Comparing first-year student attitudes towards engineering across a liberal arts university

Abstract

Many researchers have worked to identify how attitudes towards engineering affect a student's decision to pursue an engineering degree and persist in the program. High persistence has been found to be related to an entering student's general impression of engineering. Because most of these studies assessed only engineering students, their results may not be helpful in identifying why students choose to study engineering. In this work, we investigate the attitudes of first time in college (FTIC) students in a variety of disciplines including engineering and non-engineering majors. During Fall 2012, 272 FTIC students completed a survey to explore their attitudes towards engineering. Factor analysis and regression analysis were used to identify which characteristics distinguish engineers from other students and which are shared among different groups. These results support prior work indicating that students who choose engineering have different attitudes towards technical topics than those who do not. This work also provides some evidence that attitudes of women to math and engineering are not different than those of men at our school. By better understanding the attitudes of students choosing different majors, engineering programs may be able to more effectively admit and recruit students. ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.