Work In Progress - An Examination of Engineering Students ’ Profile Membership Over the Freshmen Year

Understanding the direct and indirect relationships among freshman engineering student attributes and outcomes can provide a foundation for continuous improvement in first-year engineering education. Therefore, the goal of this research has been to begin measuring relevant student attributes that will allow assessment tools of the future to monitor relative change in first-year engineering educational outcomes. Towards this end, this work-in-progress examines how engineering students can be grouped (profiled) based upon their scores across various noncognitive measures. In addition, the research effort investigates trends in noncognitive score pattern changes over a student´s freshman year. The noncognitive measures include: academic self-efficacy, academic motivation, leadership, metacognition, major indecision, type of learner (e.g., deep vs. surface), teamwork, and expectancy-value. An analysis of profile stability (i.e. the year to year repeatability of the profiles) is presented along with an evaluation of profile drift (i.e., the degree to which students´ change profiles with respect to time). The findings provide evidence of stable freshman engineering student profiles based on a set of noncognitive measures. In addition, the findings of profile drift (based upon one year of data) indicate that students´ noncognitive self-beliefs changed as they progressed through the freshman year