to leave engineering. Commonplace remedies require significant course and program transformations. In contrast, we proposed an alternative solution, a new project-based, 1-credit, mandatory course for our first-year chemical engineering students to support their connecting agency. We defined connecting agency as making decisions that connect and situate new or abstract concepts. Namely, students engaged in two projects to help them agentively connect foundational mathematics and physics courses with their prior daily and cultural experiences and the professional engineers’ work.

In the first project, students were asked to propose a decarbonized power system for their chosen community in New Mexico. Students chose a familiar community, identified the community energy needs and available resources, and learned about renewable energy through experiments and models. Then, students communicated their proposed power system by presenting it to the community or writing a persuasive letter to a leader. The second project asked students to design a learning activity using sociotechnical problems to contextualize mathematics or physics content that students perceived as unclear and not of value in engineering. Students selected a mathematics or physics concept, explored why it was difficult, investigated its importance, and designed a sociotechnical problem to help others learn the concept. Then, they got feedback from advanced chemical engineering students and shared their final learning activity at an exhibition attended by mathematics and physics instructors.

To assess students’ connecting agency, we conducted qualitative analysis of students’ artifacts and interviews, and performed basic statistical analysis of a pre-survey and end-of-project surveys. Unsurprisingly, students indicated that they saw few connections between the foundational math and physics courses and their interests and prior everyday experiences. Only 26% reported having opportunities to connect these foundational courses and engineering, even though 75% considered these courses helpful in framing and solving engineering problems. In the decarbonized power system project, students made connections to their roles as civic-minded engineers, their futures as homeowners who could install solar, their preference for problem-solving, and to their interests in sustainability. A few students also reported that what they learned could be useful in their jobs, such as at a science museum. We will expand and contrast these results with students’ connecting agency in the second project in the presentation. Helping students develop their connecting agency can support their persistence, identity, and self-efficacy especially through early foundation courses that they perceive as disconnected from engineering. We will share tools and implications for other faculty, including examples of the curricula, surveys, and ways faculty can support students to develop connecting agency.

Geisinger, B. N., & Raman, D. R. (2013). Why they leave: Understanding student attrition from engineering majors. International Journal of Engineering Education, 29(4), 914–925.

Harris, D., Black, L., Hernandez-Martinez, P., Pepin, B., & Williams, J. (2015). Mathematics and its value for engineering students: What are the implications for teaching? International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 46(3), 321–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2014.979893

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2022). New directions for chemical engineering. National Academies Press.