Pre‐Collegiate Factors Influencing the Self‐Efficacy of Engineering Students

Abstract

Background Many engineering colleges have the goal of increasing the quality and number of students choosing to pursue engineering and therefore are heavily invested in programs that expose pre‐collegiate students to engineering. Most commonly, these institutions are involved with summer outreach programs and weekend or fieldtrip opportunities for students to visit engineering campuses, and some curriculum development. A lesser, often untapped resource for engineering colleges is through K‐12 technology and pre‐engineering teacher training. Purpose(Hypothesis) This study addresses the long term effects of pre‐collegiate engineering experiences on student selfefficacy. It is hypothesized that the greater the rigor of a pre‐colligate experience, the more it will contribute to a student's self‐efficacy related to engineering studies. The pre‐collegiate experiences examined in this study include pre‐engineering classes, multi‐day programs, engineering hobbies, working in an engineering environment, extra‐curricular engineering programs, and single‐day field trips. Design/Method The long term effects of pre‐collegiate experiences were evaluated by comparing the self‐efficacy of firstyear students who had the experiences to first‐year students who did not have the experiences. Results Significant differences in self‐efficacy were only found between groups of students who had pre‐engineering classes and engineering hobbies versus students who did not have these experiences. Conclusion Based on the findings, engineering colleges with the goal of increasing the self‐efficacy of engineering students should consider focusing resources on developing K‐12 technology and pre‐engineering teachers. Additional recommendations for practice, pedagogical implications, and areas for further research are offered.

Lessons Learned in K-12 Engineering Outreach and Their Impact on Program Planning (Evaluation)

“…The United States is a historical leader in science and engineering [2]. However, interest in math and science among pre-college students is fading and in many cases students are deficient in math and science achievement [3] performing at or near the bottom of international assessment [4,5].…”

“…If the percentage of such groups in engineering is to remain comparable with percentages of the United States' population, organizations must focus their efforts on these groups. Consequently, an abundance of outreach activities exist throughout the country with a common goal to increase the awareness of and interest in engineering [2,3,[5][6][7][8][9][10][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Sullivan et al [13] and Jeffers et al [3] list a number of activities typically taken by outreach programs, which generally fall into three focus areas: 1) students, 2) teachers, and 3) curriculum development.…”

“…Mentoring programs provide great influence on students, but most of the programs for students are one to two-week long summer camps or competitions that utilize a variety of handson activities [3,7,[13][14][15]17]. Douglas et al [8] and Ralston et al [15] note the importance of hands-on learning for attracting students to engineering and some of the most proven attributes of such activities are self-motivation, real-life application, and immediate feedback [2]. Simply put, students need to do some of the engineering in order to learn about engineering [3].…”

“…Simply put, students need to do some of the engineering in order to learn about engineering [3]. While hands-on activities provide valuable knowledge about the field and enhance various cognitive skills, many of them lack an analytical component, which Fantz et al [2] states, "gives students a false sense of collegiate engineering programs. "…”

“…Although teacher workshops provide the low-pressure environment for teachers to experiment, engineering content must align with state math and science standards for inclusion within the curriculum [2,3,6,[12][13][14][15]. Some schools offer pre-engineering courses such as Project Lead the Way and The Infinity Project, which compliment existing math and science courses, but require students to be enrolled in a college prep math sequence or have already completed various math courses (e.g.…”