Reimagining Behavioral Analysis in Engineering Education: A Theoretical Exploration of Reasoned Action Approach
Plain Language Summary
This paper introduces engineering education researchers to the Reasoned Action Approach (RAA), a psychological framework developed by Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen (2010) that attempts to explain why people do or don't do things by tracing behavior through intention, and intention through beliefs about the behavior. These beliefs include what others think of the behavior, and whether the person feels capable of doing it. While engineering education has drawn heavily on a handful of familiar motivational theories, this particular framework — despite decades of use elsewhere in psychology and health behavior research — remains largely untapped. Accordingly, this paper lays out its constructs and history to make the case for its adoption. It is conceptual, rather than empirical;, but uses a running example - giving feedback to capstone team members - to show what RAA-style survey items actually look like in practice.
Contribution
The paper imports and operationalizes the RAA for an engineering education audience, situating it relative to its better-known predecessors (TRA, TPB) and outlining, construct by construct, how a researcher would build an RAA-based questionnaire from pilot study through follow-up assessment of actual control.
Research Questions
- What are the RAA's theoretical origins and core constructs, and how do they relate to one another in explaining behavioral choice?
- How can the RAA be operationalized into a questionnaire for a specific behavior in an engineering education context?
- To what extent has the RAA been applied in existing engineering education research, and where have those applications fallen short of the framework's full methodology?
Methods
This theoretical exploration relies on a narrative synthesis of the RAA's psychological lineage, from mid-20th-century task-behavior research through Fishbein and Ajzen's 2010 formulation, and unpacking of each construct (behavioral, normative, and control beliefs; attitudes; perceived norms; perceived behavioral control; intention; actual control) using a single illustrative behavior — capstone team feedback — carried through the paper. It reviews the sparse existing engineering education literature that has drawn on the RAA or its antecedent theories, evaluating how faithfully each study implemented the framework.
Key Findings
RAA-based work in engineering education is scarce and, where it exists, often incomplete. Additionally, we explore critiques of the RAA, including its omission of factors like self-identity and anticipated affect, its assumption of rational deliberation, and its limited capacity to capture power dynamics or contextual pressures such as team conflict. However, we argue that these limitations are addressable through supplementary qualitative methods.
Implications
The RAA is a generalizable, underused tool for engineering education researchers investigating why students persist, leave, collaborate, or make career choices, and they point to a companion study of their own on collaborative behaviors as a concrete next application. We recommend that future instrument design follow the RAA's prescribed pilot-then-questionnaire-then-follow-up sequence, and that researchers pair the framework with qualitative or contextual measures where power dynamics or situational constraints are likely to matter.