2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of gender differences in undergraduate engineering students’ feeling of self-efficacy across a six-year period, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Engineering self-efficacy was measured by the Longitudinal Assessment of Engineering Self-Efficacy (LAESE) instrument, while pandemic-related stress was measured with a COVID screener comprised of twenty Likert-type questions. Surveys were administered to engineering students at a small, primarily undergraduate university every semester from Fall 2018 through Spring 2024 and also included one summer survey following a move to online teaching in 2020. Results of long-term data collected over six years (thirteen timepoints) indicated no significant differences in engineering self-efficacy between genders or over time. COVID screener responses from during the pandemic highlighted significantly more social/emotional and academic stress among women compared to men. Post-pandemic the average stress levels for both genders decreased. Social/emotional stressors were significantly higher for women than men, whereas academic stressors for both genders were similar. Despite the high stress levels during the pandemic years, measures of engineering self-efficacy for both genders in this engineering program remained relatively stable over time. This may indicate resiliency of the students and their engineering self-efficacy during this challenging time, and may also reflect the efforts of the faculty to remain in-person and as “normal” as possible during this period (e.g., teaching in physical classrooms as much as possible). The study provides information on the resiliency of the engineering students at this institution throughout the last six years, including both before and after the COVID pandemic as well as offers insight as to other factors that may increase self-efficacy and ultimately resiliency of the students in this program and beyond.