Student Perceptions of Engineering Entrepreneurship: An Exploratory Study

Journal of Engineering Education, Apr 2006 by Dabbagh, Nada, Menasc�, Daniel A

ABSTRACT

This study examines students' overall perceptions of the engineering profession in a first-year course in engineering, and the effect of a pedagogical approach aimed at exposing students to engineering entrepreneurship and their perceptions of engineering entrepreneurship. The approach featured a market game that engaged a pilot group of 20 students in forming IT companies and competing for the best design of a travel agent system. The rest of the students in the course completed the traditional class project, which involved designing and building a land sailer. A pre-post Likert-type survey designed to measure students' perceptions of the engineering profession was administered to all students enrolled in this course. In addition, a short answer questionnaire seeking students' pedagogical perceptions of the market game and the land sailer project was administered at the end of the course. Results indicated that students' overall perceptions of the engineering profession significantly improved by the end of the course. More importantly, the results indicated that students who participated in the market game had significantly better perceptions of engineering entrepreneurship, specifically professional skills, than students who participated in the land sailer project. These findings are of considerable interest to engineering schools that want to increase student retention and are looking for novel approaches to assist freshmen in choosing their majors.

Keywords: engineering entrepreneurship, pedagogy, student retention.

I. INTRODUCTION

While student attrition is a national and institutional phenomenon, research has shown that engineering programs are particularly vulnerable [3]. Roughly fifty percent of students who begin their college education in engineering leave the engineering curriculum before receiving their degree with half of this attrition occurring during the freshmen year [1, 20]. Surveys of freshmen intentions show that approximately 25-30 percent of freshmen intend to major in science and engineering, however, less than half of those actually complete a science and engineering degree within five years [21]. Overall, there has been a 15 percent decline in the number of engineering bachelors degrees granted from 1997 to 2002 [23]. The problem is even more severe for women and underrepresented minorities. Minorities entering engineering curricula drop out at the rate of 70 percent or higher, and women have lower retention rates than men [2, 9]. In addition, underrepresented minorities, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, drop out of science and engineering majors at a higher rate than other ethnic groups [21].

The problem of engineering student retention has received considerable national attention [20]. Over the past decade, a large number of research studies have sought to understand the underlying causes of the high rate of attrition in engineering programs. In a seven-university study of students who transferred out of science and engineering programs, Seymour and Hewitt [19] concluded that problems related to the structure of the educational experience, and the culture of the discipline as portrayed in the attitudes and practices of faculty, had a greater impact on student retention than problems related to aptitude, ability, or appeal to other majors. For example, Brainard and Carlin [6] found that in many science and engineering programs, the attitude of faculty and administrative personnel towards students who switch or drop out has traditionally been that those students were just in the wrong field and that it was better for all concerned to weed those students out as early in the process as possible. Additionally, several studies have suggested that beginning engineering courses fail to motivate students because first-year engineering curricula consist primarily of fundamental courses (e.g., physics, mathematics, chemistry, English) that are considered essential prerequisites to upper division engineering courses and, as a result, many potential engineers transfer out of their majors before they experience what engineers really do in the real world [18].

Shuman et al. [20] surveyed 203 freshmen students that transferred out of engineering programs and found that approximately half of these students felt that their perceptions of engineering did not match their experiences and that most had little idea what the engineering profession is about. These researchers concluded that too many students were drawing improper generalizations from their introductory course material and that freshmen engineering curricula were doing little to address these issues. Anderson-Rowland [1] found similar causes when they surveyed freshmen engineering students at Arizona State University at the end of the introductory engineering class. The results of this survey revealed that beginning freshmen engineering students do not have much understanding of an engineering career and may drop out during or after the first year because they do not see the relevance of beginning engineering courses to the engineering profession. The question then is how strongly is this attrition related to students' perceptions (or misperceptions rather) of the engineering profession? And, what can engineering programs do to better portray to students what engineers do in the real world in order to motivate them to pursue a career in engineering?