Tracking Changes in Attitudes in a Cornerstone Design Course

Engineering design courses in first-year programs shape students’ attitudes, reinforce engineering identity, and develop key skills. Prior research on the first-year design course at the University of Saskatchewan (2021–2022) showed group-level attitude shifts, but anonymous surveys prevented tracking individual changes. Recent modifications now allow the linking of pre- and post-course responses for detailed individual analysis. This study examines how students' attitudes toward engineering design evolved during the first-year engineering design course in 2023 and 2024. Surveys with 16 statements for which a degree of agreement was expressed using a Likert-scale enabled paired analysis of individual changes. Statistical tests assessed shifts in attitudes over the duration of the course and correlations investigated relationships between shifts in attitudes. One conclusion was that students who felt more strongly that design is fun, also tended to increase their belief that design is important (r = 0.38). By shifting from sample-level to individual analysis, this research may help to optimize first-year design courses.