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Carnegie Mellon RAIRE Award
Appendix 1
Self-efficacy: Evaluation of Summer Undergraduate Research
Kenneth Unice, Doctoral Student, Engineering and Public Policy
Social cognitive theory, originally proposed by Albert Bandura,
describes how behavioral, environmental and personal factors in
people’s lives influence each other. The central mediator in
social cognitive theory is a construct termed self-efficacy, which
represents people’s beliefs in their capability to organize actions
into desired results and behaviors. In the fields such as health,
education and treatment of phobias, experimental research has
demonstrated that for two people of similar abilities, the one with
greater confidence in their abilities will perform at a higher level.
Apart from specific content and bodies of knowledge, institutions of
post-secondary learning should provide their students with experiences
that leave students feeling confident they are able to regulate their
own learning and exert influence in the world surrounding them.
People who are confident in their abilities to achieve valued outcomes
enjoy rewarding careers and personal lives.
One implicit outcome of graduating from a 2 or 4-year college program
is that students gain varying levels of confidence in their ability to
master the requirements of the classroom. In addition, students with
higher levels of classroom self-efficacy tend to achieve higher
G.P.A.’s. The link between confidence (and success) in the
classroom and career success is less clear. We believe that by
completing intensive undergraduate research projects over the course
of a summer, students develop confidence and skills in career related
areas that might not be reflected by changes in G.P.A. or increased
confidence in the classroom. Measurable increases in
‘career-skills’ self-efficacy attributed to the completion of
specific programs (e.g. undergraduate research) would be an excellent
indicator of student growth.
Using the self-efficacy framework, we are studying whether
undergraduate research during the summer enhances domains of
self-efficacy that are pertinent to success as an engineering or
scientific professional. These domains include technical ability
(e.g. How well can you design an experiment to test a specific
hypothesis?), communication skill (e.g. How well can you verbally
communicate technical or scientific details to your peers) and
interviewing ability (e.g. How likely do think it is that you would be
offered a job as a result of your interview?). This study includes
10 RAIRE students, 10 additional undergraduate researchers at Carnegie
Mellon, 9 students completing industry internships and 6 students
working summer jobs unrelated to their major. Thus, the effectiveness
of undergraduate research, typical summer jobs and industry
internships will be compared. Each of these students has completed a
pre-summer survey. Two additional surveys will be administered to
these students; surveys will be distributed at the end of the summer
and sometime during December 1999. Some of the undergraduate
researchers will be selected for extensive interviews during the
summer. In addition, we will be interviewing the advisors of some of
these students to assess the correspondence between the level if
student efficacy beliefs and their actual performance.
Based on the knowledge learned from this pilot study, we plan to
distribute a self-efficacy survey to a large population of students at
many universities next summer. A model of self-efficacy enhancements
in the three groups (researchers, interns and summer jobs) will be
created and cross-validated.
Survey questions
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