Increasing diverse students' persistence in engineering: A social cognitive perspective

This presentation adds to the social cognitive career theory (SCCT)[1, 2] research in engineering[3–10] to understand factors associated with Latino/a engineering students' engineering self-efficacy and engineering outcome expectations. We highlight findings from one empirical study about the associations among perceived support in engineering, perceived barriers in engineering, engineering-related learning experiences (i.e., performance accomplishments, vicarious learning, verbal encouragement, emotional arousal), and two social cognitive variables: engineering-related self-efficacy and engineering-related outcome expectations. A path analysis was performed with a sample of 655 Latino/a (255 women and 400 men) engineering students attending 11 universities across the U.S. who completed an online survey. Findings indicated that engineering self-efficacy was associated with perceived supports and all four learning experiences. Engineering outcome expectations were explained by engineering self-efficacy, perceived supports, verbal encouragement and low emotional arousal. Perceived barriers had no significant effects on either self-efficacy or outcome expectations. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to classroom practices aimed to enhance students' engineering-related self-efficacy and outcome expectations.