The Development of a Measure of Engineering Identity

This research paper describes the recent development of items to measure post-secondary students' engineering identity. Engineering identity is a particular type of role identity that students author during their experiences in engineering, typically in college. This paper draws upon a subject-related role identity framework that focuses on students self-beliefs of their interest, performance/competence, and recognition within engineering. First, a pilot survey of 371 first-year engineering students was conducted at three institutions in the U.S. during the spring semester of 2015. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to examine the underlying structure of the piloted questions about students' engineering identity. The developed items were used in a subsequent study deployed in the fall semester of 2015 that measured more than 2500 first-year engineering students' attitudes and beliefs at four institutions in the U.S. The data on engineering identity measures from this second survey were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results indicated that the developed measures do extract a significant portion of the average variance in the latent constructs and the internal consistency of the measures (Cronbach's ) fell within the acceptable and better range. The development of these items provides new measures for engineering education researchers to more deeply explore the underlying self-beliefs in students' engineering identity formation.