Pupils´ attitudes to technology: a review of studies which have a bearing on the attitudes which freshmen bring with them to engineering

Besterfield-Sacre, Atman and Shuman (1997) described how studies of freshman attitudes at the beginning of and during the freshman engineering program differ as a function of the student´s gender and educational experiences and related this data to retention. Valuable data was found for assessing college programs. That research has been extended to other institutions and will provide useful comparative data. Interest in this issue is not confined to the United States and many studies have been conducted in other countries to elicit the attitudes of school students of all ages towards engineering and technology. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to this work. In particular, attention is drawn to the international studies of the PATT (Pupils´ Attitudes to Technology) project in the Netherlands and the outcomes of an adaptation of the PATT project in the United States. Some studies related to cognitive style and personality are briefly considered. The data from these studies suggest that engineering and school technology educators engaged in attitudinal and personality research have much to learn from each other, and would benefit from collaborative investigations. There is a need for a synthesis of the studies already undertaken so that engineering educators may evaluate the help they can bring to making the curriculum and teaching more effective.