2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Entrepreneurship education has been constantly growing within engineering studies because of its need to contribute to technological innovation (Huang-Saad et al., 2020). To perform different roles and tasks of being an entrepreneur, self-efficacy, the person's belief of being capable (Bandura, 1977), is required. Project-based courses promote several professional skills, such as teamwork, creativity, and critical thinking, which are the bases of the roles and tasks required by entrepreneurs (Van Gelderen, M., 2022). During their first year, students are confronted with solving real-world problems in teams using project-based learning (Wengrowicz et al., 2017). Considering the importance of developing skills early on, this empirical work-in-progress research aims to understand how a cornerstone course impacts student self-efficacy, thus contributing to the entrepreneur mindset. Each semester between 2019 and 2024, a pre-post survey was conducted in a cornerstone course imparted at a highly selective university in Latin America. A total of 4,309 responses were received from engineering students (first semester) and bachelor's in science students (second semester) to understand students' perceptions of self-efficacy. Among responses to self-efficacy items included in a 10-point Likert scale, an exploratory factor analysis identified three dimensions: Problem-Solving, teamwork, and Self-learning, which explain 56% of the variance in the original items. A subsequent analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to test for statistically significant differences between pre-and post-measurements, controlling for the year of application and program type (Engineering or College). Preliminary results indicate a significant improvement in both the Problem Solving and Cooperation dimensions from pre- to post-measurement. This work in progress contributes to Engineering Education by analyzing how a cornerstone course affects students' perceptions of their self-efficacy in entrepreneurial skills. The relevance of this study is understanding how to encourage entrepreneurship education in engineering studies.