Background Preparing students to solve complex problems is an identified area of need in engineering education. Despite the documented influence of motivation on learning, little research exists that examines how motivation and problem solving in engineering interconnect. Purpose This study explores how engineering students perceive problem solving tasks, the future, and the connections between the two. Methods Interviews with engineering students (n = 9) about engineering problems, problem solving processes, their futures, and interactions between their futures and problem solving tasks were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Analysis of the resulting transcripts identified and clustered units of meaning into themes, first by participant and then across participants. Results Three themes emerged from the IPA: participants perceived engineering as being primarily a problem solving process; participants reported using different problem solving processes depending on how well the task aligned with their future goals; and participants' perceptions of their future drove the problem solving processes they report using. Conclusions This work supports and extends engineering problem solving literature by making explicit the connections students describe between their problem solving processes and their future‐oriented motivations. Additionally, this work furthers our understanding of how future‐oriented motivations are conceptualized by engineering students.

BackgroundGraduate engineering student attrition is prevalent, but most literature that studies graduate attrition is accomplished in disciplines outside of STEM or engineering, yielding an incomplete understanding of either attrition or persistence.Purpose/HypothesisThe purpose of this article is to investigate the relationships between motivators of attrition for engineering graduate students.Design/MethodData were collected using an online Web‐scraping “bot” that mines data from the online forum Reddit. The anonymous textual forum threads collected were qualitatively analyzed through open‐coding methods.ResultsThe emergent themes reveal the interconnectedness between the roles of the advisor, student perception of cost, their support network, goals, their perceptions of how others perceive them, and quality of life and work. Our model is flexible in that it illuminates underlying combinations of factors that can influence student attrition.ConclusionThis study provides a framework by which various stakeholders can approach the support and education of graduate students, including mentoring students both toward or away from graduate school per the student's goals.

Lisa Benson is an Associate Professor of Engineering and Science Education at Clemson University, with a joint appointment in Bioengineering. Her research focuses on the interactions between student motivation and their learning experiences. Her projects involve the study of student perceptions, beliefs and attitudes towards becoming engineers and scientists, and their problem solving processes. Other projects in the Benson group include effects of student-centered active learning, self-regulated learning, and incorporating engineering into secondary science and mathematics classrooms. Her education includes a B.S.

BackgroundResearch in engineering education has highlighted the importance of identity and motivation for a number of student outcomes including persistence. However, these constructs have often been studied separately, despite theorized and demonstrated connections between students' identity and motivation in other fields. PurposeOur study fills this gap in the literature by investigating the connections between identity and motivation. We specifically examined the connections between students' engineering role identity and future-time perspective (FTP; motivation) theories to understand students' interest in choosing an engineering major after their first year, which we call continuing engineering major interest. MethodsThe data came from a questionnaire distributed during Fall 2015 (n = 2,879). Structural equation modeling was used to understand the connections between the latent factors of engineering role This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1002/jee.20324 identity and FTP. We also examined the predictive validity of this model on students' continuing engineering major interest. ResultsOur results show connections between students' engineering role identity and the domain-specific constructs of FTP. Identity was fully mediated by students' future-time perspectives and these perspectives were important for predicting continuing major interest. Engineering role identity measures explained a combined 69% of the variance in the FTP measures, and engineering role identity and FTP measures together explained 14.2% of the variance in engineering major interest. ConclusionsThese findings provide empirical evidence for linking identity and motivation in studies of engineering students' career pathways. The results of this work inform how theories of identity and motivation can be used collectively in engineering education research.

Heather entered the Applied Social and Community Psychology program in the fall of 2014, after completing her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Cincinnati. She has participated in various research projects examining the interaction between stereotypes and science interest and confidence, their influence upon womens' performance in school and the workplace, and their presence in the media and consequences for viewers. Her primary research interest is science identity, STEM education, and participation in online communities.