Revisiting a measure of engineering design self-efficacy

An important step in the growth of engineering education as a unique field of inquiry is to understand how theoretical constructs manifest within different engineering contexts. Replication and reproducibility studies should be conducted to support and ensure results are valid and generalizable across different variations of the same context, and to support and ensure research in engineering education maintains an integral role in the development of future engineers. This study follows the previous work of Major and Kirn to replicate and re-validate Carberry and colleagues’ work to create an engineering design self-efficacy instrument. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of data collected from students enrolled in active learning environments reveal that students’ confidence and perceived success to complete design tasks combine into a single factor. Additional work is needed to further explore this emergent inconsistency and refine the model used to assess engineering design self-efficacy.