Engineering Self-Efficacy Contributing to the Academic Performance of AMAIUB Engineering Students: A Qualitative Investigation

Abstract

This research study aims to determine the factors of engineering skills self- efficacy sources contributing on the academic performance of AMAIUB engineering students. Thus, a better measure of engineering self-efficacy is needed to adequately assess engineering students’ beliefs in their capabilities to perform tasks in their engineering coursework and their future roles as engineers. A descriptive, survey research design was chosen to investigate the   sources of engineering self-efficacy of college students.  A quantitative survey design approach was used for this study. The survey was administered to all engineering students enrolled during the third trimester of school year 2014-2015. The results were generally consistent with the findings gathered by Lent and his colleagues where the instrument was originated from as well as supported the theory hypothesized by Bandura. This implies that when an engineering student has strong and positive judgment about his/her prior knowledge in engineering, he/she may achieve good grades in the subject and more importantly, he/she may also score well in engineering-related subjects. This supported Bandura‟s theory that the ability to accomplish tasks was a significant and important source of information for students to achieve better grades. This study managed to establish a direct relationship that sources of self-efficacy were significantly correlated with academic achievements and that engineering design experience could best predict the academic performance as well as overall engineering modules. These findings have practical implications which strengthened the conception of curriculum developers that tapping of students‟ prior knowledge and experience are critical in mathematics and related engineering modules. Although there is a strong correlation between engineering skills self-efficacy  and overall academic achievements for the sampled group of engineering students, more investigation is needed to widen the scope to the field of engineering. As such, the present study raises certain issues for future research. Firstly, it may be worthwhile to further investigate the reason causing low reliability to other sources of self-efficacy. This may shed some light of whether there could be hidden issue of how the study was conducted. Secondly, it would be useful to replicate and extend these findings to different student populations and domains. This could help to further strengthen and generalize the theory that was presented in this study. Lastly, further exploration to examine if students‟ achievements in Mathematics can indeed be a strong predictor for their achievements in engineering would enhance the current literature on the relation between these two domains.

Keywords: engineering self - efficacy, academic performance, general engineering skills, tinkering skills, research sills, engineering design skills