Measuring industrial design self-efficacy and anxiety

Abstract

Both evaluating students’ design works and also understanding their cognition in the industrial design process are equally important for students’ learning. This study used the design activities and design competencies required by the industrial design process as items to develop an “Industrial Design Self-Efficacy and Anxiety Scale” that can be used to help teachers better understand students’ learning from a psychological perspective. In this study, 285 industrial-design college students were recruited and item analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and reliability analysis were used to construct a scale with good reliability and validity. Analyses of the background variables revealed that (1) the self-efficacy of male students in model prototyping was significantly better than that of female students; (2) the level of anxiety regarding model prototyping was significantly higher among senior students than among freshmen students; (3) students scoring higher for self-evaluation also scored higher for self-efficacy in problem solving, information collecting, and model prototyping; and (4) students with abundant maker-space experience scored significantly higher for self-efficacy in problem solving, information collecting, and model prototyping than those with less experience. Finally, the practical use of the proposed scale is discussed.