Do Favourable Attitudes Guarantee Aptitude? Attitude Toward Technical Education, Numerical Ability, and Mechanical Reasoning Among Higher Secondary Students in Kerala, India

Engineering education in Kerala today presents a puzzle. Nearly 20,000 of the state's roughly 56,000 undergraduate engineering seats went unfilled in 2024, demand has tilted sharply toward computer science and artificial intelligence while mechanical and civil branches struggle to attract applicants, and yet a large share of the students who do enrol fall behind or fail to finish. One explanation is that career decisions at the higher secondary stage rest heavily on how students feel about technical education rather than on what they can actually do. The present study put that explanation to the test by measuring three characteristics in the same students and asking how closely they align. A stratified sample of 501 science-stream higher secondary students (253 boys, 248 girls) from eight government and aided schools of Kasaragod district completed a 43-item Likert-type Attitude Toward Technical Education Scale developed and standardised for the study (test–retest reliability .82), together with the Numerical Ability and Mechanical Reasoning subtests of the Differential Aptitude Tests. Pearson correlations with Fisher's t-tests and critical-ratio comparisons of group means were computed. Attitude proved strongly related to numerical ability (r = .676, p < .01, 46% shared variance) yet only moderately related to mechanical reasoning (r = .361, p < .01, 13% shared variance), and this uneven pattern held in every gender, school-type, and locality subgroup. Girls significantly outscored boys on both attitude and numerical ability, with no gender gap in mechanical reasoning. The results suggest that enthusiasm for technical education travels with quantitative skill but not with mechanical insight, and that career guidance should therefore pair attitude assessment with aptitude testing before students commit to technical courses.

technical education, career guidance, aptitude, attitude, higher secondary students

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