2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Self-Efficacy has shown to be positively correlated with academic success [1]-[3]. A previous study by Mamaril (2016) found significant positive correlations between general engineering self-efficacy and academic success [4]. With an often-cited need for biomedical engineers to engage more closely with the medical field, this study seeks to create an instrument to determine how self-efficacy in biomedical engineering is related to a subject’s abilities to identify and solve provocative questions relevant in a clinical environment and ability to write grant proposals related to those questions.

To create the instrument, 35 broad survey questions related to self-efficacy were generated, separate into 4 broad categories: General Self-Efficacy (GEN) a unidimensional scale taken from Mamaril’s paper, Engineering Problem Identification (IDENT), Engineering Problem Solving (SOLVE), and Engineering Proposal Writing Skills (WRITE). Participants were asked to rate their level of certainty with which they believe they can perform each task on a Likert scale from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5(Strongly Disagree). To ensure content-related validity, this instrument was reviewed by professors in biomedical engineering and experts in self-efficacy and engineering education research. To gather validity evidence based on response processes, think aloud protocols were used with two students to improve the wording of the survey before its broader use. Undergraduate and graduate biomedical engineers from a variety of universities across the United States were asked to participate in our survey, with a total of 50 responses. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to determine factor structure. Principal axis factoring was used on the categories of IDENT, SOLVE, and WRITE.

Survey questions that showed low correlation with other variables on the pattern matrix from IDENT were removed in future statistical analyses. Our three unique factors ended up accounting for about 64% of the variation between variables, with each factor having a moderate communality with their main factor and low correlation for other factors. Reliability statistics were calculated for IDENT, SOLVE, and WRITE, with each showing moderately high Cronbach’s Alpha. Correlative statistics were determined between the averages of the variables in GEN with the averages of IDENT, SOLVE, and WRITE, with Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient for each being both positive and moderately high.

We found statistical evidence of reliability and validity of our self-efficacy instrument. Our instrument can use biomedical engineers’ self-efficacy to measure their ability to identify and solve provocative questions relevant in a clinical environment as well as write grant proposals related to those questions.