Understanding student confidence as it relates to first year achievement

There has been considerable concern that entering female engineering students begin their studies with less confidence in their abilities than academically equivalent male students. Further, there is concern that this ´under-confidence´ problem persists throughout the university experience. As a precursor to a larger cross-institutional study, the authors have investigated this issue in the USA at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas-El Paso and North Carolina State University. Using the Pittsburgh Freshman Engineering Attitudes Surveys, they examined the differences between male and female students´ self-assessed confidence (relative to five measures) when they began their engineering studies and after one or two semesters of study. In addition, they examined students´ confidence and changes in confidence with respect to their entering SAT scores and first year performance. At all three institutions, female students entered with significantly lower confidence in their basic engineering knowledge and skills (one of the five measures) than did their male counterparts, but only continued to exhibit this low confidence at one institution during the freshman year. However, they did not find any consistent, significant relations for the other measures, nor did they find any relations with SAT and performance.