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Student Motivation and Engagement Across Time and Context Through the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Medley of Undergraduate Programming and Pedagogies

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37746

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37746

Download Count

1593

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Paper Authors

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Matthew J. Ford Cornell University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-1053-7149

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Matthew Ford received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and materials science from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to complete his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. After completing an internship in quantitative methods for education research with the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), he joined the Cornell Active Learning Initiative as a postdoctoral associate. His teaching interests include solid mechanics, engineering design, and inquiry-guided learning.

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Soheil Fatehiboroujeni Cornell University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5129-7428

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Soheil Fatehiboroujeni received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Merced in 2018. As a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Soheil is working in the Active Learning Initiative to promote student learning and the use of computational tools such as Matlab and ANSYS in the context of fluid mechanics and heat transfer.

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Elizabeth Mills Fisher Cornell University

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Elizabeth M. Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell. She received her PhD from U.C. Berkeley.

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Hadas Ritz Cornell University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5396-2962

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Hadas Ritz is a senior lecturer in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and a Faculty Teaching Fellow at the James McCormick Family Teaching Excellence Institute (MTEI) at Cornell University, where she received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2008. Since then she has taught required and elective courses covering a wide range of topics in the undergraduate Mechanical Engineering curriculum. In her work with MTEI she co-leads teaching workshops for new faculty and assists with other teaching excellence initiatives. Her main teaching interests include solid mechanics and engineering mathematics. Among other teaching awards, she received the 2021 ASEE National Outstanding Teaching Award.

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Abstract

Motivation is a multi-faceted construct encompassing orientation towards certain types of goals, the value and expectation of achieving those goals, and attributional beliefs. Our unique dataset tracks cohorts of mechanical engineering students through time and across multiple courses, allowing us to study context-dependent variables across time. We measured intrinsic goal orientation and extrinsic goal orientation in two cohort of mechanical engineering students at the beginning and end of the Fall 2019 and Fall 2020 terms. Though our original study was designed to evaluate instructional interventions in a "difference-of-differences" design, our cohorts were significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Based on the ongoing stress of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as widespread dissatisfaction with remote learning, we expected students to be less motivated overall in Fall 2020 compared to Fall 2019, and for motivation to erode more rapidly over the semester. Although intrinsic motivation was indeed lower in Fall 2020 compared with Fall 2019, the decrease in motivation over the course of the semester was the same. Furthermore, the availability of recorded lecture videos and class content may have mitigated against an expected drop in level of engagement for some students. Average student engagement, as measured by responses to in-class polling exercises remained constant between Fall 2019 and Fall 2020, and it appears that more students were able to maintain a 100\% participation rate in the remote context, though there is significant variation in engagement within the class.

We seek input from the engineering education research community on this work-in-progress study. We especially invite a discussion about how to make sense of survey results in dramatically different teaching contexts.

Ford, M. J., & Fatehiboroujeni, S., & Fisher, E. M., & Ritz, H. (2021, July), Student Motivation and Engagement Across Time and Context Through the COVID-19 Pandemic Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37746

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