Promoting Chemical Engineering Identity through Student Agency and Experiment Relevance

Abstract Laboratory courses play a central role in chemical engineering education. However, in many institutions, experiments are prescribed, leaving students minimal decision-making opportunities. Our approach to promote student engagement and belonging in engineering is to investigate the role of consequential agency in laboratory experiments. To determine the effect agency has on students, we explore how different aspects of laboratory experiments contribute to students' development. The goal of the project is to extend theory about agency in learning and the development of professional identity in upper division chemical engineering laboratory courses. Specifically, we investigate how agency in four domains—(1) experimental design prior to doing the laboratory experiment; (2) data collection and documentation during experiments; (3) data analysis and interpretation; and (4) communication of purpose, methods, and conclusions—contributes to students' development. We conjecture that students having agency in planning the experimental design (Domain 1) and in analysis of data (Domain 3) may matter more than having agency while performing the experiment (Domain 2). In the current study, we adapted a survey we previously developed to measure consequential agency in laboratory experiments to focus on all four domains, as well as engineering identity, relevance, and persistence intentions. The survey collected demographic information (gender, race/ethnicity, age, veteran and college generation status, home language, community context). Students at two research universities completed the survey as part of their post-lab activities (N = 74). Students were enrolled in spring, junior- and senior-level laboratory courses. They completed labs such as how pipe length impacts efflux from a tank, how fittings and pipes impact frictional pressure loss, catalysts used in conversion of ethane, calibrating a level controller on a water tank, heat exchanger experiment, fluid flow and friction, a continuous stirred tank reactor experiment, and an enzyme reaction kinetics experiment. We conducted exploratory factor analysis to assess whether the adapted survey items measured the intended dimensions. We found support for our survey, which measured (1) experimental design consequentiality; (2) experimental oversight consequentiality; (3) data analysis and interpretation consequentiality; (4) communication consequentiality; (5) overall responsibility for decisions; (6) relevance; (7) engineering identity; and (8) persistence intentions. Based on this, we proceeded with sequential regression modeling of persistence intentions and then engineering identity. We found that persistence intentions were positively, significantly predicted by engineering identity. In turn, engineering identity was positively, significantly predicted by relevance and data analysis and interpretation consequentiality (Domain 3), and negatively, significantly predicted by consequentiality during the experiment (Domain 2). This suggests that having agency over tasks like analyzing data and interpreting results contributes to students' identities as engineers more than other domains. Likewise, tasks that seem relevant—meaning, similar to the work of chemical engineers—provide a more potent experience for students' developing identities as engineering. Our results, while tentative, suggest faculty seeking to make changes to their laboratory courses can focus efforts on supporting students to make their own choices related to analysis and interpretation, and on helping students understand the connections between the experiments and the work of chemical engineers.