GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND SOCIAL COGNITIVE-FACTORS PREDICTING THE ACADEMIC-ACHIEVEMENT OF STUDENTS IN ENGINEERING

This study examines the relationships of measures of occupational and academic self-efficacy; vocational interests; outcome expectations; academic ability; and perceived stress, support, and coping to the academic achievement of women and men enrolled in university-level engineering/science programs. Students from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds (N = 197) responded to scales measuring the variables of interest; high school and college academic data were obtained from university records. Self-efficacy for academic milestones, in combination with other academic and support variables, was found to be the strongest predictor of college academic achievement. Outcome expectations, vocational interests, and low levels of stress were in turn the strongest predictors of academic self-efficacy. Prediction equations for Euro-American and Mexican-American students revealed no significant contribution of ethnicity to the prediction of college academic achievement; however, ethnicity did enter into the equations predicting the 2 self-efficacy variables.