Engineering culture under stress: A comparative case study of undergraduate mechanical engineering student experiences

IF 3.9 2区 工程技术 Q1 EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH Journal of Engineering Education Pub Date : 2024-04-04 DOI:10.1002/jee.20594
Jessica R. Deters, Jon A. Leydens, Jennifer Case, Margaret Cowell
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Abstract

Background

Engineering culture research to date has described the culture as rigid, chilly, and posing many barriers to entry. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an important opportunity to explore how engineering culture responds to a major disruption.

Purpose

The purposes of this study are to understand how elements of engineering culture emerged in mechanical engineering students' perceptions of their classroom experiences during the pandemic and how their experiences varied across two national contexts.

Method

This qualitative comparative case study examines undergraduate mechanical engineering students' perceptions of their experiences taking courses during the pandemic at two universities—one in the United States and one in South Africa. Semistructured interviews were conducted across both sites with 21 students and contextualized with 3 faculty member interviews. Student interviews were analyzed using an iterative process of deductive coding, inductive coding, and pattern coding.

Results

We identified two key themes that characterized participants' experiences during the pandemic: hardness and access to resources. We found that students at both sites experienced two types of hardness—intrinsic and constructed—and were more critical of constructed forms of hardness. We found that the South African university's response to facilitating student access to resources was viewed by students as more effective when compared with the US university.

Conclusions

We found that hardness remained a central feature of engineering culture, based on student perceptions, and found that students expressed awareness of resource-related differences. A key distinction emerged between intrinsic and constructed hardness.

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压力下的工程文化:机械工程本科生经历的比较案例研究
背景迄今为止,对工程文化的研究一直将其描述为僵化、冷酷和构成许多进入壁垒。然而,COVID-19 大流行病为探索工程文化如何应对重大破坏提供了一个重要机会。 目的 本研究旨在了解在大流行病期间,机械工程专业学生对其课堂经历的看法中是如何出现工程文化元素的,以及他们的经历在两个国家背景下是如何变化的。 本定性比较案例研究考察了两所大学--一所在美国,一所在南非--机械工程专业本科生对大流行病期间上课经历的看法。研究人员在两所大学对 21 名学生进行了半结构式访谈,并与 3 名教师进行了访谈。通过演绎编码、归纳编码和模式编码的迭代过程对学生访谈进行了分析。 结果 我们确定了参与者在大流行病期间经历的两个关键主题:艰难和获取资源。我们发现,两个研究地点的学生都经历了两种类型的困难--内在困难和建构困难,而且对建构困难的批评更多。我们发现,与美国大学相比,学生们认为南非大学在促进学生获取资源方面的应对措施更为有效。 结论 根据学生的看法,我们发现 "硬 "仍然是工程学文化的一个核心特征,而且学生对与资源相关的差异也有所认识。内在硬度和建构硬度之间存在着重要区别。
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来源期刊
Journal of Engineering Education
Journal of Engineering Education 工程技术-工程:综合
CiteScore
12.20
自引率
11.80%
发文量
47
审稿时长
>12 weeks
期刊介绍: The Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) serves to cultivate, disseminate, and archive scholarly research in engineering education.
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