Perceptions of Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Students Regarding the True Nature of Engineering Practice

Martell Cartiaire Bell; Aaron W. Johnson; Rachel Vitali

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Conference: 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Publication Date: June 22, 2025
Start Date: June 22, 2025
End Date: August 15, 2025
Conference Session: ME Technical Session 1 - Enhancing Mechanical Engineering Education: From Prerequisites to Practice
Tagged Division: Mechanical Engineering Division (MECH)
Page Count: 10
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/57034

Paper Authors

biography

Martell Cartiaire Bell The University of Iowa

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I'm am a second year Ph.D student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Iowa with a dual focus in engineering education and automation/artificial intelligence in manufacturing.

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Aaron W. Johnson University of Michigan

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Aaron W. Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department and a Core Faculty member of the Engineering Education Research Program at the University of Michigan. His design-based research focuses on how to re-contextualize engineering science engineering courses to better reflect and prepare students for the reality of ill-defined, sociotechnical engineering practice. Current projects include studying and designing classroom interventions around macroethical issues in aerospace engineering and the productive beginnings of engineering judgment as students create and use mathematical models. Aaron holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Michigan and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to re-joining Michigan, he was an instructor in Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Rachel Vitali The University of Iowa orcid.org/0000-0002-1436-6148

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Dr. Rachel Vitali is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Iowa. Prior to her appointment, she was a NASA-funded TRISH postdoctoral fellow in the Industrial & Operations Engineering Department at the University of Michigan, where she also received her B.S.E. in 2015, M.S.E in 2017, and Ph.D. in 2019 from the Mechanical Engineering Department. As director of the Human Instrumentation and Robotics (HIR) lab, she
leads multiple lines of research in engineering dynamics with applications to wearable technology for analysis of human motion in a variety of contexts ranging from warfighters to astronauts. In addition to her engineering work, she also has an interest in engineering education research, which most recently has focused on incorporating authentic engineering educational experiences through engineering history education and open-ended modeling problems designed to initiate the productive beginnings of engineering judgement and engineering identity.

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Abstract

From national data, roughly half of the students who start an engineering program leave within the first two years. Some of the most cited reasons include those students developing a dislike for engineering or even losing interest in the profession entirely, which indicates divergence between what students think engineering is and the reality they encounter early on in their training. This mismatch is unsurprising given that the first year in most engineering programs is occupied by mathematics and science courses. This work aims to characterize how contextualizing the practice of engineering can influence the perceptions of undergraduate mechanical engineering students. With this understanding, changes to undergraduate engineering education can be made to ideally improve student retention by educating students on the realities of the engineering profession in addition to the technical content they traditionally learn in their engineering science courses.

Central to this work is a teaching pedagogy focused on providing students with a more complete and well-rounded contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. This pedagogy was implemented during the Fall 2023 and Fall 2024 semesters in a required seminar course for mechanical engineering sophomores at [name of university]. Additional data was collected in Spring 2024 in an introductory dynamics course required for multiple engineering subdisciplines, including mechanical engineering. At the end of each semester, a survey was distributed to students that included Likert-type questions regarding intention to persist in their major and an open-ended question regarding their perceptions of engineering practice. This paper will focus on the qualitative analysis conducted on the answers to the open-ended questions, which captures the spectrum of students’ beliefs about the nature of engineering practice. These beliefs are described in a codebook iteratively developed through an analysis of the data. This paper also presents an evaluation of the interrater reliability of that codebook. This paper aims to also evaluate whether there are differences in how students answer the open-ended questions based on semester, major, and intention to persist in engineering.

Citation
Format

Bell, M. C., & Johnson, A. W., & Vitali, R. (2025, June), Perceptions of Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Students Regarding the True Nature of Engineering Practice Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/57034

TY - CPAPER
AB - From national data, roughly half of the students who start an engineering program leave within the first two years. Some of the most cited reasons include those students developing a dislike for engineering or even losing interest in the profession entirely, which indicates divergence between what students think engineering is and the reality they encounter early on in their training. This mismatch is unsurprising given that the first year in most engineering programs is occupied by mathematics and science courses. This work aims to characterize how contextualizing the practice of engineering can influence the perceptions of undergraduate mechanical engineering students. With this understanding, changes to undergraduate engineering education can be made to ideally improve student retention by educating students on the realities of the engineering profession in addition to the technical content they traditionally learn in their engineering science courses.

Central to this work is a teaching pedagogy focused on providing students with a more complete and well-rounded contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. This pedagogy was implemented during the Fall 2023 and Fall 2024 semesters in a required seminar course for mechanical engineering sophomores at [name of university]. Additional data was collected in Spring 2024 in an introductory dynamics course required for multiple engineering subdisciplines, including mechanical engineering. At the end of each semester, a survey was distributed to students that included Likert-type questions regarding intention to persist in their major and an open-ended question regarding their perceptions of engineering practice. This paper will focus on the qualitative analysis conducted on the answers to the open-ended questions, which captures the spectrum of students’ beliefs about the nature of engineering practice. These beliefs are described in a codebook iteratively developed through an analysis of the data. This paper also presents an evaluation of the interrater reliability of that codebook. This paper aims to also evaluate whether there are differences in how students answer the open-ended questions based on semester, major, and intention to persist in engineering.
AU - Martell Cartiaire Bell
AU - Aaron W. Johnson
AU - Rachel Vitali
CY - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
DA - 2025/06/22
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Perceptions of Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Students Regarding the True Nature of Engineering Practice
UR - https://peer.asee.org/57034
ER -