Exploring Trends in Research, Teaching, and Mentoring Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Engineering and Computing Graduate Students

Sense of belonging and self-efficacy are closely linked to persistence and retention in graduate studies, especially for those with marginalized and historically minoritized identities in STEM, such as women, BIPOC, and low-income students. To help us map the existing landscape of graduate education in engineering and computing disciplines at a large R1 university, we conducted a mixed methods study using a sequential explanatory mixed methods design. The primary questions guiding the study were: 1) In what aspects of teaching and research are our students confident? 2) What aspects of research and teaching do they feel are relevant to their future career goals? 3) What roles do mentors and other supports play in the development of their self-efficacies in teaching and research during graduate school? The initial survey instrument was developed from a conceptual framework that examines mentoring and productivity for early-career STEM faculty; it was adapted for use with STEM graduate students and revised for communicative validity. A total of 118 valid responses were received for the pilot survey that was distributed to all engineering and computing graduate students in the college. Survey responses were analyzed with descriptive statistics and informed the qualitative interview protocol. A subset of 11 students were invited to participate in a follow-up, in-depth semi-structured interview to explore trends observed in the survey in more depth. The interviewees represented nearly all fields of engineering and computing offered in the college, and the majority were doctoral students. Approximately 45% identified as women, and 45% identified as international students. Interview responses were initially coded a priori through the lens of Bandura's Self-Efficacy Theory to better understand students' perceived sources of influence for developing self-efficacy beliefs in teaching and research. This was followed by rounds of emergent and in vivo coding to ensure all salient themes were captured in a thematic analysis. Multiple coders were involved in the data analysis cycles. Five major themes resulted from the overall analysis of the qualitative data, four of which strongly correlated to relevant components of Bandura's Self-Efficacy Theory. There were differences in the frequency with which sources of self-efficacy were mentioned by men and women graduate students, as well as evidence for prior gender discrimination experiences influencing their self-efficacy and willingness to reach out for future support. Peer mentoring was identified for nearly all respondents as a strong source of development for their research and teaching self-efficacy beliefs. The implications and results of this research study will be shared with the engineering and computing graduate faculty at R1 universities, with the goal of amplifying graduate students' voices and experiences and sparking more targeted mentoring dialogues between graduate students and their faculty advisors. Additionally, these results will inform future graduate peer mentoring and professional development initiatives at R1 institutions, to better support these students in the teaching and research areas which were identified as needing improvement to align with their diverse professional goals.