2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Instruments to Measure Connections and Creating Value in First-Year Engineering Students

This Work in Progress paper will describe the initial steps of validating an instrument to measure Connections and Creating Value skills in undergraduate engineering students. To effectively tackle global challenges and meet industry demands, it is crucial for today's engineering graduates to possess both technical expertise and professional skill competencies. Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and associated behaviors in first-year engineering students is one step towards fostering students' professional skill development and preparing them for their future career roles. This study examines the use of two survey instruments designed to measure entrepreneurial mindset (EM) constructs, such as Connections and Creating Value in engineering students. Grounded in the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) definition of EM, two indirect surveys were developed and implemented in a first-year engineering program across multiple cohort years. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) will be conducted using the data collected from this first-year engineering course.
Using the KEEN definitions and EM learning objectives developed within the network, two survey instruments were developed to measure Connections and Creating Value. The Connections survey instrument developed had 18 items, and the Creating Value survey instrument had 22 items. Based on a previous study, the EFA analysis technique was used to identify factors associated with each construct. This was completed with data from an Autumn 2021 first-year engineering cohort with ~215 full responses to each survey. The resulting EFA identified four factors for Connections and three factors for Creating Value. However, this data only included one cohort and thus was limited in its findings. While the number of responses met the ratio of 10 responses per item for an EFA accepted in multiple sources as the ideal minimum, higher responses are often preferred. Since Autumn 2021, this data collection has been repeated for Autumn 2022, 2023, and 2024, resulting in an additional 700+ student responses. These cohorts will be used for the CFA in this study. Overall, this work-in-progress study is a continuation of previous work aimed at refining and validating the survey instruments.
The results from this study will bolster the efforts to expand the use of EM-specific assessment instruments across other institutions implementing an EM, standardize assessments of the entrepreneurial mindset constructs, enable researchers to make comparisons across different groups, and broaden the use of these tools across various disciplines. The final paper will include a presentation of the CFA results and recommendations for further validation of the instruments.

Authors

Dr. Bhavana Kotla http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5163-7664 The Ohio State University [biography]

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering Education, College of Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Tyler James Stump http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1264-858X The Ohio State University [biography]

Tyler Stump is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. Tyler received his B.S. in Biosystems Engineering at Michigan State University in 2022 and his M.S. from Michigan State University in 2023. His engineering education interests include first-year engineering student experiences, computing education, and how to foster and develop creativity within programming courses.
Mr. Connor Jenkins The Ohio State University [biography]

Connor Jenkins is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University. His engineering education research interests include first-year engineering, teaching assistant programs, and technical communications.
Abbey Darya Kashani Motlagh The Ohio State University [biography]

Abbey Kashani Motlagh is currently pursuing her Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering at The Ohio State University. Her research interests regarding engineering education stem from experience as an undergraduate teaching assistant and time in the classroom. Abbey has research interests in first year engineering classroom dynamics, programming education, and student-teacher interactions.
Dr. Krista M Kecskemety http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1192-4172 The Ohio State University [biography]

Krista Kecskemety is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University and the co-Director of the Fundamentals of Engineering Programs. Krista received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University in 2006 and received her M.S. from Ohio State in 2007. In 2012, Krista completed her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State. Her engineering education research interests include investigating first-year engineering student experiences, faculty experiences, and the research to practice cycle within first-year engineering.
Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9745-1921 The Ohio State University [biography]

Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Ohio State and earned her Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on the intersection between motivation and identity, first-year engineering programs, mixed methods research, and innovative approaches to teaching. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Identity and Motivation in Engineering (RIME) Collaborative.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025