Examining Workplace Affordance and Student Engagement in Engineering Co-op and Internship Literature

Abstract

Co-ops and internships complement students’ classroom learning and constitute important contributors to the quality of engineering education. In light of Stephen Billett’s affordance-engagement framework, we reviewed 30 selected empirical studies on undergraduate engineering students’ co-op and internship experiences. From these studies, we identified three themes with respect to workplace affordances and individual engagement in engineering co-ops and internships. Our analysis not only showed that Billett’s framework offers an enlightening approach to examining engineering students’ workplace learning experiences but also it made the equity dimension of the framework explicit. We call for engineering co-op and internship programs and researchers to go beyond learning outcome assessment alone and shift the attention to uncovering the factors in workplace learning experiences that might have influenced the achievement of desirable learning outcomes.