EAGER: Leveraging Disruptive Technologies to Promote Learner Agency in Engineering Education

In education, disruptive technologies are those that have the potential to significantly alter the foundational principles and practices that guide teaching and learning. These technologies, such as Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), have attracted significant national attention due to its conversational power and widespread availability as an open-source application.

Such technologies are considered to be ‘disruptive’ because their impacts on education are uncertain and unpredictable. While many educators tend to take a cautious approach of blocking the application or restricting its use in academic settings, this technology has experienced widespread adoption within a short period of time, and students have been open about their use of ChatGPT to complete coursework and progress through academic programs.

In the field of engineering education, prior research has focused on instructor and faculty reactions to these technologies, with little to no work exploring why and how students proactively leverage these technologies in learning engineering content. For this reason, this project aligns with the National Science Foundation’s high priority to research that pushes the frontiers of knowledge in STEM education in the EAGER program.

The knowledge gained from this exploratory work has the potential to transform teaching and learning by providing insights into how educators can proactively integrate disruptive technologies into existing engineering curricula and beyond. By gaining a deeper understanding of students’ interactions and perceptions of disruptive technologies, this research can be used to inform the development, design, and implementation of educational interventions that leverage the advantages of these technologies to meet the needs and motivations of diverse groups of learners.

This project will quickly establish a foundational understanding for harnessing the capabilities of disruptive technologies to promote learner agency by gaining insights into why and how students choose to use them in their learning. Using the theoretical lens of self-authorship, this research will examine the ways undergraduate engineering students use disruptive technologies to facilitate learning and their motivations for doing so.

The self-authorship constructs of self-agency (i.e., the internal capacity to define one’s own decisions) and motivation (e.g., performance versus learning goal orientation) will be used to gain deeper insights into students’ goals and motivations for engaging with and applying disruptive technologies to navigate their learning as engineers. Specifically, this study will employ an exploratory mixed method design to answer the questions: (1) why do undergraduate engineering students choose or choose not to engage with disruptive technologies such as ChatGPT; and (2) how do undergraduate engineering students perceive and utilize advancing disruptive technologies such as ChatGPT to assist learning?

Findings from this work will be applied and expanded in future proposals examining the use and perceptions of disruptive technologies among other groups of learners such as graduate engineering students. This work will provide the initial first steps in moving from reactive to proactive approaches for integrating emerging and advancing technologies in engineering curricula and educational practice.

The findings from this research will enable the engineering community to begin to understand the impacts of disruptive technologies on the professional formation of undergraduate engineering students, particularly in areas of learning orientation and motivation. For engineering educators and researchers, these findings have the potential to provide more nuanced insights into the various ways students from different engineering sub-disciplines perceive, approach, and adopt disruptive technologies to support their learning.

For industry, these findings can be used as a starting point for testing and refining disruptive technologies for enhanced career training. Lastly, this project will foster a new community of practice in this unique and uninvestigated area of educational research.

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.