IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION 1 Self-Efﬁcacy for Engineering Design (SEED): Instrument Development and Validation Ahmed Ibrahim , Member, IEEE, and Deeksha Seth Abstract—Contribution: This article presents the development and validation of a novel instrument, the self-efﬁcacy for engi- neering design (SEED) instrument, using a sample of 257 under- graduate students who studied engineering design (ED) in their mechanical engineering program of study. The SEED instru- ment consists of 35 self-report survey items distributed across nine subsections representing phases of ED. Background: ED helps foster creative thinking and promotes the application of technical knowledge to real-world problems. Self-efﬁcacy is frequently used to evaluate educational outcomes. No adequate instruments exist to measure SEED. Research Questions: 1) Do the proposed items adequately represent and measure the SEED construct, based on experts’ judgments, and thus providing evidence for content validity? 2) Do the proposed items coherently cluster into categories that meaningfully represent the SEED construct, thus providing evi- dence for internal structure validity? and 3) Do the proposed items pertaining to each subsection of the SEED instrument have strong and consistent relations among each other, thus providing evidence for internal consistency reliability? Methodology: This study used established theoretical frame- works in ED and design thinking to develop the SEED items. Evidence for content validity came from agreements of three experts, and for internal consistency via conﬁrmatory factor analysis (CFA) and McDonald’s  indices. Findings: The proposed items for the SEED instrument can be 1) used to adequately represent and measure the SEED construct, based on experts’ judgments (content validity) and 2) grouped into categories that represent the SEED construct (construct validity). The proposed items pertaining to each category of the SEED instrument have strong and consistent relations among each other (internal consistency reliability). Index Terms—Design thinking, engineering design (ED), self- efﬁcacy for engineering design (SEED), self-efﬁcacy. I. I NTRODUCTION E NGINEERING design (ED) is recognized globally as a quintessential process that can help solve a wide range of problems globally [1]. Internationally, the United Nations Educational, Scientiﬁc, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) advocates for ED education to build capacity for overcoming Manuscript received 29 May 2021; revised 17 December 2021, 29 April 2022, 18 August 2022, and 4 November 2022; accepted 9 November 2022. (Corresponding author: Ahmed Ibrahim.) This work involved human subjects or animals in its research. Approval of all ethical and experimental procedures and protocols was granted by the Drexel University Institutional Review Boards (IRB). Ahmed Ibrahim is with the School of Professional Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 USA (e-mail: ai2500@columbia.edu). Deeksha Seth is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Villanova University, Villanova, PA 19085 USA (e-mail: deeksha.seth@villanova.edu). Digital Object Identiﬁer 10.1109/TE.2022.3221896 major challenges, such as producing clean water and clean energy and overcoming climate change problems to help it achieve its sustainable development goals [1]. Many countries have recognized the role that ED education can play in solving long-term problems that they face. In the United States, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) emphasized that ED education can be used to train students to “produce solutions that meet speciﬁed needs with consid- eration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors” [2]. Accordingly, many engineering education programs have built their curricula to include courses and labs that teach students the essential skills of ED. One important learning outcome that can result from educating students in ED is the improvement in their self- efﬁcacy for ED (SEED). SEED is important because it can be used to measure students’ beliefs about how conﬁ- dent they are in accomplishing ED-related tasks. In general, self-efﬁcacy has been shown to be strongly and positively related to achievement [3], [4] and a signiﬁcant predictor of career choices, especially for science and engineering college students [5], [6]. To measure the SEED construct, a valid and reliable instru- ment is needed. To address the need for an instrument that measures students’ SEED, Carberry et al. [7] developed and validated an instrument for that purpose based on an eight- step framework proposed by the Massachusetts Department of Education (MA-DOE) [8] for elementary and secondary students (to be referred to as the Carberry SEED instrument for brevity). Although the Carberry SEED instrument can be useful as a generic SEED scale, it has several shortcom- ings that would undermine its use as a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the SEED construct. These short- comings are presented not to discount previous research, but rather to emphasize an urgent need for a SEED instru- ment to be designed based on a strong theoretical foundation and developed using best practices in instrument design and validation. The Carberry SEED instrument lacks 1) the theoretical basis that conceptualizes ED phases from the scholarly and empirical literature and 2) a detailed nuanced assessment of students’ self-efﬁcacy in speciﬁc tasks related to ED. First, it was developed based on an eight-step framework proposed by the MA-DOE [8] for elementary and secondary stu- dents to “measure individuals’ self-concepts toward ED tasks.” A well-designed instrument should be conceived for a speciﬁc target population, and thus an instrument designed for any 0018-9359 c  2022 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information. This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. Authorized licensed use limited to: Johns Hopkins University. Downloaded on December 10,2022 at 15:25:32 UTC from IEEE Xplore. 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