Self-efficacy has been found to be one of the key factors that are responsible for academic success of engineering students. However, there exist multiple instruments for determining the self-efficacy of engineering students and studies conducted in this area in the past have varied significantly in their use of a general or engineering domain-specific constructs. This work investigates whether an engineering-domain specific self-efficacy measurement instrument is required for determining the self-efficacy beliefs of engineering students or whether a general instrument will suffice. Furthermore, this study also aims to investigate the effect of gender, class level, and transfer status of students on their engineering self-efficacy beliefs. Over two hundred engineering students from Texas A&M University and Houston Community College are surveyed on 39 questions divided across 6 distinct self-efficacy instruments. The survey data was then analyzed to determine whether there exists a significant difference in the scores obtained across the generic and the domain-specific instruments. Factor analysis is also performed to explore the interrelationships among the questions belonging to different self-efficacy instruments. The results reveal that there exists a significant difference in the scores across the two types of instruments.
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Differences Between First- and Third-Year Students’ Attitudes Toward Computational Methods in Engineering (WIP)
This Work-In-Progress study investigates differences in freshman and junior engineering students’ valuation of and self-efficacy for computational work in engineering. We administered a survey to N=58 total students and performed a mixed-methods analysis to better understand what factors may influence students’ attitudes in this area. We found that freshmen’s intended major (CS or non-CS) was strongly correlated to differences in their response patterns across survey items. Interestingly, while MSE juniors had significantly higher self-efficacy scores for computational work than those of freshmen, their valuation scores were slightly lower than those of freshmen, despite their much greater experience in the area. We are currently conducting and analyzing follow-up interviews with survey participants to investigate the causes of these outcomes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2025093
- PAR ID:
- 10440929
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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