Keywords: women, minority, self-confidence, persistence
Exploring the Relationships Among Performance on Engineering Tasks,
Confidence, Gender, and First
Year Persistence
Despite a decade of programs aimed at attracting women and minority students to engineering, enrollment
in engineering programs continues to be flat or declining. High attrition during the first two years, and a
lack of diversity in engineering students raise concerns nationally about maintaining a competitive edge and
future technological advancement. The goal of this research is to contribute to ongoing research efforts
to understand how students think about engineering, how they conceive of themselves as engineers, and how these
understandings influence their practices as they develop into engineers.
Implications of Findings
Ramifications for first year programs may be to ease the transition from high school to college with
emphasis on realistic expectations for performance. First year programs that bring this common gender
issue to light may create awareness for both males and females along with successful study and learning
techniques that equip future engineering students with both the cognitive and psychological awareness needed
to complete their engineering degree.
| Men had greater confidence in themselves going into engineering programs, and therefore
perhaps suffered more disillusionment than women as they experienced academic challenges in the first year
of study.
|
Method and Background
This exploratory study is based on data from the Academic Pathways Study, a longitudinal, multi-institution
study of engineering student experiences directed by the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of
Engineering Education. The APS uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to elicit data regarding
the undergraduate engineering student experience. Here we analyze data gathered in the first year from an
engineering performance task and survey questions about students’ self-confidence to conduct an exploratory
study on possible relationships between these measures (for a full description of the methods used, please
follow the link below).
What We Found
This exploratory study has shown that while men enter engineering report higher confidence in themselves than
women, they do not perform better on an engineering task nor are they more likely to persist (beyond the first
year, women were more likely to persist than men).
These findings are contrary to what the theory of self-efficacy would predict – that is, the greater one’s belief
in one’s abilities to achieve the objectives, the greater one’s chances are of achieving those objectives.
Expectancy theory suggests that lower self-confidence should increase the expected level of effort needed to
study engineering. If women generally have lower levels of confidence in their engineering-related knowledge
and skills, the theory states that they should expect to work harder to achieve the valued outcomes. Conversely,
if men have higher levels of confidence in their engineering-related knowledge and skills, then they should expect
less effort required to graduate.
Cognitive dissonance theory may explain why women have lower confidence levels yet perform and persist on par with
men. We hypothesize that greater alignment between expectations and experience—less dissonance—requires less
radical change in the individual. The finding that women perform engineering tasks equally as well as men and that
they persist at equal rates than men, may in part be due to their lowered confidence at entry. Rather than
experiences of disillusionment, women may be more realistic in the expectations of difficulty at the outset of the
engineering program. Men had greater confidence in themselves going into engineering education, and therefore
perhaps suffered more disillusionment than women as they experienced academic challenges in the first year of study.
On the other hand, women’s greater persistence may be a function of the perceived value of an engineering degree.
Other factors may influence the persistence of students besides gender. For example, due to the predominantly
male culture in engineering, the women who choose to enter the field may have self-selected based on higher levels
of commitment than their male counterparts. The women in this study may come into the program with higher levels of
commitment that would manifest in higher levels of persistence. Even if this self-selection process plays a larger
role, it is also likely that the roles of expectancy and cognitive dissonance play an important part of this self
selection – an important area for future research.
Authors: Jennifer Light, Russell Korte, Ken Yasuhara, and Deborah Kilgore
Source: Proceedings of the 2007 American Society for Engineering Education Conference
The full paper, including references, is available via ASEE proceedings search.
For a printable pdf of this research brief, click here.
Brief created July 2007
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