Measuring first year engineering students' knowledge and interest in Materials Science and Engineering

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that engineering students were generally not very familiar with Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). However, career decision theories suggest that people need to be both knowledgeable and interested towards a career in order to make an informed career choice. The purpose of this study was to measure first-year engineering students' knowledge and interest in MSE, and to compare the results from students who chose MSE as their major and students who did not. Open ended questions and a Likert-scale survey were used to collect data from 919 first year engineering students. Open coding strategy was used to analyze the patterns of students' answers to open questions and to record frequencies. ANOVA as well as non-parametric statistic tests were used to identify the differences between different groups of students from the Likert-scale survey and frequencies from coding openended questions. Among all participants, 23 students expressed an interest in MSE as their first choice. Forty-five students identified MSE as their second choice. Sixty-eight students were randomly selected from students who did not express their interest in MSE as a control group for the qualitative content analysis. The results indicated that: 1) students who chose MSE as their 1st or 2nd choice were significantly more knowledgeable and more interested in MSE than those who did not chose MSE; and 2) first-choice students were significantly more interested in MSE than 2nd-choice students, but the difference in knowledge between 1st-choice and 2nd-choice students was not significant. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.