A GIS Based Laboratory in Transportation Engineering: Self-Efficacy as a Predictor of Students’ Learning

The focus of this paper is to identify an exploratory model that links students’ performance in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) laboratory to students’ perceptions and beliefs related to this experience. Self-efficacy, perceived motivation and perceived difficulty, were examined as significant predictors of students’ performance outcomes. Structural equation modeling approach was adopted in this study. The results indicate that both perceived motivation and perceived difficulty are significant predictors for students’ academic self-efficacy. Higher self-efficacy produced the desired outcome as a result of better alignment of the complexity of the laboratory activity with the level of students’ expectations. This outcome is of great interest as the GIS laboratory was set as a distributed learning activity implemented as stand-alone laboratories in several courses throughout the civil engineering curricula. The data used for the analyses were obtained from a four-semester study of student performance in the GIS laboratory.