Examining Validity of General Self-Efficacy Scale for Assessing Engineering Students' Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy has been found to be one of the key factors that are responsible for academic success of engineering students. However, there exist multiple instruments for determining the self-efficacy of engineering students and studies conducted in this area in the past have varied significantly in their use of a general or engineering domain-specific constructs. This work investigates whether an engineering-domain specific self-efficacy measurement instrument is required for determining the self-efficacy beliefs of engineering students or whether a general instrument will suffice. Furthermore, this study also aims to investigate the effect of gender, class level, and transfer status of students on their engineering self-efficacy beliefs. Over two hundred engineering students from Texas A&M University and Houston Community College are surveyed on 39 questions divided across 6 distinct self-efficacy instruments. The survey data was then analyzed to determine whether there exists a significant difference in the scores obtained across the generic and the domain-specific instruments. Factor analysis is also performed to explore the interrelationships among the questions belonging to different self-efficacy instruments. The results reveal that there exists a significant difference in the scores across the two types of instruments.