A Longitudinal Study Exploring Motivation Factors in Cornerstone and Capstone Design Courses

Design courses are an integral component of undergraduate engineering education. Design is recognized as one of the primary responsibilities of an engineer in industry. New designs are responsible for stimulating sales and company growth. This paper presents the findings of a four year longitudinal study on the impact of motivation factors on course performance of mechanical engineering students in design courses. The first design course, cornerstone design, takes place during the first semester of freshman year. The second course, capstone design, takes place during the student’s final year of undergraduate study. An adapted version of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) is used to measure five motivation factors: cognitive value, selfregulation, test/presentation anxiety, intrinsic value, and self-efficacy. Motivation is measured against the final grade in the course. The major contribution of this paper is the ability to examine the impact of motivation on grades in design courses. The motivation and performance is also measured with regard to student gender, residency (domestic or international), family income, and highest degree attained by parents to determine if a correlation is realized. Additionally, the study focuses on a single cohort of 32 students. This affords the ability for the examination of the differences in motivation between the students’ freshman and senior year to determine if this can be correlated to student gender, residency (domestic or international), family income, and degree attained by parents. The results of the study indicate that the student’s freshman cornerstone design grades are impacted by their freshman anxiety levels with significance, which was further exacerbated by the student’s residency. On the other hand, the senior capstone design grades were impacted by their intrinsic motivation. The change in their grade between their freshman and senior year was correlated to their freshman year anxiety and their residency, though the students exhibited similar levels of anxiety during their senior year.