UC Irvine

Engineers are needed more than ever to sustain our current life and maximize the best possible life for our future. From our everyday present lives, engineers work on powering our markets, offices, and homes to designing computer software. From what our future holds, engineers can develop efficient humanoid robotic systems to conduct surgical procedures, build renewable energy buildings and transportation sources, and predict meaningful political, medical, and financial information based on prior big data. Yet, in the United States, the field of engineering neither attracts nor maintains college students who were originally interested in pursuing it, particularly for minoritized students (Beering, 2007; National Science Foundation, 2021). Increasing and diversifying the number of engineers will contribute not only to better current and future living standards, but also bring new perspectives to solve the problems the nation faces. This dissertation research aims to address the critical issue of college students becoming uninterested or disengaged in engineering through YouTube videos to promote choice and persistence.

The dissertation consists of three separate, but connected papers that examine undergraduates’ choice and persistence in engineering using an alternative methodology of YouTube videos. Paper 1 focuses on engineering college students’ career values and the extent to which the discussion of their careers is associated with career values. There are two studies within this paper. The first study investigates students’ agentic (i.e., the importance of doing something in service of the self) and communal (i.e., the importance of doing something in service of others) career value themes in their written post-graduation responses after watching a YouTube video. I found career, personal development, and financial gains agentic career value themes as well as helping others and being family- oriented communal career value themes. The second study uses those career value themes to match achievement-related and interpersonal word categories to surveyed career values. I found significant associations between students’ word usage on their career and surveyed career values. Paper 2 examines transfer engineering undergraduates’ experiences filming engineering advice-related YouTube videos to community college students, in which we predicted that students experience the saying-is-believing effect. The saying-is-believing effect refers to how individuals are more likely to internalize a message if they advocate for it (Higgins & Rholes, 1978). This study identifies for important college students’ affective, cognitive, and behavioral engagement themes during their experiences creating the YouTube videos, in order to differentiate the different levels of the saying-is- believing effect. I found that students do differ in the extent to which they experience the saying-is-believing effect based on the different components of engagement. In particular, students’ positive affective experiences from creating YouTube videos may be the starting point to experiencing the saying-is-believing effect. Paper 3 takes a different perspective of the motivational intervention by focusing on the engineering community college students who watched the YouTube videos rather than those who filmed the YouTube videos. Students were able to choose from a library of videos from a diverse group of engineering transfer undergraduates. This study investigates the difference in engineering community college students’ course grades and subsequent engineering course enrollment between those who participated and those who did not participate in the intervention. I found that students who participated in the role model intervention leveraging YouTube had higher course grades and subsequent course enrollments in engineering compared to those who did not participate in the intervention.

Each of the three papers: (a) provides a greater understanding on how to support engineering college students’ choice and persistence; and (b) focuses on using YouTube videos as an alternative method to gain a more comprehensive picture on engineering undergraduates’ motivation. Using YouTube videos to understand students’ perceptions can help participants answer in a way that would minimize predetermined item choices and researchers’ expectations. This methodology can aid researchers and practitioners investigate engineering college students in a more naturalistic way. Incorporating a wide selection (or library) of YouTube videos from minoritized engineering college students can optimize the motivation of others who similarly identify, which can thus, increase the diversity in the labor force market.