Engaging or enduring? Expectancy-value motivations and engagement with self-assessment in undergraduate engineering learning

Self-assessment is a formative learning strategy that can support metacognition, self-regulated learning, and academic ownership, yet students do not engage uniformly in engineering education. Drawing on Expectancy-Value Theory, this qualitative study examines undergraduate engineering students’ perceived expectancy beliefs, value, and costs based on their reported engagement with structured self-assessment activities. Data were collected through an open-ended survey completed by 112 students enrolled in a probability and statistics course. Our thematic analysis identified patterns in students description of value and costs of self-assessment, as well as three motivational profiles that captured different configurations of expectancy, value, cost, and engagement. The findings suggest that self-assessment engagement is motivationally contingent rather than uniformly beneficial, with perceived costs sometimes co-occurring with otherwise positive expectancy and value. For engineering education, the findings point to the importance of designing self-assessment in ways that support students’ confidence, make its relevance visible, and limit unnecessary emotional burdens.