Towards a Survey Instrument for Use In Proactive Advising

West, Kenneth; Carroll, Bruce; Shin, Jinnie; Crippen, Kent

doi:10.18260/1-2--48167

This paper introduces the pilot implementation of the Evidence Based Personas survey instrument for assessing non-cognitive attributes of relevance from undergraduate students at different stages of their engineering degree for the purpose of informing proactive advising processes. The survey instrument was developed with two key objectives: first, to assess its potential for streamlining and shortening existing instruments, and second, to explore the possibility of consolidating items from different surveys that measure the same or closely related constructs. A proactive advising system is being developed that uses the Mediation Model of Research Experiences (MMRE) as a framework. Within this framework, participation in various educational activities is linked to increased Commitment to Engineering via three mediating parameters: Self-Efficacy, Teamwork/Leadership Self-Efficacy, and Engineering Identity. The existing, validated MMRE survey instrument was used as a starting point for development of the current instrument with a goal of streamlining / shortening the number of questions. Ultimately, we envision augmenting the shortened instrument with items related to broader non-cognitive and affective constructs from the SUCCESS instrument. Noting that both the MMRE and SUCCESS instruments include measures of Self-Efficacy and Engineering Identity, selected questions from both were included and compared. Data was collected from 395 total respondents, and subsequent data analysis was based on 337 valid participants. Factor Analysis techniques, both exploratory and confirmatory, were employed to uncover underlying or latent variables within the results, particularly in the areas of Self-Efficacy where the combined items of the SUCCESS instrument and the MMRE instrument were used. Cronbach’s alpha analysis was employed to assess the internal consistency of the survey instrument. The Teamwork, Engineering Identity, and Commitment to Engineering constructs all produced a Cronbach’s alpha value in excess of 0.80. The Self-Efficacy construct fell below the 0.80 threshold at 0.77 which is considered to be respectable but is indicative of some short comings compared to that of the other constructs. The results of the EFA four-factor pattern matrix show the SUCCESS instrument items breaking out into their own components while the MMRE items merge with some of the items from the Engineering Identity construct suggesting a distinction in the underlying concepts these items may be measuring. This finding is further supported in the CFA through an assessment of the Goodness of Fit (GFI), Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI), and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) of these constructs. The initial groupings of the four constructs produced a robust CFI value of 0.853, robust TLI value of 0.838, and a robust RMSEA value of 0.075. Self-Efficacy is broken out into two sub-scales one defined by the three items from the SUCCESS instrument and the other defined by the four remaining items from the MMRE instrument. Engineering Identity was also broken into two sub-scales. The robust CFI and TLI report values of 0.928 and 0.919 respectively, and the robust RMSEA is reported to be 0.053. The findings of the factor analyses indicate that a shortened form of the MMRE survey instrument will provide reliable measures of the underlying constructs. Additionally, the results suggest that the self-efficacy as measured by items from the MMRE and from the SUCCESS instruments are related to two separate aspects of self-efficacy and do not load well into a single factor.

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