2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background/Motivation: Capstone experiences provide an important bridge between education and employment in engineering and providing marketable skills is a major function of the experience (Pembridge & Paretti, 2019). There is growing consensus around capstone projects as a potential site for teaching students professional skills, such as problem solving and teamwork (Lee & Loton, 2019). Yet there remains a gap in skills between employer expectations and the graduates they hire (Kolmos & Holgaard, 2019), suggesting that not all capstone experiences are providing sufficient support for developing these skills. For example, Picard, Hardebolle, Tormey, and Schiffman (2021) found limited growth in professional skills in small, short-term project experiences. One potential amplifier of developing professional skills is self-efficacy. Capstones that employ project-based learning may be particularly well-positioned to scaffold students’ sense of confidence in their ability to accomplish more than they previously thought (Fini, Awadallah, Parast, & Abu-Lebdeh, 2018). This paper uses three sets of analyses to examine the extent to which intensive capstone project experiences can assist in developing students’ self-efficacy alongside professional skills, as well as the contribution of self-efficacy and professional skills to long-term career preparedness.

Methodology: These questions are examined with a sample of 2,101 alumni from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) who completed a survey in 2021 about their educational experiences and its impact on their lives after graduation. All undergraduate students at WPI are required to complete a 9-credit major qualifying project in the final year to graduate. A series of hierarchical multiple linear regression models were constructed and assessed to determine the relative contributions of variables in predicting self-efficacy, each type of skill, and career preparation.

Results: The first series of models found that the capstone experience has a moderately sized positive effect on self-efficacy, even after controlling for student demographics, response bias, courses in the major, and other project experiences. The second series of models found a similar effect on the development of communication skills, information use skills, and teamwork skills. Finally, the third series of models demonstrated that self-efficacy, communication skills, and information use skills all significantly contribute to alumni’s preparation for their current career; teamwork skills, however, did not.

Conclusions/Significance: Self-efficacy is often implicit in the theories of action guiding capstone design (Pembridge & Paretti, 2019). The studies described in this paper explicitly confirm the significant role of capstones in developing students’ self-efficacy and its importance in preparing students for future engineering careers. This paper also extends prior research that stops short of assessing whether the self-efficacy and professional skills gained in capstones translates to career success.