Higher education institutions are charged with developing civically engaged leaders to address the pressing issues facing the country and the world. While existing literature suggests institutional practices, such as promoting co-curricular involvement, hold promise for fostering key learning outcomes, educational literature suggests the benefits of participation may not be shared by all students. Using structural equation modeling, we examine the role of background characteristics (i.e., race/ethnicity and gender) and co-curricular participation in sustainability-related activities in fostering climate change leadership development and sustainability activism. We find that women reported significantly higher systems thinking, futures thinking, leadership development, and activism. Additionally, our results suggest systems thinking and futures thinking are key learning outcomes related to students’ climate change leadership development and activism. Moreover, we find a small negative relationship between sustainability literacy and leadership development and activism, suggesting there might exist an inflection point at which more knowledge about climate change and sustainability issues makes students less likely to engage in leadership and activism behaviors. We discuss the implications of this work for sustainability education pedagogy in higher education.

Background: Prior research has demonstrated that participation in authentic learning experiences that resemble real-world engineering practice is key to unlocking the benefits of collaborative projects, such as design projects, for students in engineering. However, research has also documented that women are less likely to participate in key learning experiences in engineering design education, undermining the goals of project-based learning. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this research study was to understand how social power dynamics shape the types of tasks allocated to students in teams and, by extension, students learning in collaborative engineering design projects. Drawing on the Model of Inequitable Task Allocation in Project-Based Learning, this work examines the role of prior experiences and skills, self-efficacy, and students’ motivation in the process by which design tasks allocation is negotiated in student teams. Design/Method: This ethnographic study entailed three data collection strategies: (a) ongoing observations of three focal design teams in a cornerstone design course, (b) one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with focal design team members, and (c) reflections from peer mentors who worked with focal and non-focal teams. Results: Students reflected on their prior experiences and skills, and the confidence they gained or lacked as a result, when negotiating their roles in their teams. Importantly, students’ valuation of their skills was gendered, where masculinized notions of engineering skills might lead women to underreport their skills during the role-negotiation process. Finally, while gendered patterns of marginalization and exclusion were apparent, I discuss the strategies women employed to exert influence over their team dynamics. Conclusions: Ensuring equitable participation in collaborative projects is key to support learning for all students in collaborative projects. Understanding how students negotiate their roles and learning opportunities is an important step in supporting students’ learning in collaborative projects.

Background: Personal characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, and precollege experiences) are known to shape students' pathways to engineering, as well as persistence decisions in college. However, the role of psychological cost in postgraduation intentions has received less scholarly attention.Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine sociocognitive factors that shape students' postgraduation intentions in the early college years. Guided by Social Cognitive Career Theory and the concept of psychological cost, we examine the role of self‐efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and psychological cost, as well as key background characteristics, in students' postgraduation intentions.Method: We analyzed survey responses from four cohorts of undergraduate engineering students at a large public university. Participants responded to items measuring self‐efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and psychological cost after their first and second years of college. We used structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between the sociocognitive variables and students' graduate school and career intentions.Results: The sociocognitive variables predicting postgraduation intentions after Year 1 differed from those predicting intentions after Year 2. After Year 1, we found no statistically significant sociocognitive variables predicting graduate school intentions or engineering career plans. After Year 2, both self‐efficacy and outcome expectations were significant predictors of postgraduation intentions. The psychological cost was significantly related to both self‐efficacy and outcome expectations. Finally, we found significant differences in racial/ethnic identity, sex, and first‐generation status.Conclusion: Examining psychological cost provides additional insights into the factors informing students' postgraduation intentions over the course of their collegiate careers and suggests new directions for research on students' thinking about engineering careers.