Modeling undergraduate STEM students’ satisfaction with their programs in China: an empirical study

Several major reform areas attempted by ‘New Engineering Education’ (NEE), China’s most recent engineering education reform initiative at university level, are examined for their direct and indirect impact on Chinese STEM-major students’ satisfaction with their programs in this study. With data collected from a sample of 619 Chinese undergraduate students, the measurement and structural models both display good model fits. The structural results indicate that course satisfaction fully mediates the impact of classroom instruction method on program satisfaction, while partially mediates the impact of support from faculty members and alternative assessment methods on program satisfaction. The impact of resource and service on program satisfaction, however, is direct without any mediating effect in between. Multigroup analyses show that the impact of alternative assessment methods on course satisfaction is significantly stronger for first-tier university students than for non-first-tier university students. Furthermore, there is stronger impact of resource and service on program satisfaction for junior and senior students than for freshmen and sophomores. Practical implications are discussed.