Actively Building the Drive to Achieve through Everyday Engineering Learning

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Having passion and perseverance for long-term goals or the drive to achieve is potentially important to individuals trying to achieve the challenging, long-term goal of attaining an engineering degree, which requires not only talent but also focused and sustained application over a long period. This project is investigating the role of active learning in building passion and perseverance through a longitudinal observational research design. As a result of their natural progression through the curricula, students have widely varying experiences along the active-learning continuum, from low quantity and quality, to high. This highly diverse engineering-learning ecology presents a unique opportunity to study the association between active learning and the growth of passion and perseverance. This project is developing a smartphone application (app) for participants to measure the quantity and quality of active learning they experience. These data, along with extensive measures of other psychological traits and student achievement, are elements of a model that will clarify the relationship between active learning, passion and perseverance growth, and student achievement. Results from this study potentially will improve the retention and graduation rates of all STEM students.