Relationship between Guided Interactive Activities and Self-concept in Engineering Students

Abstract

The number of women who decide to study engineering is under-represented within studentpopulations, despite efforts made by governments and universities [1] [2]. Chile is no exception. In 2019, 28.7% of students who entered STEM disciplines were women, increasing only by 1.3% in 2020 to 30%. Family, cultural, economic and social factors influence this under-representation, factors which tend to reduce women's self-concept on learning and ability in this area. Women have lower self-concept in the STEM disciplines than do men, consequently the dropout rate for women is double that of men [3]. An intervention was designed aiming to promote and increase self-concept in learning capabilities in first-year engineering students in Computer Engineering and Industrial Engineering. Such intervention was based on three types of collaborative activities within the classroom, which seek to encourage questioning and debate among students in order to internalize expected learnings. Activities were aimed at solving real problems relevant to the scenario that the country was facing in order to demonstrate the contribution that contents learned may have in all areas of society. The intervention was implemented through a quantitative, explanatory and non-experimental study, applied on a 110-student sample, studying Database within the Computer Civil Engineering and Industrial Civil Engineering disciplines from Andrés Bello Universityin Santiago, Chile, of whom 22.7% were women. The results obtained from applying interactive and collaborative activities in the classroom contributed towards increasing the self-concept in the study sample, increasing from 7.1% to 22% in women. Additionally, the sample obtained a mean positive correlationof 0.52 between selfconcept and academic performance, while women had a low positive correlation of 0.39.