Cognitive Defaults in Indigineering: Baseline Orientations toward Indigenous Knowledge, Engineering, and Entrepreneurship among First-Year Engineering Students

Abstract

Engineering education increasingly calls for pedagogies that engage local and Indigenous knowledge systems, yet few instruments exist to examine how students initially orient themselves at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, engineering, and entrepreneurship. This study introduces the Indigineering Cognitive Defaults Instrument and reports a pre-intervention baseline from a first-year engineering course at the university of ANONYMOUS. Two hundred students completed 13 scenario-based items together with motivation and entrepreneurial competency measures. We examined item-level patterns against chance expectations, explored student profiles using k-means clustering, and assessed relationships among composite Indigenous knowledge (IK), engineering (ENG), and entrepreneurial (ENT) indices across the full sample and two authorization subsamples. Students demonstrated strong Indigenous knowledge legitimacy defaults (66-80%), modest entrepreneurial orientation, and comparatively weak analytical engineering (14%), tool-adaptability (19%), and co-creation ethics (13%) defaults. IK and ENG indices independently predicted entrepreneurial orientation in OLS models, whereas the hypothesized sequential mediation pathway was not supported. A gender difference emerged for the analytical engineering default, while IK legitimacy did not vary by childhood setting. The study provides initial psychometric and construct validity evidence for the instrument and suggests that culturally responsive engineering curricula may need to strengthen analytical and ethical capacities while building on students' existing recognition of Indigenous knowledge as a legitimate source of engineering innovation.