Samenvatting
Background: While educators strive for optimal student motivation to enhance the quality of learning for all, different students attending the same course can have different needs. Person-centered approaches on basic needs profiles, categorizing individuals into groups with similar motivational profiles, have the potential to inform the relationship between different variables per cluster and to support instructional design sensitive to student differences. However, they are still absent in engineering education research (EER). Purpose/Hypothesis: This gap is addressed by analyzing the basic psychological needs of engineering students as potential mediators during a mandatory, first-year course on the ethics and history of technology. The aims are thus to (1) determine whether distinct basic needs profiles can be identified and (2) investigate how students' motivation differed and evolved during the course for the different basic needs profiles. Design/Methods: Two-step cluster analyses, MANOVA, and t-test analyses were conducted using the data collected from 1864 students with digital questionnaires completed at three points within a semester of a course. Results: We construed four student profiles from the survey data based on the distinct roles of competence and autonomy, with post hoc tests showing relationships between meaningful differences in evaluation of course elements, motivation, course appreciations, and motivation dynamics. Conclusions: The person-centered approach is promising in engineering education design to answer differences in students' basic needs to improve the quality of learning for all. We showed that the person-centered approach could also add important insights complementary to the variable-centered approach in EER on dynamics of motivation for learning.
| Originele taal-2 | Engels |
|---|---|
| Pagina's (van-tot) | 357-375 |
| Aantal pagina's | 19 |
| Tijdschrift | Journal of Engineering Education |
| Volume | 111 |
| Nummer van het tijdschrift | 2 |
| Vroegere onlinedatum | 19 jan. 2022 |
| DOI's | |
| Status | Gepubliceerd - apr. 2022 |
Bibliografische nota
Funding Information:This research was funded by the 4TU‐Centre for Engineering Education, the Netherlands (no reference number). Anouck Kluytmans provided substantial help in the statistical analyses. We also thank Maarten Vansteenkiste for the support at the start of the research; and Andreas Spahn, Diana Martin, Gerard van de Watering, Michael Bots, Jan Vermunt, and Karolina Doulougeri for their theoretical and practical support and feedback, and Eindhoven Student Affairs for their support in compiling the data files. We particularly thank the anonymous reviewers for their extensive, in‐depth, and helpful comments and the students for all their input, be it the questionnaire and all the engaging discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Engineering Education published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Engineering Education.