2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Efforts to increase engineering degree completion at community colleges often focus on recruitment, academic performance, and persistence. However, an often-overlooked yet crucial factor is engineering self-efficacy—students' belief in their ability to learn and perform engineering tasks. This belief significantly influences academic success, retention, and career decisions. Higher self-efficacy can enhance motivation, task engagement, and overall achievement, and one way to improve engineering self-efficacy is through the acquisition of hands-on skills. Such skills allow students to engage directly with tasks and achieve tangible results, reinforcing their belief in their ability to succeed. While many four-year universities offer opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience through access to workshops, makerspaces, and other collaborative environments, community college engineering programs often lack such facilities. In addition to developing hands-on skills, access to these kinds of workshops can improve students' sense of belonging within the engineering community, which is equally important for success.
The engineering faculty at a Texas Community College recently procured a space on campus and modest financial support to establish an engineering workshop, complete with basic hand tools, work benches, 3D printers, safety equipment, and a small study area. This study will examine the impact of launching a new engineering-specific workshop on community college engineering students' self-efficacy. The analysis will rely on matched survey responses from students enrolled in the Fall 2024 Introduction to Engineering cohort. First, students will complete a survey assessing their prior experience with tools, workshops, and hands-on engineering projects. They will also take the 19-question Engineering Skills Self-Efficacy Scale (Mamaril et al., 2016), which measures self-efficacy in three key areas: experimental, tinkering, and design. The survey will be administered again at the end of the second, third, and fourth semesters to track changes in self-efficacy based on workshop utilization for various courses’ projects.