Conference Session

FPD3 -- Professional Issues for First-Year Courses

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Jennifer Light, University of Washington; Russell Korte, University Of Minnesota; Ken Yasuhara, University of Washington; Deborah Kilgore, University of Washington

Tagged Divisions

First-Year Programs

parental education and SATscores, better study skills, and participated in classes specifically designed to reduce or eliminatefactors purported to work against women in the classroom, yet still did not persist at greater ratiosthan men. In fact, men did better, especially at the upper end of the grade spectrum.These and other research studies show that while self-confidence is one of many positiveoutcomes for college students, its relationship to successful outcomes is not a simple positive one.Bandura’s12 concept of self-efficacy may be a better construct when examining students’perceptions of their capabilities and their likelihood to perform well on an engineering task.Self-efficacy is widely used to mean one’s perception of one’s own

Conference Session

FPD11 -- Multidisciplinary Experiences

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Mehrube Mehrubeoglu, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi; Lifford McLauchlan, Texas A&M University-Kingsville

Tagged Divisions

First-Year Programs

University describe an introductory course on fundamentals ofelectrical and computer engineering that employs a theme-based curriculum to link theengineering topics to be taught to real-world problems2. The authors emphasize the importanceof real-world related applications. In our cooperative learning exercises, the students have theopportunity to work with the results of an independent group, and their results, in turn, is utilizedby yet another group, giving students the experience of being engaged in real-time exercises.Hutchison et. al. investigate factors influencing the beliefs of self-efficacy of the freshmanengineering students3. The group’s work revealed nine factors that contribute to the studentconfidence. These factors are understanding