  Most students do not enroll in introductory astronomy as part of their major;
for many, it is the last science course they will ever take. Thus, it has great
potential to shape students' attitudes toward STEM fields for the rest of their
life. We therefore argue that it is less important, when assessing the
effectiveness of introductory astronomy courses, to explore traditional
curricular learning gains than to explore the effects that various course
components have on this attitude. We describe the results of our analysis of
end-of-semester surveys returned by a total of 749 students in 2014-2015, at 10
institutions that employed at least part of the introductory astronomy lecture
and lab curriculum we first implemented at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2009. Surveys
were designed to measure each student's attitude, and to probe the correlation
of attitude with their utilization of, and satisfaction with, various course
components, along with other measures of their academic background and their
self-assessed performance in the course. We find that students' attitudes are
significantly positively correlated with the grade they expect to receive, and
their rating of the course's overall effectiveness. To a lesser degree, we find
that students' attitudes are positively correlated with their mathematical
background, whether they intend to major or pursue a career in STEM, and their
rating of the effectiveness of the instructor. We find that students' attitudes
are negatively correlated with the amount of work they perceived the course to
involve, and, surprisingly, the size and reputation of their home institution.
We also find that, for the subsets of students who were exposed to them,
students' attitudes are positively correlated with their perception of the
helpfulness of the lecture component of the course, and of telescope-based labs
that utilized UNC-CH's Skynet Robotic Telescope Network.
