Factors impacting students’ creativity-related self-efficacy in an undergraduate makerspace-based course

Abstract

The need to cultivate creativity in engineering education calls for opportunities for students to exercise freedom in proposing and pursuing projects aligned with their interests. This paper presents insights into an undergraduate makerspace-based course in terms of factors affecting students’ creativity-related self-efficacy. We conducted a survey on students who come from an engineering and science background to gain their opinions about the impact of this course on enhancing their creativity. To establish if there is a significant difference in the students’ creativity, we performed the non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test comparing the first and second survey, with results showing that there is a statistically significant increase in students’ creativity-related self-efficacy. There was a general increase for all the items, especially students’ perceptions toward the relevance of the course, the conduciveness of the learning environment, opportunities to make and learn from mistakes, and the resourcefulness of their team. Results obtained via quantitative statistical analysis was backed up by qualitative analysis that employed text mining techniques such as automatic key phrase extraction and sentiment analysis on the open-ended responses and the reason(s) for the Likert-scale answer choice. In addition, we used the Spearman’s rho to report correlations between Likert-scale items and determine the variables that are significantly and positively correlated with the creativity-related self-efficacy construct. A multivariate regression model was then constructed to observe the extent to which each highly correlated variable impacts creativity-related self-efficacy; of which, a sense of relevance appears to have the largest effect. Through gaining insights into the factors that may impact students’ creativity-related self-efficacy, this study contributed to a deeper understanding on how this important attribute could be developed through a makerspace-based university course.