Research on achievement motivation has shown that the connections students make between their perceptions about their future goals and present academic tasks affect the choices they make about persisting at those goals and tasks. In fact, there is evidence that students with more positive perceptions of the future in comparison with their perceptions of the present are more persistent toward their goals.

The research I will present focuses on answering the question, “What are the interactions between student motivation and their persistence in engineering majors?” I will present data collected through the Motivation and Attitudes in Engineering (MAE) survey and the current majors of the students who completed the MAE survey as first year engineering students three years ago. The MAE survey was developed to assess undergraduate engineering students’ time-oriented motivations and how those motivations relate to their perceptions of metacognitive processes and problem solving. Constructs within the survey include goal orientation (performance approach, mastery approach and work avoid), expectancy (beliefs about succeeding at a task), and future time perspective (perceptions of the future, perceived instrumentality of present tasks, and perceived effects of the future on present tasks). A multiple logistic regression model of MAE factor scores as predictors of whether or not a student would remain in an engineering major revealed that a mastery approach was negatively correlated with persistence in an engineering major, and high expectancy and positive perceptions of the future were positively correlated with a student’s persistence in engineering. These findings provide evidence for researchers and educators who seek to attract and keep students in engineering majors who might otherwise be inclined to leave, namely students whose goal is to master the material, who question their likelihood to succeed in an engineering major, or who do not have clear, positive perceptions of what their future in engineering will be.