Background: Student persistence in undergraduate engineering majors often depends on how they perform in foundational engineering courses. Although mastery of prerequisite knowledge affects how students perform in these courses, research suggests that achievement goal orientations and task-value and self-efficacy beliefs play prominent roles in…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a prominent alternative source of learning for engineering and science students. This rising proclivity for MOOCs among students is based on multiple factors. Several studies have focused on factors that affect MOOCs usage, and most of them have used the Motivation theory. These studies have…

Background: Students are more likely to persist when they both perceive themselves as capable of success (expectancy) and perceive tasks to be interesting, important, and useful (values) or less costly in terms of effort, lost opportunities, and psychological stress (perceived costs). Prior research has not examined whether these motivational…

This paper studies the impact of gender on the interest in engineering and technical subjects of the students in the first courses of secondary education. A statistical analysis was carried out, analyzing the use of a free virtual-reality application, developed by the 3M Foundation, which aims to bring these subjects to the students.…

This study investigates Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish first-year engineering students' task performance in mathematics and examines how it relates to their motivational values and beliefs about the nature of mathematics. In a set of seven mathematical tasks, female students outperformed male students, for example, in the simplification of…

We examine a group (N = 88) of Swedish first-year engineering students, their motivation, self-efficacy, and beliefs about the nature of mathematics, and how these relate to their task performance in mathematics. In our data, engineering students who emphasized the exact reasoning in their view of mathematics performed significantly better in a…

This longitudinal study investigated development in expectancy for success (perceived competence), 3 types of task value (utility, interest, attainment), and 3 types of perceived cost (opportunity, effort, psychological) for engineering students during their first 2 years of college. Latent growth curve models indicated declines in expectancy and…

There is strong evidence showing that the choice of undergraduate major has a significant net impact on future earnings. Other work shows motivational differences between men and women. In building on this previous work, this study looked at what motivates students in six different engineering majors to study engineering. The results of this study…