2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering design courses attempt to teach students how to design products and services that address problems in the real world. We investigate the role that motivation and learning strategies play in the learning of design skills, taught in a higher education setting, but requiring authentic team-based, design project activities and requiring interaction with external clients. We measure motivation scales like intrinsic motivation levels for multiple concurrent sections of English-speaking students in a first-year engineering design course, using five separate cohorts of students in five distinct school terms. The mode of instruction of the school terms ranges from fully online to Hybrid Flex (HyFlex) to fully in-person. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the 2021 Fall term course offering was held completely online, while the 2022 Winter term offering of the same course used a HyFlex teaching model. The course offering began its transition to a fully in-person mode in Fall 2022, and was completely in-person for the remaining 2023 Winter and 2024 Winter terms. Each cohort of students were surveyed at the end of their term.

We use Pintrich’s Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and analyze the results to determine variations in the levels of motivation and study strategies of the different cohorts and course sections. We analyze statistically significant correlations and differences between the online, HyFlex, and in-person versions of the course and examine variations in student motivation across the different sections of the same course, as taught by different instructors. Student survey response participation rates varied between 18\% and 26\% of the total class size, making only certain statistical analysis methods and types of inferences appropriate.