Future Time Perspective and Self-Regulated Learning: Multiple Case Studies in Industrial Engineering

Abstract

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. This research paper is a pilot of a larger, mixed methods study that aims to capture the experience of sophomore engineering students' self-regulated learning (SRL) strategy use and the connections with the student's motivation with respect to the future. The overarching goal of the project is to understand the motivations and attitudes of undergraduate students in engineering, which is vital to answering the call for increasing the number of engineering graduates. Our project aim is to study engineering students' future time perspective (FTP) and how their FTP affects their use of SRL strategies. The quantitative portion of this study describes a cluster analysis of data from a motivation survey that characterizes students' FTP (n=118). The qualitative portion consists of case studies (n=4) which assess connections between students' FTP and SRL use. The cluster analysis showed three clusters of student FTP's. Interviews showed that clustering matched the FTP interview results, a variety of SRL strategy use among FTP's, and connections between FTP and SRL including perceived instrumentality and a timeline of short and/or long term goals. Future work will focus on the connection between FTP and SRL with the intent that practitioners may use this work to create programming related to these themes to increase SRL use among undergraduate engineering students.

Work in Progress: Developing a Quantitative Instrument for Measuring Undergraduate Engineering Students' Future Time Perspectives

“…This study also found that these students fit in one of these three FTP cone types 12 . And a fourth study focused on replicating the results of the previous studies with a new population-freshmen engineering students (n=7) at a western land-grant institution 13 .…”

“…She also wants to get an anthropology minor and study abroad to make her more qualified for a job that allows her to travel. The fact that she narrowed down her future goals and is able to describe these goals beyond her first job after graduation fits with other Sugar Cone students; however, there was not as much definition as other Sugar Cone students we have interviewed in previous studies [5][6][7]12 . She also sees these ideal future goals as realistic, as we would expect for a Sugar Cone student.…”

“…Cronbach's alpha (α) was calculated to test for internal consistency reliability for each of the factors, and was in the acceptable range for education research of above >0.7 for each 12 . This is shown in Table 2 along with the description of factors and the number of items in each.…”

CAREER: Informing Instructional Practice through the Study of Students' Future Time Perspectives

“…We will expand the quantitative and qualitative studies to further test and magnify our findings, and explore how engineering students' FTPs affect their self-regulated learning strategies and processes, particularly sub-goaling 4 . We will focus on completing a large portion of the longitudinal study by doing follow up surveys and interviews with students who took the MAE survey as first year students 2 and 3 years ago.…”

“…Additionally, more detailed descriptions of the qualitative research that addresses RQ2 are provided elsewhere [3][4] .…”