Relationships between Class Engagement, Community, and Engineering Design Self-Efficacy in Remote, Kit-based Classes

Abstract

Online education has grown explosively in the past 20 years, but experienced an unprecedented bloom during the COVID-19 pandemic, when even largely “hands-on” engineering design classes were forced to operate remotely. As many students and educators bemoaned the shift, urgent questions of how to produce educational value in online environments emerged. Self-efficacy is one measure of student experience that can be used to understand what students gain from a class. In this research, a survey of 81 students in two remote, kit-based engineering design classes in Spring 2021 was conducted to probe the relationships between class engagement, sense of class community, and engineering design self-efficacy. Students with a stronger sense of community were found to have higher engineering design self-efficacy. On a 100-point scale, students with the highest ratings of class community (compared to those with the lowest ratings) had higher confidence by 10.65 points, higher motivation by 14.86 points, and higher expectations of success by 13.38 points. Furthermore, this relationship between community and self-efficacy was statistically significant in confidence, motivation, expectations of success and anxiety for females-identifying students and not significant in any lens for male students.

Demographics were also considered for significant effects. Higher levels of engagement were found in female students and higher levels of motivation in students who worked primarily remotely, as opposed to those who worked on the class project in an on-campus lab. No significantly different community or self-efficacy levels were found of students in different years (sophomore/junior/senior). Additionally, students who identified as an underrepresented minority (URM) race/ethnicity category were found to have statistically significant lower levels of motivation (by 12.39 points) and higher anxiety (by 12.34 points) for engineering design compared to non-URM students. These results inform the future of remote engineering classes and the importance of a sense of community for students in these courses.