Freshman engineering student perceptions on global warming

Managing the problems that global warming is being forecast to cause requires the educated attention of many disciplines. One of these has to be engineering, as engineers are trained in the practical application of science and technology to meet human needs. This paper presents part of our efforts to enlighten our freshman engineering students on these problems. Modifications to an existing freshman course are briefly described that involve global warming issues, with the primary focus of the paper being on the students' perceptions. A pre-course instrument with 20 questions was used to obtain students' perceptions on the importance of global warming as a problem, if they can have an impact, and if anything can really be done about it. The same instrument was given at the end of the course to help measure the impact of the course content that focused on global warming. The paper includes the perception instrument and comparison of results from the pre and post surveys.