Board 33: Enhancing Self-Efficacy Among Transportation Engineering Undergraduates Using Hands-On Pedagogy.

Abstract Self-efficacy, a belief in one's potential to achieve a desired outcome, stands as a significant factor towards learners' achievement in learning. Engineering education, which is often distinguished by its rigorous theoretical emphasis and empirical analysis, demands an innovative and comprehensive approach toward student development that includes not only technical knowledge but also instills confidence and problem-solving ability. This study investigates the factors moderating transportation engineering undergraduates' self-efficacy and the impact of an evidence-based, experiment-focused, hands-on pedagogy. The study adopts a descriptive and quantitative method using the Motivated Strategy for Learning Questionnaires (MSLQ) in a pre-post-test design. The responses of the survey were obtained from 68 learners who fully participated in the transportation engineering modules where experiment-centric pedagogy was implemented. The data were cleaned and analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Inferential analysis was conducted at a confidence level of 95%. The mean self-efficacy score at the baseline was 9.21±5.98 which was found to significantly increase at post-test to 17.06±3.39. The Cohen d effect size was found to be greater than 0.8 which revealed that the changes were not due to chance. At baseline, the most strongly significantly correlated factor to mean self-efficacy score was the current academic level of the undergraduates (p<0.001) which was later found to be insignificantly and uncorrelated at the post-test. In conclusion, hands-on activities helped learners to learn engineering skills and gain real-life experience during learning which led to more confidence in their engineering skills. This study showed that hands-on pedagogy can boost engineering learners' self-efficacy which is noted to influence performance and retention.