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1. How do undergraduate engineering students conceptualize product design? An analysis of two third‐year design courses

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20468  

   Miska, Jacob W. ; Mathews, Laura ; Driscoll, Jessica ; Hoffenson, Steven ; Crimmins, Sarah ; Espera, Jr., Alejandro ; Pitterson, Nicole ( May 2022 , Journal of Engineering Education)

   Engineering education traditionally emphasizes technical skills, sometimes at the cost of under‐preparing graduates for the real‐world engineering context. In recent decades, attempts to address this issue include increasing project‐based assignments and engineering design courses in curricula; however, a skills gap between education and industry remains.

   This study aims to understand how undergraduate engineering students perceive product design before and after an upper‐level project‐based design course, as measured through concept maps. The purpose is to measure whether and how students account for the technical and nontechnical elements of design, as well as how a third‐year design course influences these design perceptions.

   Concept maps about product design were collected from 105 third‐year engineering students at the beginning and end of a design course. Each concept map's content and structure were quantitatively analyzed to evaluate the students' conceptual understandings and compare them across disciplines in the before and after conditions.

   The analyses report on how student conceptions differ by discipline at the outset and how they changed after taking the course. Mechanical Engineering students showed a decrease in business‐related content and an increased focus on societal content, while students in the Engineering Management and Industrial and Systems Engineering programs showed an increase in business topics, specifically market‐related content.

   This study reveals how undergraduate students conceptualize product design, and specifically to what extent they consider engineering, business, and societal factors. The design courses were shown to significantly shape student conceptualizations of product design, and they did so in a way that mirrored the topics in the course syllabi. The findings offer insights into the education‐practice skills gap and may help future educators to better prepare engineering students to meet industry needs.

    

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2. Using Adaptive Comparative Judgment to Holistically Assess Creativity of Design Solutions: A Comparison of First-Year Students and Educators' Judgments

   Reid, Clodagh ; Sorby, Sheryl ; Raju, Gibin ; Buckley, Jeff ; Seery, Niall ( June 2023 , Review directory American Society for Engineering Education)

   This Complete Research paper investigates the holistic assessment of creativity in design solutions in engineering education. Design is a key element in contemporary engineering education, given the emphasis on its development through the ABET criteria. As such, design projects play a central role in many first-year engineering courses. Creativity is a vital component of design capability which can influence design performance; however, it is difficult to measure through traditional assessment rubrics and holistic assessment approaches may be more suitable to assess creativity of design solutions. One such holistic assessment approach is Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ). In this system, student designs are presented to judges in pairs, and they are asked to select the item of work that they deem to have demonstrated the greatest level of a specific criterion or set of criteria. Each judge is asked to make multiple judgements where the work they are presented with is adaptively paired in order to create a ranked order of all items in the sample. The use of this assessment approach in technology education has demonstrated high levels of reliability among judges (~0.9) irrespective of whether the judges are students or faculty. This research aimed to investigate the use of ACJ to holistically assess the creativity of first-year engineering students design solutions. The research also sought to explore the differences, if any, that would exist between the rank order produced by first-year engineering students and the faculty who regularly teach first-year students. Forty-six first-year engineering students and 23 faculty participated in this research. A separate ACJ session was carried out with each of these groups; however, both groups were asked to assess the same items of work. Participants were instructed to assess the creativity of 101 solutions to a design task, a “Ping Pong problem,” where undergraduate engineering students had been asked to design a ping pong ball launcher to meet specific criteria. In both ACJ sessions each item of work was included in at least 11 pairwise comparisons, with the maximum number of comparisons for a single item being 29 in the faculty ACJ session and 50 in the student ACJ session. The data from the ACJ sessions were analyzed to determine the reliability of using ACJ to assess creativity of design solutions in first-year engineering education, and to explore whether the rankings produced from the first-year engineering students ACJ session differed significantly from those of the faculty. The results indicate a reasonably high level of reliability in both sessions as measured by the Scale Separation Reliability (SSR) coefficient, SSRfaculty = 0.65 ± 0.02, SSRstudents = 0.71 ± 0.02. Further a strong correlation was observed between the ACJ ranks produced by the students and faculty both when considered in terms of the relative differences between items of work, r = .533, p < .001, and their absolute rank position, σ = .553, p < .001. These findings indicate that ACJ is a promising tool for holistically assessing design solutions in engineering education. Additionally, given the strong correlation between ranks of students and faculty, ACJ could be used to include students in their own assessment to reduce the faculty grading burden or to develop a shared construct of capability which could increase the alignment of teaching and learning. 

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3. Case study on engineering design intervention in physics laboratories

   Kaufman-Ortiz, K. ; Morphew, J. W. ; Rebello, N. S. ; & Rebello, C. M. ( January 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings)

   Problem-solving is a critical skill in the workplace, but recent college graduates are often deficient in problem-solving skills. Introductory STEM courses present engineering students with well-structured problems with single-path solutions that do not prepare students with the problem-solving skills they will need to solve complex problems within authentic engineering contexts. When presented with complex problems in authentic contexts, engineering students find it difficult to transfer the scientific knowledge learned in their STEM courses to solve these integrated and ill structured problems. By integrating physics laboratories with engineering design problems, students are taught to apply physics principles to solve ill-structured and complex engineering problems. The integration of engineering design processes to physics labs is meant to help students transfer physics learning to engineering problems, as well as to transfer the design skills learned in their engineering courses to the physics lab. We hypothesize this integration will help students become better problem solvers when they go out to industry after graduation. The purpose of this study is to examine how students transfer their understanding of physics concepts to solve ill-structured engineering problems by means of an engineering design project in a physics laboratory. We use a case-study methodology to examine two cases and analyze the cases using a lens of co-regulated learning and transfer between physics and engineering contexts. Observations were conducted using transfer lenses. That is, we observed groups during the physics labs for evidence of transfer. The research question for this study was, to what extent do students relate physics concepts with concepts from other materials (classes) through an engineering design project incorporated in a physics laboratory? Teams were observed over the course of 6 weeks as they completed the second design challenge. The cases presented in this study were selected using observations from the lab instructors of the team’s work in the first design project. Two teams, one who performed well, and one that performed poorly, were selected to be observed to provide insight on how students use physics concepts to engage in the design process. The second design challenge asked students to design an eco-friendly way of delivering packages of food to an island located in the middle of the river, which is home to critically endangered species. They are given constraints that the solution cannot disrupt the habitat in any way, nor can the animals come into contact directly with humans or loud noises. Preliminary results indicate that both teams successfully demonstrated transfer between physics and engineering contexts, and integrated physics concepts from multiple labs to complete the design project. Teams that struggle seem to be less connected with the design process at the beginning of the project and are less organized. In contrast, teams that are successful demonstrate greater co-regulated learning (communication, reflection, etc.) and focus on making connections between the physics concepts and principles of engineering design from their engineering course work. 

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4. Bringing Social Justice Context into Civil Engineering Courses for First-Year and Third-Year Students

   https://doi.org/10.1061/JCEECD.EIENG-1857  

   Casper, A. M. ; Atadero, Rebecca A. ; Abdallah, A. Rahman ; Siller, Tom ( April 2024 , Journal of Civil Engineering Education)

   Civil engineering education must be updated to keep pace with the profession and move past a culture of disengagement where technical work is considered separate from societal impact. Civil engineering students need to engage with diversity, equity, inclusion and justice (DEIJ) so they can understand the differential impacts of engineering on individuals from different groups within society. We aim to encourage the transformation of civil engineering education to produce engineers that will be prepared to meaningfully engage with society and advance justice in their future professional roles by providing examples of pedagogical change and analyzing student responses. In this study we implemented new course assignments in an introductory civil engineering course and a civil engineering materials course. In the introductory assignment students were taught to draw systems models and asked to consider social and technical factors contributing to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In the materials course students completed pre-class readings about a regional highway reconstruction project, including articles about neighborhood opposition to the project, and participated in an in-class discussion. We analyzed student submissions using qualitative content analysis. Students in both courses (33% introductory, 60% materials) described learning about the impact engineering designs had on the community. In the materials class students were asked specifically about the impact of race and wealth on infrastructure decision-making. Student responses showed a wide range in how students understood the history of the situation and dynamics of power and privilege. Errors and limitations in student responses point to specific ways the instructors can improve student learning. Our results demonstrate that the integration of activities about societal impact is possible in technical engineering courses, emphasize the importance of integrating social context and related DEIJ content into technical courses, and provide insights into what students perceived they learned from the activities. 

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5. Examining the “narrow” and “expansive” socio-technical imaginaries influencing college students’ collaborative reasoning about a design scenario

   Radoff, J. ; Turpen, C. ; Abdurrahman, F. ; Chen, D. ; Tomblin, D. ; Agrawal, A. ; Chudamani, S. ( August 2022 , Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN)

   Many studies show that college engineering students’ sense of ethical and social responsibility declines over the course of their college careers (Cech, 2014; Canny & Bielefeldt, 2015; Schiff et al., 2021). One reason is that many college engineering programs and courses reinforce the social-technical dualism, which treats social and macro-ethical issues as distinct from the technical work more often associated with “real” engineering. Some programs, like the Science, Technology and Society (STS) program at [institution made confidential for review], attempt to challenge this dualism by supporting the integration of social and technical considerations within students’ design work and by asking students to grapple with the complex ethics of their work. However, this program is still embedded within a department, university, and society that subscribes to harmful ideologies such as technocracy, capitalism, and meritocracy, which value efficiency, surveillance, and control. These ideologies and their associated values constrain the imagination for what is possible in design work, for instance, by relying on technological ‘quick fixes’ to address complex social problems or by propping up large corporations as innovators, without adequately grappling with the harm that these corporations might be doing. This cultural reality creates an uphill battle for educators attempting to support engineering students’ sense of social consciousness and ethical responsibility. Thus, this study attempts to understand how engineering students’ imaginations are being constrained by societal structures and ideologies and when do they “break free” from these constraints? In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of first-year STS students collaboratively reasoning through a simulated design scenario about a small community store facing challenges related to the Covid-19 pandemic (adapted from Gupta, 2017). Using discourse and narrative analysis, we analyzed multiple focus group interviews to identify what we call “co-occurrences,” or ideas that tend to hang together in participants’ reasoning. Examining these co-occurrences provides insight into the variety of ways socio-technical imaginaries play out in students’ design thinking. 

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