Prosocial engagement lies at the intersection of social responsibility (i.e., evaluating the broader impacts of a one’s work on public welfare) and communal value (i.e., a person’s desire to work with and help others). Social responsibility and communal value and are intricately linked because the desire to work with and help others is in essence a microcosm of the desire to help society more broadly. Prosocial engagement is a key variable in understanding the formation of the engineering workforce because it contributes simultaneously to the recruitment and retainment of talented students and shapes the culture of the engineering workforce to one that holds public welfare paramount. Work in the area of goal congruity theory has shown that most students want careers that afford prosocial value. However, electrical and computer engineering (ECE) is stereotyped as a career that does not provide opportunities to work with and help others. Instead ECE is stereotype as a career that affords agency (i.e., power, prestige, wealth) but consists mainly of working in isolation. This “incongruity” may help to explain why certain demographics don’t choose ECE as a degree path and also why those that do opt out before graduation. This paper presents work that was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) where the stereotypes about the ECE profession and the students’ personal trait endorsements were measured. Data in a cross-sectional study revealed that first-year students had higher prosocial affordance beliefs about the ECE profession than senior-year students. Data also revealed that prosocial affordance beliefs predicted persistence intensions of first-year students more so than agency beliefs. This paper presents the results of a pilot intervention that aims to increase the prosocial affordance beliefs about the ECE profession using 3-minute video assignments. Similar interventions in the biological sciences had shown that communication assignments that force the student to think about the communal value of the field allow them to build lasting beliefs about the profession. In this study, a pilot intervention is tested to see if these video assignments can have the same effect within ECE.
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