The multiplicative function of expectancy and value in predicting engineering students' choice, persistence, and performance

Abstract

Background: Students are more likely to persist when they both perceive themselves as capable of success (expectancy) and perceive tasks to be interesting, important, and useful (values) or less costly in terms of effort, lost opportunities, and psychological stress (perceived costs). Prior research has not examined whether these motivational beliefs synergistically predict engineering-related outcomes; studying such synergy is critical for understanding how multiple forms of motivation combine to support engineering persistence.Purpose/Hypothesis: We tested how engineering academic self-efficacy (expectancy), values/costs, and their interaction predicted engineering-related outcomes. We hypothesized that there would be significant interactions between self-efficacy and values/costs in predicting engineering persistence and academic success. Design/Method: Structural equation modeling was used to investigate latent interactions between self-efficacy and values/costs (interest, attainment, and utility values; opportunity, effort, and psychological costs) in predicting career intentions, aspirations for engineering graduate school, and engineering retention, and grades in foundational courses for engineering among first-year engineering undergraduates (n = 2420).Results: Significant interactions between self-efficacy and values (interest and utility only) were identified, but not for self-efficacy and attainment value or costs. Feeling both competent in engineering and highly valuing engineering were simultaneously related to higher engineering persistence, as compared to either feeling competent or valuing engineering alone. Conclusions:The findings contribute to expectancy-value theory by providing a more precise understanding of the role of each type of value and cost in predicting distal outcomes, and practicing by highlighting the importance of supporting both expectancy and values when intervening to support engineering persistence.

Academic Self-Efficacy and Value Beliefs of International STEM and Non-STEM University Students in Germany from an Intersectional Perspective

“…Yet, even if the decision to study a STEM subject has already been made, differences in STEM students' self-efficacy and value beliefs, e.g., due to their perceived minority status as a female or first-generation student, occur and should not be neglected, as they were shown to be relevant for study success [9,29,30]. For example, a study with a sample of first-year engineering undergraduates showed that higher levels of engineering self-efficacy and highly valuing engineering were related to higher engineering persistence [31].…”

Making It Matter: Increasing Student-Perceived Value of Microbiology through Reflective and Critical News Story Analysis

“…Expectancy-value theory predicts that students will put in more effort if they perceive value in a learning activity, which has been shown to be effective in encouraging active learning ( 8 ). By providing students with opportunities to engage with microbiology and immunology current events of their own choosing, students are expected to be intrinsically motivated to work harder, pursue more biology-based coursework in the future ( 9 ), and become better consumers of science-based news stories. This iterative series of activities uses expectancy-value theory by asking students to explain, using lay language, the relevance of course content to contemporary news events, all to increase student motivation.…”

Identifying Student Profiles Related to Success in an Analog Signal Processing Course

“…This is an involved effort because students taking the same course can engage with it and experience it in different ways depending on the prior background that they bring with them to the course such as their motivation, sense of belonging and study resources. Researchers in Engineering education are working to identify such sets of student features that play a role in course performance Specifically, researchers studied whether aspects related to their motivation, such as expectancy to do well, is related to course outcomes [1,8,9], whether high performing students have different study behaviors than low performing students [10], and whether other sources such as sense of belonging and stress contributes to the struggles that students face [2]. This prior work mainly focused on first year Engineering courses.…”