Investigating the ways in which Student Agency develops through Engagement with Knowledge

This Work in Progress paper reports on preliminary work in a new longitudinal project which tracks engineering students as they progress through four years of their undergraduate degree. It focuses specifically on students’ engagement with disciplinary and professional knowledge, in domains of basic science, engineering science, and engineering design. The project centers on annual in-depth interviews that will be conducted with students recruited from the first year in a selected engineering program (Chemical Engineering) at two selected US bachelors’ institutions: one a rural-based public land grant research university, and the other an urban public research university with a more diverse student intake. To highlight the distinctive features of the ways in which engineering graduates are formed, the project tracks in parallel a sample of students from a closely related science program (Chemistry/Biochemistry). The first year of data collection in this project is completed, and this paper will provide early reflections on the research design, specifically the ways in which student interview data can be used to show development of agency through engagement with knowledge.