"i am an engineer!" Three scales used in measuring identification of engineering as first-year students
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American Society for Engineering Education, 2017. Changing the extent to which first-year undergraduate engineering students identify with engineering may help improve retention. Research suggests that the degree to which students identify with engineering is positively related to their decisions to continue in engineering as a major. Therefore, identity frameworks have proven useful for furthering understanding of engineering retention. However most of the studies examining engineering identity have been conducted using qualitative research methodologies. While qualitative studies provide rich insights into engineering identity, evaluating engineering identity for hundreds or thousands of first-year students requires a quantitative instrument. Therefore, a current project is the development of a quantitative tool for measuring engineering identity. It uses information from six scales to measure different aspects of engineering identity. The scales are: identification, selfassessment, engineering embeddedness, university embeddedness, satisfaction, and retention. Since all six scales are not assessed each time the tool is administered to students, the paper will describe the two given thus far to students in the project: identification and self-efficacy. Further, it presents results responses from approximately 2, 000 first-year engineering students at a large public institution. The paper addresses two questions: 1) How do engineering students respond to two scales related to identity frameworks; and 2) What has been learned by giving these two scales to first-year engineering students.
