Self-Efficacy in First Year Engineering Design Courses: Belonging, Satisfaction and Team Roles

Olin College Summer Experiences in Education Research 2013 Liz Spingola, Ohio Northern University & Briana Saul, Louisiana State University
Advisor: Debbie Chachra, PhD
Abstract

Project-based learning has become a popular pedagogical approach where students, usually, work in teams to investigate and solve particular problems. Courses that accept this method of teaching provide students with an opportunity to gain engineering skills and mastery experience. This project examines the factors that affect changes in self-efficacy of students before and after an engineering design course. A focus on team roles, role models, satisfaction, belonging and gender roles was emphasized and explored during analysis.
Self-Efficacy An individuals judgment of their capability to organize and execute courses of action for a given task. (Bandura, 1994)

Emergent Themes From Qualitative Analysis

Teamwork Roles and Division of Labor Olins Curriculum Stereotype Threat/Stereotypes

Linking Satisfaction to Belonging and Team Roles

Motivation and Role Models

Factors that affect selfefficacy/confidence

Satisfaction in Group/Project

Feeling of Being Useful

Motivation
The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of a team-based courses where a prototype is built on students self-efficacy. This was done, primarily, in first-year engineering design courses. The sample set that was worked with was 32 interviews, 14 female students and 18 male students, taken from the Olin course, Design Nature, in the years 2011 and 2012.

Team Roles

Sense of Belonging

Example quotes from interviews that show belonging to the team and team roles
Male student Belonging: Everyone was involved. Everyone contributed Tasks: I was generally the main scheduler. I was kind of in charge I was far more interested in getting the other experiences more like project management or working with other people. Female student Belonging: I dont think there was really ever [a time] when I felt like I didnt belong Tasks: mainly CAD assembly, and machining, and actually assembling the [animal]

Methods A mixed methods approach was taken for this project. Quantitative Pre/post-course surveys Activity logs and reflections
The emergent theme that interested me was: sense of belonging and team roles as it pertains to gender, and I decided to focus on it. These themes emerged while qualitatively analyzing the semi-structured, postcourse interviews.

Qualitative Semi-structured, post-course interviews

For the most part, the male students seem satisfied with working on the professional tasks or the engineering tasks. As long as they feel like that task they were completing was useful to the group they felt a sense of belonging to the group and satisfaction on the personal and professional levels. Female students had to, almost exclusively, be involved with the technical skills to feel a sense of belonging and satisfaction. This was observed in 12 out of the 14 interviews with female students. These results are preliminary and future work needs to be done to validate it. Above is a depiction of the theme that I worked on.

Future Research
Look deeper into the sub-topics that were explored and relate them to the main theme of self efficacy. The main hypothesis should be explored to a fuller extent.

This research was performed as part of the Olin College Summer Experience in Education Research program, funded by a Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant (#1156832) from the National Science Foundation.