The Effects of Students’ Course Perceptions on Their Domain Identification, Motivational Beliefs, and Goals

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine whether students’ perceptions in a first-year university engineering course affected their engineering identification, motivational beliefs, and engineering major and career goals. Based on current motivation models and theories, we hypothesized that students’ perceptions of the components of the MUSIC Model of Motivation (the MUSIC model) in one of their first university engineering courses would predict their engineering identification, which would predict their major and career goals. We conducted exploratory factor analyses on an estimation sample of 110 students and used a two-step structural equation modeling approach with a validation sample of 333 first-year engineering undergraduates. The measurement and structural model fit indices demonstrated that the hypothesized model provided a good fit to the data, indicating that students’ perceptions of four of the five MUSIC model components were statistically related to students’ engineering identification, which then predicted their major and career goals.