Intersections Between Entrepreneurial Minded Learning, Identity, and Motivation in Engineering

A growing trend in engineering education is to infuse entrepreneurial minded learning (EML) into design-based courses across the curriculum. This educational approach supports students in developing an entrepreneurial mindset by the time they graduate and enter the workforce where such a mindset will be vital for their success. We posit that the infusion of EML in the first year of engineering education sets students on a trajectory to develop an entrepreneurial mindset by graduation, along with enhancing their motivations to succeed in the field and developing their identity as engineers. To investigate the impacts of EML, motivation, and identity, we surveyed first-and fourth-/fifth-year engineering students across five different institutions representing variation in academic setting, approach to EML, and maturity of their EML program. Through our multi-method analysis, we did not find evidence of major differences across the five institutions as we anticipated. However, we found noteworthy differences in the impact of one particular program at one site compared to the other sites, including higher average scores for all EML student outcomes at this site. We also found differences between male and female students and students in different educational years. We observed a positive relationship between EML and motivation across all sites. Based on our analysis, we believe the practice of using EML in engineering education holds promise for supporting students' success as engineers in the field. However, additional research into the nuances of EML experiences is needed to identify what makes them successful as our work did not show as many unique findings across sites as were anticipated. We attribute the lack of patterns to the variability between and within site EML implementation.