An Investigation of Self-Efficacy and Topic Emotions in Entry-Level Engineering Design Learning Activities

What I read

In this text, the authors summarize research they conducted with undergraduate engineering students, intended to understand how emotions change throughout the course of a semester, and how those emotion changes impact self-efficacy. They find that both positive and negative emotions are related to self-efficacy.

First, the authors indicate the growth in demand for skilled engineers, but describe that novice engineering students frequently drop out, citing reasons like finding an easier field or feeling unfulfilled. They hypothesize that one reason for attrition is the emotional response to engineering learning activities, where failure is often encouraged or designed into the curriculum. Another reason may be that students lack self-efficacy (or resilience).

Next, the authors describe existing literature related to these topics. They note that engineering education is often rigid and “unemotional,” while other disciplines have recognized that emotions exist in learning and impact learning efficacy. These are “academic emotions”, which “consist of two dimensions: valence (positive/negative) and activation (activating/deactivating).” This frame allows for more nuance than simply “good or bad”; for example, activating, negative emotions (such as anger) may actually increase engagement and elaboration.The authors also describe research into “topic emotions”, related to the actual subject matter being studied. These sometimes relate to the complexity or ambiguous nature of the topic (such as negative numbers in mathematics). These are both “state-like, which consist of those ‘immediate and rapidly changing emotions’, or trait-like, that comprises a ‘longer-term and relatively stable characteristic’” over the course of the class or semester.

The authors describe literature related to self-efficacy, which they define as someone’s “belief in their ability to succeed in a specific situation, goal, or task, even if the circumstances may be difficult to pursue.” There are four sources of this self-efficacy: “(a) vicarious experiences; (b)social persuasion; (c) emotional and physical state; and (d) mastery experiences.”

Next, the authors describe their study. The goals were to understand the topic emotions found in the students throughout the course, the levels of self-efficacy, and how these two items are related. Engineering students completed “in-the-moment” surveys three times in the semester to assess emotions, and a self-efficacy survey as well.

The data showed that students exhibited positive emotions throughout the semester—primarily curiosity and interest at the beginning, and hopefulness and happiness at the end. Additionally, they saw a moderate correlation with self-efficacy, as well as a consistent positive topic-to-self-efficacy relationship. “Positive topic emotion at the end of the semester influenced both self-efficacy and the final grade, while the self-efficacy also contributed to final grade.”

The authors then discuss their findings. Students “reported experiencing positive topic emotions throughout the semester”, and had high self-efficacy at the beginning of the semester, which then increased in strength. They also found that negative topic emotions were inversely related to self-efficacy, while positive emotions were related to positive self-efficacy. The overall finding is that “self-efficacy and topic emotions as being contextually situated based upon the nature of the engineering design activity.”

What I learned and what I think

There’s something about the sort of banal and boring findings here that I appreciate. The study doesn’t make some sort of revolutionary claim about what was learned: that during learning, there’s a connection between what I would characterize as resilience, and positive emotions. Students who feel that they can overcome challenges feel better about their learning experience (although it may go the other direction, or even both.) I also think it’s interesting that something like this can be published. It doesn’t seem to add much value to the world of knowledge. It seems like this would have been a good study to run, and then say, “we did it, nothing to report here,” and move on. But I know that you don’t get or keep tenure like that.

I wonder about all sorts of things in the study itself. Did any of the students drop out halfway through the class? They must have… how was that data treated? Was the class actually difficult? Literally no increase in negative sentiment amongst the students… Were these overachievers? What about the self-selection of 58 of 88 students who participated in the study? What about the actual performance of the students? The researchers indicate that they didn’t measure performance in the class, but report that there was a relationship in their findings to final grade; how do we know?Maybe most importantly, what about the quality of the professor, which matters so, so much?

I’m learning about the sometimes “bulletproof” nature of these papers, and the inconsistency of how much substantiation is included, and what is substantiated and what is not. So much thought is spent on justifying assertions through citations (this one has 74 citations), and in the rigor of the statistical analysis, but then there are also so many gaps in these studies, which is inevitable because everything in culture about everything is so intertwined and complex. I’m back my skepticism of the positivist studies of human behavior. But I know I can’t write off the whole approach…….