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Impact of Household Location on First‐Year Engineering Students' Environmental Awareness and Resistance to Change
Author(s) -
Weber Nicole,
Dyehouse Melissa,
Miller Christopher C.,
Fang Jun,
Hua Inez,
Strobel Johannes
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.896
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 2168-9830
pISSN - 1069-4730
DOI - 10.1002/jee.20028
Subject(s) - curriculum , resistance (ecology) , sustainability , class (philosophy) , environmental education , location , psychology , mathematics education , engineering , computer science , pedagogy , geography , ecology , artificial intelligence , biology , geodesy
Background To prepare engineers for their future roles, responsibilities, and professional demands, undergraduate engineering programs must integrate sustainable design into their curricula. Hence, we need to understand engineering students' awareness, conceptions, and, particularly, their prior knowledge and what shaped it. Purpose This study proposed to examine the impact of their home location on engineering students' environmental awareness and resistance to change. Design/Method We administered two environmental surveys to students in a first‐year undergraduate engineering program. First, a macrolevel analysis focused on differences between students from different U.S. regions and international students. Then, to examine differences hypothesized in our environmental awareness model at the zip code‐level (students' household location, i.e., location from which they applied to college), we focused on first‐year engineering students with Indiana zip codes ( n = 1,367). Results Significant differences appeared in environmental awareness and knowledge according to students' household location (U.S. regions and international). As a result, we created a predictive model of the students' environmental knowledge, awareness, attitudes, and resistance to change using a GIS location‐based model. Conclusions This study extends the existing literature and provides a starting point for further exploring these relationships with engineering students. Since engineering programs provide different experiences to students, this study cautiously supports the idea that student household location has an impact and should be considered a viable variable. Further work is necessary to study the impact of location‐based class projects on the students' awareness and knowledge about sustainability and environmental issues.