A Narrative-Style Exploration of Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Beliefs about Smartness and Identity

This Full Research Paper reports findings from a narrative-style study about undergraduate engineering students' beliefs about smartness and identity. Extant research has demonstrated that conceptions of smartness and ability impact students as they navigate engineering at the collegiate level. Through our work, we aimed to better understand the nuanced interaction between these constructs to better support students through their undergraduate experience. For this work, we utilized narrative-style interviews to collect students' stories about their experiences and struggles in school. Interviews were conducted with seven participants, all of whom indicated on a recruitment survey that they had experienced academic struggle in their first year of an undergraduate engineering program. We analyzed the interviews using three-limits of-and developed a resistance part analytical memos and thematic analysis to identify emergent themes. Through our analysis, we aimed to address the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students describe their educational trajectories with respect to beliefs about smartness and identity? Three major findings of this study are; 1.) messages about smartness in educational systems have implications for students' identity as smart and beliefs about smartness, 2.) social experiences have a significant impact, particularly for the female students, on identity and beliefs about smartness, and 3.) students recognize the limits of-and developed a resistance to-normative indicators of ability (i.e., GPA). Our research contributes a more holistic understanding of the formation of beliefs about smartness and identity in the educational trajectories of undergraduate engineering students along with insight into the complex interaction between beliefs about smartness and identity. An implication of this study is that given the pervasiveness of identity and beliefs about smartness, they are almost never explicitly addressed in formal undergraduate engineering education and therefore should be considered by engineering education professionals when developing undergraduate engineering courses and curricula.