Experience is Not Mastery: Unexpected Interactions Between Project Task Choice and Measures of Academic Confidence and Self-Efficacy in First-Year Engineering Students

Engineering confidence and self-efficacy are key contributors to persistence in engineering. Hands-on, team-based engineering design projects can increase students' engineering self-efficacy, by providing mastery experiences. However, not all students benefit similarly from project-based learning in teams; students can take on different tasks and as a result, experience different changes in confidence or self-efficacy. In this study, we investigated the relationships between time spent on various project tasks and students' initial levels of and changes in confidence or self-efficacy. This study used a mixed-methods approach to data collection and analysis, focusing on 97 students between 2012-2015 enrolled in two different project-based learning contexts: at a small private engineering college and at a large public university. We found that engineering confidence and self-efficacy did not increase monotonically over the project experience for both contexts. Although there were no relationships between project tasks and related measures in confidence (for example, students who spent more time on building did not have a higher increase in tinkering self-efficacy), there were negative correlations between time spent on writing tasks and students' initial confidence/self-efficacy and changes in confidence/self-efficacy. Our findings indicate that time spent on task may not be a proxy for mastery experiences, and that changing self-efficacy or confidence may be highly individual and contextual. However, some recurring patterns suggest approaches for intervention that may better support a wide range of students.