Embedding Personal Narratives in Engineering Courses to Improve Engineering Student Success

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving student persistence, particularly among historically marginalized student groups, through storytelling activities embedded in engineering courses. Students’ sense of belonging and engineering identity are predictors of students’ persistence in in engineering programs. Effective educational interventions are needed that are intentionally designed to improve students’ sense of belonging and engineering identity. This project will examine how engaging engineering students in personal and professional reflection activities at a time when they are encountering the most intellectually rigorous part of their engineering programs affects student persistence. A storytelling curriculum will be developed and implemented in existing engineering courses and will target undergraduate engineering students in their second and third years. Students will learn how to write personal narratives about their engineering education experiences and communicate them to audiences through live performances or video recordings. Each semester will culminate in a public storytelling session attended by students and the broader community in which engineering students will have the opportunity to share their stories. The storytelling curriculum will be made available to the engineering education community through an online public repository.The goal of this project is to develop, implement, and examine the mechanisms and effects of a new storytelling intervention designed to help shape and reinforce engineering students’ self-view. Past work suggests that storytelling pedagogy can support identity development. However, individual reflection and storytelling are typically not included in a traditional engineering curriculum that is focused on the application of scientific knowledge to solve engineering problems. This project will incorporate the element of storytelling and public performance into the pedagogy of multiple engineering courses. Undergraduate engineering students will learn storytelling techniques and apply these techniques to narratively communicate their personal experiences in engineering education. Using a mixed methods approach, this project will examine the efficacy of storytelling on student success in terms of students’ sense of belonging, professional identity, and persistence in the major. This project will identify themes in students’ stories that are associated with the most substantial impact on student success outcomes. This study will provide insights on why storytelling assignments enhance student success, and what types of stories have the most impact on student success. Project results will contribute to the literature on narrative identity and inform subsequent efforts to refine storytelling assignments to enhance its influence on aspects of engineering students’ self-view. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.