"How Engineering Students' Beliefs About Knowledge Affect Their Learning About Entrepreneurship"

ABSTRACT
While we tend to focus on what content is or is not included in the increasingly packed curriculum in engineering, students beliefs are a critical element as well. This is especially true when students are asked to developed competence in areas that they do not personally define as part of engineering or areas in which they have significant existing knowledge. Portfolios and entrepreneurship represent two of these areas where students' beliefs deeply impact their learning. Students' perception of engineering as grounded in facts, science, and provable reality influences how students approach innovative pedagogies grounded in reflection, argumentation, and metacognition. Similarly, their strong conceptions about what an entrepreneur is and does affect how they learn to be creative and self-driven. Collectively, their beliefs negatively impact engineering students'  ability to self-author an engineering identity that is authentic to them. 

In my talk, I will describe two studies of engineering undergraduates that I have led and how they demonstrate the issues described above. I will then describe how those studies have influenced my teaching and can frame other efforts to make students more entrepreneurially minded. I will end by describing how those studies would drive my thinking if asked to develop and teach the portfolio program in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Host: Joe Le Doux, Ph.D.