Resumen de Changing the culture in a senior design course to focus on grit, mastery orientation, belonging, and self-efficacy:: building strong academic mindsets and psychological preparedness
With the expectation that engineering students ought to be prepared to adapt to a continuously evolving workplaceenvironment to solve the complex problems of the future, engineering educators ought to also adapt and provideinnovative learning environments that support not only technical agility, but also psychological agility to support thedevelopment of our students. Senior design and capstone courses serve as ideal contexts to support engineering studentswith this preparation. This paper describes how a senior design course was transformed not in content, but in the classroomvalues/culture, reward structures, and the learning environment to encourage mastery learning though effort contingen-cies, grit and perseverance, collaboration, and empowerment. Designed as a pre-test post-test control group design, a set ofpsychological constructs (grit, sense of belonging, achievement goal orientation, self-efficacy, impulsivity) were adminis-tered to a treatment group and a control group to investigate effects of the educational innovations. Effect sizes revealmoderate to high practical significance comparing the treatment and control groups. Psychologically-grounded strategiesand important implications for all engineering educators are detailed in this paper.
