Validation of the Student Attitudinal Success Inventory II for Engineering Students

So Yoon Yoon; P.K. Imbrie; Joe J.J. Lin; Kenneth Reid

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Conference: 2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Publication Date: June 15, 2014
Start Date: June 15, 2014
End Date: June 18, 2014
ISSN: 2153-5965
Conference Session: Methodological & Theoretical Contributions to Engineering Education 2
Tagged Division: Educational Research and Methods
Page Count: 14
Page Numbers: 24.1356.1 - 24.1356.14
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--23289
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/23289
Download Count: 532

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Paper Authors

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So Yoon Yoon Texas A&M University orcid.org/0000-0003-1868-1054

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So Yoon Yoon, Ph.D., is a post-doctoral research associate at Texas A&M University. She received her Ph.D. and M.S.Ed.in Educational Psychology with the specialties in Gifted Education and Research Methods & Measurement, respectively, from Purdue University. Her work centers on the development and validation of instruments, particularly useful for P-16 STEM education settings (e.g., the Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests:Visualization of Rotations [Revised PSVT:R], the Teaching Engineering Self-efficacy Scale [TESS], the Student Attitudinal Success Inventory [SASI]), the evaluation of engineering teacher professional development programs, and the investigation of P-16 students’ spatial ability to understand its association with their academic performance and talent developemnt in STEM fields.

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P.K. Imbrie Texas A&M University

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Joe J.J. Lin Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Joe J.J. Lin currently works as a research associate in the college of engineering at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering Education and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University. His research interest includes: student success and retention in engineering, international engineering education research, education policy making, teamwork and leadership, and management of production systems. He has worked as a production control engineer in Taiwan, and taught industrial, manufacturing, and first-year engineering at Purdue University. He also participated in NSF funded projects on student success in engineering, and international engineering education. His passion is to develop world-class engineers that can collaborate and compete with the best engineers in the world.

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Kenneth Reid Ohio Northern University

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Ken Reid is the Director of Engineering Education, Director of First-Year Engineering and Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ohio Northern University. He was the seventh person in the U.S. to receive a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. He is active in engineering within K-12, serving on the TSA Boards of Directors and over 10 years on the IEEE-USA Precollege Education Committee. He was awarded with an IEEE-USA Professional Achievement Award in 2013 and named the Herbert F. Alter Chair of Engineering in 2010. His research interests include success in first-year engineering, introducing entrepreneurship into engineering, international service and engineering in K-12.

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Abstract

Validation of the Extended Student Attitudinal Success Inventory (e-SASI) for Engineering Students (Research Paper)As low student retention rates in engineering programs in the United States become a threat tothe effort to increase the engineering workforce, various approaches have been utilized toinvestigate the putative factors that may contribute to attrition of engineering students.Traditionally, indicators of students’ pre-college academic performance, such as high schoolgrade average points (GPAs) and scholastic aptitude test scores (e.g., the SAT and the ACT),have served as main criteria to determine acceptance to engineering programs because of theirassumed predictive validity of academic success in college. However, recent studies haveprovided evidence on the predictive power of non-cognitive attributes over cognitive measures ofstudents in retention and their future academic performance.This study describes a validation procedure for the extended version of the Student AttitudinalSuccess Inventory (SASI) to assess engineering students’ multifaceted non-cognitive attributes.Originally, the SASI consisted of 168 items that originated from existing instruments and weredeveloped by a group of researchers at a Midwestern university based on theoretical frameworksfrom literature. The nine constructs measured by the SASI are academic self-efficacy, academicmotivation, leadership, metacognition, major indecision, deep learning style, surface learningstyle, teamwork skill, and expectancy-value, each using a five-point Likert type scale. However,with increasing research evidence about other constructs relevant to students’ collegeperformance and retention, the SASI was extended to include 246 items by adding items aboutgoal orientation, implicit beliefs, intent to persist, social climate, and self-worth. As the extendedSASI (e-SASI) contains many constructs and items, this study aims to restructure the e-SASI tokeep only essential constructs and items through psychometric approaches and provide reliabilityand validity evidence of the e-SASI.In 2007, more than 1,700 students, who enrolled to attend a first year engineering (FYE)program at the Midwestern university, were invited to respond to online surveys during thesummer before their start of the program. Among them, 1,182 students (NM = 943 [79.8%], NF =239 [20.2%]) completed the e-SASI. An initial exploratory factor analysis was conducted. Tofinalize the items and the factor structure of the e-SASI, a confirmatory factor analysis will beapplied on a new data set collected from 1,695 FYE students in 2008. As students’ non-cognitiveattributes have gained more attention in academic performance and retention studies in highereducation, we expect that the e-SASI can be used as a sound and all-round instrument to measureengineering students’ non-cognitive attributes for various research and education purposes.

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Yoon, S. Y., & Imbrie, P., & Lin, J. J., & Reid, K. (2014, June), Validation of the Student Attitudinal Success Inventory II for Engineering Students Paper presented at 2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Indianapolis, Indiana. 10.18260/1-2--23289

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -         Validation of the Extended Student Attitudinal Success Inventory                        (e-SASI) for Engineering Students                                          (Research Paper)As low student retention rates in engineering programs in the United States become a threat tothe effort to increase the engineering workforce, various approaches have been utilized toinvestigate the putative factors that may contribute to attrition of engineering students.Traditionally, indicators of students’ pre-college academic performance, such as high schoolgrade average points (GPAs) and scholastic aptitude test scores (e.g., the SAT and the ACT),have served as main criteria to determine acceptance to engineering programs because of theirassumed predictive validity of academic success in college. However, recent studies haveprovided evidence on the predictive power of non-cognitive attributes over cognitive measures ofstudents in retention and their future academic performance.This study describes a validation procedure for the extended version of the Student AttitudinalSuccess Inventory (SASI) to assess engineering students’ multifaceted non-cognitive attributes.Originally, the SASI consisted of 168 items that originated from existing instruments and weredeveloped by a group of researchers at a Midwestern university based on theoretical frameworksfrom literature. The nine constructs measured by the SASI are academic self-efficacy, academicmotivation, leadership, metacognition, major indecision, deep learning style, surface learningstyle, teamwork skill, and expectancy-value, each using a five-point Likert type scale. However,with increasing research evidence about other constructs relevant to students’ collegeperformance and retention, the SASI was extended to include 246 items by adding items aboutgoal orientation, implicit beliefs, intent to persist, social climate, and self-worth. As the extendedSASI (e-SASI) contains many constructs and items, this study aims to restructure the e-SASI tokeep only essential constructs and items through psychometric approaches and provide reliabilityand validity evidence of the e-SASI.In 2007, more than 1,700 students, who enrolled to attend a first year engineering (FYE)program at the Midwestern university, were invited to respond to online surveys during thesummer before their start of the program. Among them, 1,182 students (NM = 943 [79.8%], NF =239 [20.2%]) completed the e-SASI. An initial exploratory factor analysis was conducted. Tofinalize the items and the factor structure of the e-SASI, a confirmatory factor analysis will beapplied on a new data set collected from 1,695 FYE students in 2008. As students’ non-cognitiveattributes have gained more attention in academic performance and retention studies in highereducation, we expect that the e-SASI can be used as a sound and all-round instrument to measureengineering students’ non-cognitive attributes for various research and education purposes.
AU  - So Yoon Yoon
AU  - P.K. Imbrie
AU  - Joe J.J. Lin
AU  - Kenneth Reid
CY  - Indianapolis, Indiana
DA  - 2014/06/15
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Validation of the Student Attitudinal Success Inventory II for Engineering Students
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/23289
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--23289
ER  -