Family Determinants of Undergraduate Students’ Decisions to Pursue Engineering as a Degree Choice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The global demand for science and engineering professionals is at its peak, yet relatively few Canadian students choose post-secondary programs in certain STEM-related fields leading to an under capacity in the labour market. In this study we used a quantitative research methodology to investigate the influence of family determinants on the decisions of students who decide to pursue an undergraduate Engineering degree. A survey of 151 undergraduate engineering students at Memorial University identified high parental income and education, financial support by parents, parental advice/encouragement, parental pressure to be academically competitive, and value for a degree in science or engineering among family members as key enabling influences for students who opt for university-level engineering studies. Following on the findings from this research and other recent work in this area, we suggest several tangible school-family based strategies and other policy options that could be useful in motivating more high school students to pursue a career in engineering.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".