ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1538497
Differentiating Middle School Students' Conceptions of Engineering from Interests in Engineering
Provisionally accepted
- 1Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
- 2Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States
- 3University of San Diego, San Diego, California, United States
- 4E4S, LLC, Abingdon, Virginia, United States
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Developing and deploying research tools that measure pre-college students' conceptions of engineering is challenging, and often surveys relying on measurements of interest and identity are used to understand students' goals related to engineering. The purpose of this study is to describe the creation of and preliminary findings from a survey in the context of long-term engagement with middle school students. To identify underlying factors related to student conceptions of engineering, this study leveraged exploratory factor analysis with data from 360 middle school students along with descriptive and inferential statistics to understand more about the relationship between conceptions and interest and identity. Results from the analysis revealed a total of five factors related to a range of students' conceptions of engineering and interest and identity for engineering, suggesting that conceptions of engineering are different from measures of interest and identity. Results from this study point to the need to differentiate discussions about interest and identity in engineering from understanding about engineering through more nuanced analysis of data.
Keywords: conceptions of engineering, Engineering Engagement, exploratory factor analysis, 12 pt, English (US) 2003), Factor 1, factor 2, Nuances related to what
Received: 02 Dec 2024; Accepted: 28 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Schilling, Matusovich, Grohs, Paradise and Carrico. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Malle Schilling, Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
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