Are There Differences in Engineering Self-Efficacy Between Minority and Majority Students Across Academic Levels?

Abstract

Abstract Topic/session: New research and trends related to underrepresented minorities inengineering Are There Differences in Engineering Self-Efficacy Between Minority and Majority Students Across Academic Levels?AbstractWilliam A. Wulf, former president of the National Academy of Engineering, expressedthe importance of diversity in engineering when he said, “We need to understand why ina society so dependent on technology, a society that benefits so richly from the results ofengineering, a society that rewards engineers so well, engineering isn’t perceived as adesirable occupation.” Despite his sentiments, little progress has been made to attractminorities in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).The students who are attracted are rarely retained. Nationally, the retention to graduationrate for minority students is 37.8% compared to majority students 46.1% (NACME,2008).Something happens between a students’ freshman year and the point they decide to eitherswitch their major or drop-out of school altogether. Do minority students feel included intheir courses and labs? Do their expectations of what will happen upon graduating withan engineering degree change at some point? These questions are in fact related to theirengineering self-efficacy.Engineering self-efficacy is a person’s belief that he/she can successfully navigate theengineering curriculum and eventually become a practicing engineer. Strategies thatincrease awareness of engineering self-efficacy in minority students have the ability toimprove persistence and sense of belonging for minority students in engineering.This paper compares the self-efficacy constructs of minority and majority engineeringstudents at a predominantly white institution and examines similarities and differencesacross academic levels. The factors that are significant in predicting minority studentpersistence and sense of belonging in engineering are also explored.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.