Cultivating First-Year Engineering Students’ Connecting Agency

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Abstract

Lower-division undergraduate STEM courses aim to provide a foundation for engineering majors. Such courses are necessarily broad, creating a fragmented experience for students. In this study, we investigated how a 1-credit chemical engineering course can support students to become responsible for building connections between foundational mathematics/physics, their developing interests in engineering, and their cultural and everyday experiences. We used mixed methods to investigate how a course project can support minoritized students to agentively connect content in their foundational STEM courses to the work of engineers and to their prior everyday and cultural experiences. Qualitative analysis of student talk shed light on the nature of connecting agency and its development.

Authors

• Ruben Lopez-Parra, Purdue University

• Kanchana Konara Mudiyanselage, University of New Mexico

• Vanessa Svihla, University of New Mexico

• Gulnara Kussainova, University of New Mexico

• Madalyn Wilson-Fetrow, University of New Mexico