Cognitive pathways to engineering

We collected qualitative data to examine how engineering students´ previous experiences, present academic course work, and future goals create cognitive pathways to a career in engineering. Using future time perspective theory as our literature base, we conceptualize cognitive pathways as relationships or links between reconstructed-past, present-active, and imagined-future events that lead to a career in engineering. Our goal is to begin to develop evidence for cognitive linkages between past, present, and future that motivate students to pursue careers in engineering. To gather the data, 21 students were interviewed after they completed a timeline of their lives, consisting of their developmental experiences, present academic work, and their imagined future. We used purposive sampling to recruit participants who are strong engineering students to provide preliminary evidence for what ideal cognitive pathways might look like. The data are being collected as part of a funded “seed” project to conduct exploratory work that can ultimately lead to a well-designed larger project. Here, we present some preliminary results of our analysis, including example case study of a participant timeline. The results are primarily descriptive, and provide a glimpse into our analytic techniques and mixed method approach to the data.