Investigating Patterns of Undergraduate Engineering Writing Efficacy and Career Trajectories

Open Access
- Author:
- Walp, Adriana
- Area of Honors:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Catherine G P Berdanier, Thesis Supervisor
Daniel Humberto Cortes Correales, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Undergraduate Engineering
Engineering Education
Writing Efficacy
Writing Apprehension
Writing
Career - Abstract:
- Writing is a key aspect of communicating scientific results but is often overlooked in engineering education. This study aims to identify how undergraduate engineering students feel about their writing and if there are any correlations to potential careers. A recruitment email was sent to the respective engineering colleges within the Academic Big 10+ Alliance that asked participants to rank how much they would agree or disagree with a provided statement. The statements were from Daly and Miller’s empirical instrument to writing apprehension and Bandura and Zimmerman’s scale measuring the participants perceived self-efficacy. Information about potential career trajectories and demographic information was also collected. The rankings were transformed into numerical values so that participants could be grouped into categories representing high, moderate, and low writing apprehension and self-efficacy. Totals were also used to calculate the Pearson correlation coefficients for each survey against each other, the potential career trajectories, and demographic information. There was only one significant trend between having high self-efficacy and likeliness to pursue a role in higher education. There was a strong correlation between writing apprehension and writing self-efficacy which agrees with data from the graduate level. However, there were no trends between either survey and the potential occupations which does not agree with graduate level data. This may because undergraduate students, especially underclassmen, are likely to not have a strong sense of what they would like to do in the future. Previous research suggests that a strong self-efficacy encourages students to pursue diverse fields. Therefore, to increase the likelihood of a student going to graduate school and thriving, it is necessary to prepare students and their belief in their writing abilities more.