The Four-Phase Interest Development in Surveys (FIDS) were developed to address a need for a survey instrument derived from current interest development theory to measure the psychological construct of student interest in academic content. Our first FID survey was designed to measure interest in engineering. The Four-Phase Interest Development in Engineering (FID-ES) survey was developed using Hidi and Renninger’s (2006) Four-Phase Model of Interest Development as a theoretical framework for identifying indicators of student interest. The instrument was developed using an iterative method, and after two rounds of modification and fine-tuning, we present the FIDES 2.0 instrument as a valid and reliable tool for measuring student interest in engineering.

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As formulated, the FID-ES 2.0 survey is a 12 item Likert-style survey developed to measure interest in engineering along a unidimensional scale. Use of the survey can provide critical information about student interest in engineering to both researchers and practitioners in engineering education, and is particularly useful for evaluating change in interest over time.  The survey can be easily modified for use in other domains, and has currently been used for engineering (FID-ES), chemistry (FID-ES), and reading (FID-RS) interest measurements. We provide the mean scores and distributions from each of our studies using the FID series of surveys to provide researchers with up to date reference information.