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Engineers are socialized to value rational approaches to problem solving. A lack of awareness of how engineers use different decision‐making approaches is problematic because it perpetuates the ongoing development of inequitable engineering designs and contributes to a lack of inclusion in the field. Although researchers have explored how engineering students are socialized, further work is needed to understand students' beliefs about different decision‐making approaches.

We explored the espoused beliefs of undergraduate students about technical, empathic, experience‐based, and guess‐based approaches to engineering design decisions.

We conducted semistructured one‐on‐one interviews with 20 senior engineering students at the conclusion of their capstone design experience. We used a combination of deductive and inductive data condensation approaches to generate categories of beliefs.

We identified a total of nine categories of beliefs, organized by approach. Although students' espoused beliefs did reflect the emphasis on technical approaches present in their socialization, they also described technical approaches as limited and overvalued.

The landscape of beliefs presented make explicit both the challenges and the opportunities that students' beliefs play as the backdrop for any efforts of engineering educators to develop engineers as effective and equitable engineering designers.

 

Well-structured, de-contextualized problems that can be solved using solely technical approaches remain a large component of the engineering education curriculum. As a result, students may mistakenly believe that all engineering work can be done the same way—without the use of other approaches. Capstone design courses are an established way of exposing undergraduate students to ill-structured design tasks that more realistically reflect engineering practice. Yet, little is known about the influence of their capstone design experiences on their beliefs about how engineering design decisions are made. Our study compared students’ beliefs about four diverse approaches (technical, empathic, guess-based, and experience-based) to making engineering design decisions at the start of their capstone to their beliefs held at the end of their capstone. We conducted and analyzed qualitative transcripts from one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 17 capstone students. We found little evidence that students’ experience in capstone courses changed their beliefs about diverse approaches to making engineering design decisions. The minimal change that we did find in students’ beliefs was primarily about guess-based approaches, and that change was not uniform amongst the students who did demonstrate change. Our findings point to the resiliency of students’ beliefs about approaches to design decisions throughout an engineering capstone design experience. Therefore, we recommend instructors foster reflexivity within their classrooms to disrupt these limited, normative beliefs about the approaches needed to make engineering design decisions.

 

Engineering design decisions have non-trivial implications, and empathic approaches are one way that engineers can understand and translate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Prior literature demonstrates that students must develop empathic skills and beliefs that these skills are important to embody empathic approaches in meaningful ways. However, we have limited understanding of the relationship between students’ beliefs about the value of empathy in engineering decision making and how they describe their reported use of empathic approaches. We collected qualitative data through interviews with ten undergraduate engineering students in capstone design. We found that our participants espoused a belief that empathic approaches are valuable in engineering design decisions. However, while students considered diverse perspectives when describing how they made design decisions, their reported behaviour during design decisions did not demonstrate translation of their empathic understanding. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to educators and researchers. 

Engineers are expected to make decisions in the context of design, which is ill-structured. Capstone courses serve as an opportunity for engineering students to engage in design and practice making decisions that do not have a single correct answer. Empirical research has demonstrated that when making such decisions, people use informal reasoning, of which there are multiple types: rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic. Despite this reality, engineering education often portrays decision making in the context of engineering design as objective. For example, capstone design instruction typically focuses on providing students with tools to facilitate rational reasoning alone. In this paper, we introduce a framework for informal reasoning that can be used to think critically about how we teach decision making in the context of engineering capstone design. In addition, we use this paper to briefly describe the ways in which capstone design conference attendees engaged with this framework when it was presented in a workshop during the 2018 Capstone Design Conference. To conclude, we present preliminary recommendations for capstone design educators to integrate more opportunities for diverse and realistic forms of reasoning in their teaching practices.