Students' Conceptions Of Their Engineering Discipline: A Word Association Study

A goal of engineering education is to prepare students for professional practice by helping students acquire important knowledge and skills as well as an overall schema of engineering practice. In this paper, we report on an exploratory study to investigate civil engineering students’ schemas of civil engineering. In our study, 30 graduating civil engineering students completed a word association task using the probe “civil and environmental engineering.” In this paper, we describe and interpret some results from this experiment, focusing on the relationships of student’s schemas to the engineering schema implicit in the new ABET learning outcomes.