Expanding and Refining a Decision-Making Competency Inventory for Undergraduate Engineering Students

This Full Research Paper discusses ongoing work to develop a survey instrument to reliably assess undergraduate engineering student self-regulated decision-making. This work focuses on a second round of item expansion and refinement to the Decision-Making Competency Inventory (DMCI) to develop items related to learning from past decisions. The refined instrument was distributed to first-year engineering students enrolled in a large, public, land-grant institution located in the southeastern United States in the Fall of 2018. Of the approximately 1,200 students in first-year engineering courses, 883 valid surveys were randomly split into two separate samples for exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). EFA results indicated a viable four-factor solution, which was explored with the CFA. The CFA results also indicated a four-factor model was appropriate. Improving this instrument will help researchers document and understand students’ decision-making skills and how they relate to observed decisions like initial choice of major or change of major. A decision-making instrument will also be valuable in evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to help students build their decision-making competency and make adaptive choices.