Measuring the Impact of Extra-/Co-Curricular Participation on Professional Formation of Engineers

Abstract

While most current research on teaching and learning is conducted in the classroom, evidence suggests that the quality of a student's learning is also affected by experiences outside of the classroom (i.e., extra-/co-curricular experiences). Engineering students have available to them a rich variety of learning opportunities outside of the classroom - such as competition teams, undergraduate research experiences, and service-learning organizations - which reinforce and strengthen the knowledge they gain through engineering coursework while enhancing their self-efficacy in academic and engineering skills. The goal of this project is to determine which features of engineering students' professional formation are impacted by their participation in engineering-focused extra-/co-curricular activities - specifically, competition teams, undergraduate research, and service-learning organizations. The first phase of this study, reported in this paper, involves the implementation of an electronic survey to measure the impact of engineering-focused extra-/co-curricular activities on students' academic achievement and self-efficacy. Academic achievement is measured using questions from the Statics Concept Inventory [1], and self-efficacy is measured using a series of questions from self-efficacy survey items [2] that ask students to rate on a six-point Likert scale their capability in (a) specific engineering skills such as working with machine and engineering design, and (b) general engineering coursework. Based on the results from the survey administered to junior and senior mechanical engineering students at two universities and the two-sample t-test with a 95% confidence interval analysis, this study demonstrated that students who had participated in any engineering-focused extra-/co-curricular activity had a higher mean in each survey item. This shows that engineering students' engagement in engineering extra- and co-curricular activities enhance confidence and reinforcing academic and professional skills by strengthening the knowledge they gain through engineering coursework.