CAREER- Achieving Diversity in Engineering Education: Cultivating Student Self-Efficacy
Many women who leave undergraduate engineering and science programs believe less in their capabilities than those who stay, despite earning similar grades. Those who stay have a lower opinion of their capabilities than their male colleagues. Because self-efficacy beliefs correlate with motivation, performance, retention, and professional success, agencies and foundations have sponsored the development of interventions designed to promote women's self-efficacy in engineering. However, research has not sought to understand how specific efficacy beliefs are formed and how different aspects of the learning environment influence these beliefs. Using methodology that focuses on personal meanings, as qualitative approaches do, is particularly important for addressing these types of questions.
Project Objectives This project will . Assess and describe undergraduate engineering student self-efficacy beliefs . Measure correlations of self-efficacy beliefs with student achievement, interest, and retention . Characterize how the engineering learning environment facilitates or undermines positive belief formation and processes by which students form their self-efficacy beliefs . Identify how student levels of efficacy, the influences of the learning environment, and the processes by which students form their efficacy beliefs change as students progress through their undergraduate engineering programs and how these changes vary by gender and engineering discipline . Develop, implement, assess, and refine course practices that enable and encourage students to accurately assess their abilities . Disseminate findings and practices to faculty, faculty-in-training, advisors, and administrators in the fields of engineering, science, technology, and educational psychology
A mixed-method approach will be used. Two cohorts of male and female engineering students at will be interviewed and surveyed longitudinally in their freshman through senior years. A sample of engineering lectures and recitation classes will be observed; engineering instructors, interviewed; and course materials, analyzed, enabling across-methods triangulation of results. The education plan includes commitments to develop and test course practices that promote engineering student self-efficacy. The use of these practices will be promoted through the development, delivery, and assessment of workshops and a graduate-level engineering course. The work will be informed by social cognitive theory.
