Exploring enculturation in the first-year engineering program NSF-award 1640521
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American Society for Engineering Education, 2017. Culture is defined as the set of beliefs, customs, and or arts of a particular group. Engineering enculturation can be defined as the process by which an engineering student learns the traditional content of an engineering culture and assimilates its engineering practices and values. The assimilation process to the engineering culture can be associated to engineering outcomes as defined by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and through common outcomes among engineering programs, including first year engineering programs. A group of professors at a university located in the southwestern region of the United States are conducting engineering enculturation research based on self- reported student's perceptions as well as performance indicators (i.e. grades) of at least 400 first year engineering students. Since publications and reports show that attrition is high during the first year engineering program, this inquiry seeks to explore the enculturation of individuals new to the profession. This paper presents preliminary data analysis of the pre-survey applied to the freshmen class during the fall 2016. Two different perspectives and subsets of data were included in this preliminary analysis. One from an open ended view of aspects valued by students as foundational to their enculturation process and the other based on a Likert-based set of questions.
