Investigating Memorable Messaging Across Undergraduate Engineering Pathways

Although the United States continues to need a strong engineering workforce, many students who begin engineering degrees do not complete them, and many graduates do not enter or remain in engineering careers. This project will address a national need to strengthen the engineering workforce by examining how the messages engineering students encounter in their degree programs shape their experiences and decisions to continue in the field. Messages may come from courses, advising, peers, professional experiences, media, or broader beliefs about engineering. The project will examine which messages remain salient for students and how they influence engineering identity development and pathway decisions. By identifying messages that discourage or support continued participation, the project will generate knowledge that can help engineering programs better understand student experiences and develop more effective strategies for supporting persistence. The project’s broader significance lies in its potential to help institutions cultivate learning environments that attract, retain, and support a growing number of engineers. The project’s goals are to examine how messages encountered in undergraduate engineering shape students’ engineering identity development and decisions to enter, persist in, and pursue careers in engineering. Research activities will focus on identifying the content and sources of messages, examining how students interpret and respond to those messages, and developing a methodological process for reauthoring messages that support greater participation in engineering. Multi-phase data generation will include longitudinal interviews, artifact gathering, focus groups, and co-design activities with undergraduates and institutional stakeholders. The project will result in a theory-informed model of messaging in undergraduate engineering based on phenomenological analyses to examine how students challenge or revise messages that constrain their participation. Evaluation will be conducted through formative and summative methods to assess project progress, transferability, and the usefulness of project outcomes. Publications, presentations, practitioner briefs, resource sheets, workshops, and a gallery will be shared with local and national audiences. This work will result in adaptable tools that institutions can use to identify and revise messages that shape students’ movement into, through, and beyond undergraduate engineering. Ultimately, this project will result in tools that are more likely to retain undergraduates, resulting in an engineering workforce that more fully leverages talent across the nation. This project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research (ECR) program and NSF's IUSE: EDU Program. The IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.