Uncovering the role of emotion in learning through firstand second-year engineering students' narratives

We explored the role of emotions in first- and second-year engineering students' learning and discuss implications of the findings on engineering courses and curricula. We used a qualitative, narrative analysis approach in which we conducted narrative interviews with 21 undergraduate engineering students from year one through year five-in this study we focused on a subset of four students who were in their first- or second-year and who represented different engineering majors. We constructed narratives for these students, which were then thematically analysed to identify the role of emotion in their learning. Most of the events were coded as high activation emotions (70.8%), which is promising as these types of emotions encourage flexible learning and higher order thinking strategies. Over half of the events were coded with positive emotions (59.3%), and this is important because positive emotions encourage self-regulated learning. Implications inform interventions for retention and attraction within engineering programs.