2024 AIChE Annual Meeting

(198e) Using Educational Comics in Outreach Efforts to Promote Interest in Chemical Engineering

Authors

Landherr, L. - Presenter, Northeastern University
Opportunities and growth in larger STEM fields over the past few decades have driven the need for broadening participation and support in engineering education in order to provide students with the necessary skills and mindset to succeed in engineering jobs. A major factor in these efforts is the need not just to increase enrollment in engineering majors, but to ensure that enrolled students are retained within the field over the course of their studies and once they enter the workforce. Retention becomes an even greater concern to ensure participation by women and underrepresented minority (URM) students can be lifted towards a more equitable level as that of white male students. Some of the greatest concern in retention has focused on self-efficacy beliefs of engineering students. Studies have shown that the efficacy of STEM students is directly related to their interest in the field, persistence to remain within the field, and their resulting achievements. Students who leave the STEM fields are more likely to have lower efficacy beliefs, even if they exhibited similar grades to students remaining in STEM; this difference is also particularly notable for women students

An integrated STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) approach to engineering education has been a broad effort over the last few decades, with objectives ranging from driving interest in STEM in young learners, to enabling better classroom instructional approaches, to creating more interdisciplinary collaborations in learners and instructors. Many different efforts have been utilized to produce STEAM education in different fields, including video series, in-class modules, and broader creative projects. Several studies have shown that these STEAM efforts have had positive impacts on student interest, understanding, and self-efficacy, and may lead to greater retention. One STEAM approach that has been shown to be effective in a wide range of STEM fields is through the use of educational comics, combining text with visual presentation to enable greater conection between the reader and the content, while also providing a means of implementing greater representation in the educational tool through diverse depiction of the characters in the comics. Utilizing comics in chemical engineering undergraduate courses has been demonstrated to increase student interest and confidence with potential further benefit to understanding; similar potential exists to utilize such an approach to promote interest and self-efficacy in younger students in chemical engineering concepts.

In order to help bridge students from K-12 education and in general first-year engineering programs into chemical engineering, a series of educational comics were developed in collaboration with student and professional artists for outreach and formal learning purposes. These comics included a series of one-page comics connecting everyday applications like ice cream, hockey, and nail polish to chemical engineering concepts, as well as a longer 16-page comic highlighting the breadth of the different fields that chemical engineering encompasses, including medicine, materials, renewable energy, and food science. These comics were disseminated with K-12 andd first-year engineering students, with student understanding of chemical engineering as well as interest and confidence in the subject matter being assessed through a series of surveys. Self-efficacy and motivation of learners was studied with additional consideration of student learning styles. This paper will discuss the efforts in utilizing these comics with different groups of students and the results from their implementation.