What preconceptions and attitudes about engineering are prevalent amongst upper secondary school pupils? An international study

What preconceptions and attitudes about engineering are prevalent amongst upper secondary school pupils? An international study

Koycu, U.
De Vries, M.J.

Applied Sciences

2015-03-24

n the Netherlands, as well as in many other countries, there is an increasing interest in implementing education about engineering as a part of general education at the upper secondary school level. In order to know what pupils at that level think about engineering, a study has been done to investigate their attitude towards and their concept of engineering. This study was done not only in the Netherlands but also in 39 other countries. In the preparation of the study, pupils were asked to draw concept maps of what they thought engineering was about. In the quantitative main part of the study, pupils were asked to respond to 33 Likert-type attitude items and 32 concept-items of the same type. A factor analysis was done in order to reveal the dimensions in the pupils’ attitude and concept. In contrast to studies carried out amongst students in lower secondary school levels, a fairly clear concept about engineering was found. The gender differences relating to engineering, found in lower secondary education, were not found in upper secondary education. The prevalent attitude of students towards engineering indicated a fairly positive image of engineering.

attitudes
concepts
engineering
upper secondary school

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ea52472f-6bad-4ab0-8ca6-ebf445e41f2d

Springer

0957-7572

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-015-9305-4

International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2015

Institutional Repository

journal article

(c) 2015 The Author(s)
This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com