Work in progress-is attitude toward mathematics a major obstacle to engineering education?

Many topics in most engineering curricula are taught using mathematics and mathematical models. Knowledge of the prerequisite background in mathematics is therefore necessary for students to learn such topics. In recent years, there has been a growing concern among educators about the competence of incoming freshmen in mathematics. Most engineering educators believe that deficiencies in students´ mathematics backgrounds are a major impediment to learning and may be the cause of an unacceptable high attrition rate. To remedy this problem, we need to study the underlying causes of these deficiencies in some detail. This paper seeks to test the hypothesis that one of the major causes for the problems that some students have with learning mathematics is attitude towards the subject It is well known that attitude significantly affects learning in general. However, surprisingly few results are available on the impact of attitude toward mathematics on engineering education. We will investigate the link between attitude and competence in mathematics for engineering freshmen. For this purpose, we have designed an attitude assessment tool that was administered to engineering freshmen enrolled in ENGR 101 Introduction to Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. The paper will present the results of the survey together with a statistical analysis to assess the importance of attitude toward mathematics learning as an obstacle in engineering education.