2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The influence of self-efficacy on pre-college students’ interest in STEM fields (Evaluation)

In this paper, we analyze five years of data from summer engineering camps in order to determine whether self-efficacy plays a factor on pre-college students’ interest in the STEM fields. The camps were part of the DOE’s GEARUP program (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs). They were designed with the intention of increasing pre-college students’ interest in the STEM fields. The camps took place in the years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023 (with a two year break due to the COVID pandemic) and contained engaging engineering activities that explored water, rockets, air quality, etc.

Before and after each camp, the students completed surveys in which they answered Likert-style questions on the amount of their self-perceived self-efficacy in each of the STEM subjects, as well as whether they have STEM role models, significant parental influence, parental careers in STEM, parental socio-economic status, etc. These surveys also contained similarly themed open-ended questions. There were a total of five summer camps with an approximate total sample size of n=130.

In our analysis, we explore whether students’ self-efficacy is correlated, or has any influence on a number of factors such as STEM interest, the presence of STEM role-models, parents who have STEM careers, and the pre-post changes in these themes that result from the intervention (the camp). In particular, the researchers are eager to explore whether there are significant differences in categories such as STEM interest between low and high self-efficacy students, before and after the camp. We expect that students with low self-efficacy (but who have demonstrated the willingness to attend a summer engineering camp) are more motivationally resilient and maintain their level of interest at a higher, less volatile rate when compared to their counterparts with high self-efficacy.

We intend to explore whether students lacking in self-efficacy appear to have any of a wide-number of potential lurking variables that provide them with a stable ‘attractor’ to the STEM fields; these ‘attractors’ could include the presence of a STEM role-model, a parent with a STEM career, etc. Likewise, we are interested in parsing the efficacious students who have these ‘attractors’ from the efficacious students who do not, and determining if the presence (or absence) of these ‘attractors’ present themselves in the data.

To simplify, or explain in another way, we examine the trope of the engineer who ‘chose STEM because they were good at STEM’ versus the one who ‘performs poorly in STEM (in a traditional academic sense) but has strong conviction that “STEM is cool!” ’. This research has implications in STEM recruitment and retention and could point towards the need to focus these efforts on students who have high self-efficacy, but lack a certain number of to-be-determined tangibles such as, for example, the presence of a STEM role model, having friends in STEM, and parents who have careers in STEM fields, among other possibilities. Traditional STEM efforts have focused on students with low self-efficacy.