A Cross-Sectional Study of Engineering Students’ Self-Efficacy by Gender, Ethnicity, Year, and Transfer Status

This is a cross-sectional study of 519 undergraduate engineering majors’ self-efficacy beliefs at a large, research extensive, Midwestern university. Engineering self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in his or her ability to successfully negotiate the academic hurdles of the engineering program. Engineering self-efficacy was obtained from four variables: self-efficacy 1, self-efficacy 2, engineering career outcome expectations, and coping self-efficacy. The four variables were analyzed using a repeated analysis of variance among levels of gender, ethnicity, years students had been enrolled in their engineering program, and transfer status. No significant differences in mean engineering self-efficacy scores were found by gender, ethnicity, and transfer status. However, significant interactions between gender and the subscales, ethnicity and the subscales, and transfer status and the subscales were found. Significant differences in mean engineering self-efficacy scores were found among years students had been enrolled in the program.     

Neural Correlates of Belief- and Desire-Reasoning

Theory of mind requires an understanding of both desires and beliefs. Moreover, children understand desires before beliefs. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this developmental lag. Additionally, previous neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have neglected the direct comparison of these developmentally critical mental-state concepts. Event-related brain potentials were recorded as participants ( N  =   24; mean age   =   22 years) reasoned about diverse-desires, diverse-beliefs, and parallel physical situations. A mid-frontal late slow wave (LSW) was associated with desire and belief judgments. A right-posterior LSW was only associated with belief judgments. These findings demonstrate neural overlap and critical differences in reasoning explicitly about desires and beliefs, and they suggest children recruit additional neural processes for belief judgments beyond a common, more general, mentalizing neural system.     

Neural Correlates of Direct and Reflected Self-Appraisals in Adolescents and Adults: When Social Perspective-Taking Informs Self-Perception

Classic theories of self-development suggest people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescence ( N  = 12, ages 11–14 years) and adulthood ( N  = 12, ages 23–30 years). During direct self-reflection, adolescents demonstrated greater activity than adults in networks relevant to self-perception (medial prefrontal and parietal cortices) and social-cognition (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, temporal–parietal junction, and posterior superior temporal sulcus), suggesting adolescent self-construals may rely more heavily on others' perspectives about the self. Activity in the medial fronto-parietal network was also enhanced when adolescents took the perspective of someone more relevant to a given domain.