A Comparative NLP-BASED Sentiment Analysis of Basic Psychological Needs and Engagement Among Students with and Without Disability Accommodations in a Design Thinking Course with HyFlex Settings

Although HyFlex teaching has been studied for decades and has become part of the teaching norm since the 2020 pandemic, studies have generally not investigated the learning experiences of students with disabilities in HyFlex classrooms. This study compared the basic psychological needs (BPN) and engagement of undergraduate students who did (SwA) and did not (SwoA) request academic disability accommodations in an introductory, active learning, human-centered design thinking course, a core component of engineering technology education. Data were collected from 3748 primarily first-year undergraduate engineering technology students between fall 2021 and spring 2024, 126 of whom requested disability accommodation through the disability office. The data sources consisted of an end-of-course survey, in which students reported their basic psychological satisfaction level on a Likert scale and described their BPN experiences and engagement in response to open-ended survey questions. As a novel contribution, this study integrates the descriptive analysis of Likert-scale measures with textual- and word-level sentiment analysis, advancing conceptual understanding of reported BPN satisfaction and engagement and revealing divergent patterns across analytic approaches. While the SwA group reported lower scores across all BPN constructs compared to their counterparts, the highest number of them provided positive feedback statements across all BPN domains. Conversely, the SwoA group reported higher BPN scores across all constructs, yet the highest number of them used negative sentiments in their responses across all BPN constructs. The majority of SwA provided positive feedback on autonomy satisfaction, while the majority of SwoA’s positive feedback was on relatedness to the instructor. Future directions for advancing engineering technology education and disability data collection in higher education are provided.