Abstract
Introduction: Many undergraduate students lack fundamental cooking skills, which can negatively influence their dietary behaviors and overall health. Although hands-on cooking instruction within higher education shows promise for improving dietary outcomes, limited research has explored the cognitive, behavioral, and environmental factors that motivate or hinder undergraduate students from enrolling in such courses. Understanding these determinants is essential for designing effective college cooking courses. Methods: Guided by Social Cognitive Theory, this quantitative, cross-sectional study utilized an online, theory-based survey to assess cooking self-efficacy, outcome expectations, behavioral intentions, and perceived barriers and facilitators to enrollment in a basic, hands-on cooking course. A combination of convenience and purposive sampling was used to recruit 86 undergraduate students at a large, diverse public university. The sample was predominantly female (70.9%) and aged 18–22 (55.8%). Data were analyzed using SPSS.
Results: Most respondents (83.7%) indicated intent to enroll in a cooking course if one were offered. Students reported high outcome expectations and moderate-to-high cooking self-efficacy. However, behavioral intentions consistently exceeded self-efficacy across most skill areas (p<0.05), suggesting a desire to develop skills in areas where students felt least confident. Students were most confident in basic skills like measuring but least interested in learning them, with the opposite pattern for complex tasks like meal planning and cooking meats and fish. Schedule compatibility (90.7%) and affordable recipes (80.2%) were the most influential enrollment factors, and over half preferred in-person instruction (58.1%).
Conclusion: Prioritizing these factors may enhance student participation in cooking education and support healthier dietary behaviors among undergraduates.