Exploring Undergraduate Engineering Students' Changing Beliefs about Smartness in Engineering

What does it mean to be “smart” in an engineering classroom? How do engineering students make sense of themselves as smart enough to be engineers? The development of shared beliefs about what it means to be “smart” and where you rank compared to others is a result of smartness as a cultural practice. With the cultural practice framing, smartness is not a noun – something that someone possesses a certain amount of, but rather it is a verb – something that is actively happening to and with others in context. The interactions between individuals result in shared beliefs about what it means to be smart. Specifically, when we participate in smartness as a cultural practice, we learn what is recognized as smart and our place in the relative hierarchy of smartness. Beliefs about how to be a smart engineer become particularly impactful to students when navigating educational experiences in an area of study in which “being smart” is synonymous with the field. Engineers are constructed as “smart” in society, where the pervasive belief is that ability is something you either have or you don't. But as students transition into undergraduate engineering programs, how does their participation in the cultural practice of smartness contribute to their beliefs about what it means to be a smart engineer and their identities as smart and as engineers? Our study generated empirical evidence for how. We conducted three interviews with 25 engineering students over the course of their first and second years in an undergraduate engineering program. In the first and third interviews, we asked participants explicit questions about their beliefs and identities related to smartness and engineering. Analysis to compare the beliefs expressed in students' first and third interviews revealed that about half of the 25 participants demonstrated notable change in their beliefs of what it meant to be a smart engineer. We present empirical evidence characterizing the ways in which undergraduate engineering students' beliefs about what it means to be a smart engineer changed over the course of a year for 5 of the 25 participants. We explored these 5 participants' changing beliefs through a lens of cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance is the misalignment between two or more of a person's beliefs and/or behaviors. People experience discomfort with dissonance and therefore work to resolve the misalignment. One way in which someone's dissonance can be resolved is by a person changing their beliefs. Using this lens, we discuss how the changes to participants' beliefs may be an artifact of students' need to resolve the dissonance between the shared beliefs and ranking in a smartness hierarchy produced during their participation in smartness as a cultural practice in the context of pre-college education and engineering education. We also make recommendations to engineering educators on how to engage in the cultural practice of smartness in a way that allows for the growth and development of students' beliefs of what it means to be “smart” in engineering.