Problem Definition in Design by First-Year Engineering Students

National Center For Engineering and Technology Education, 2011

The objective of this study was to describe the task interpretation of students engaged in a design activity and determine the extent to which students translate their understanding of their design task to their planning and cognitive strategies. Twenty-nine students at one Colorado high school participated in this study. Students worked individually in the Architectural Design class (n=7), and in teams in the Robotics Design class (n=22). To capture students' perceptions of their understanding of the task, planning strategies, and cognitive strategies, the Engineering Design Questionnaire (EDQ) was used. The development of the EDQ was guided by Butler and Cartier's Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) model. Besides the EDQ, a Web-based Engineering Design Notebook was developed to facilitate students reporting planning activities and engineering design strategies. Graphical views are used to present quantitative and qualitative analysis of data collected in this study. In addition, the mean scores of design phases (i.e., SRL dimensions) were compared across SRL features (i.e., task interpretation, planning strategies, and cognitive strategies). From the analysis, the findings suggest that the level of understanding of the task were high in problem definition, conceptual design, and preliminary design. In contrast, students were found to be lacking on those three design process components in the area of planning strategies. Students performed well in cognitive strategies except for problem definition.

2010

This study used Verbal Protocol Analysis (VPA) to investigate the cognitive process of 8 undergraduate engineering students during a hands-on model building design task. The present paper will focus on one aspect that emerged from this research: the paramount importance of correctly interpreting the problem. Although this may seem simplistic, correctly framing or interpreting the problem (which is distinct from identifying the problem) was a crucial and pivotal point for these students. Without it, the developmental process stalled and the design path became more haphazard. Once students were able to correctly interpret the problem, their path to a viable solution progressed much more smoothly and efficiently.

2011 Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2011

This paper presents the results of design cognition studies of two groups of students: high school juniors and seniors who have taken pre-engineering courses and sophomore university students in a mechanical engineering department. Both groups carried out design sessions designing for the same design challenge. Data were collected using the protocol analysis technique through video and audio recordings of design sessions. The students' design cognition was measured by segmenting and coding the transcribed videos using the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) ontologically-based design issues and design processes coding scheme that provides a uniform basis for analyzing design protocols. Differences in design cognition were found and tentative explanations provided to account for them.

JOURNAL …, 2007

Journal of Engineering …, 2005

This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning. The capstone course is a U.S. term for design courses typically taken in the senior year. The term cornestone is a recent U.S. coinage for design or project courses taken early (e.g., first year) in the engineering curriculum. It was intended to draw a distinction from and preserve the mataphor of the capstone course. G handle uncertainty; G make decisions; G think as part of a team in a social process; and G think and communicate in the several languages of design.

Research on engineering design is a core area of concern within engineering education and a fundamental understanding of how engineering students approach and undertake design is necessary in order to develop effective design models and pedagogies. Understanding the factors related to design experiences in education and how they affect student practice can help educators as well as designers to leverage these factors as part of the design process. PURPOSE This study investigated the design practices of first-year engineering students' and their experiences with a first-year engineering course design project. The research questions that guided the investigation were: 1. From a student perspective, what design parameters or criteria are most important? 2. How does this perspective impact subsequent student design practice throughout the design process? DESIGN/METHOD The authors employed qualitative multi-case study methods (Miles & Huberman, 1994) in order to the answer the research questions. Participant teams were observed and video recorded during team design meetings in which they researched the background for the design problem, brainstormed and sketched possible solutions, as well as built prototypes and final models of their design solutions as part of a course design project. Analysis focused on explanation building (Yin, 2009) and utilized within-case and cross-case analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994). RESULTS We found that students focused disproportionally on the functional parameter, i.e. the physical implementation of their solution, and the possible/applicable parameter, i.e. a possible and applicable solution that benefited the user, in comparison to other given parameters such as safety and innovativeness. In addition, we found that individual teams focused on the functional and possible/ applicable parameters in early design phases such as brainstorming/ ideation and sketching. When prompted to discuss these non-salient parameters (from the student perspective) in the final design report, student design teams often used a post-hoc justification to support how the final designs fit the parameters that they did not initially consider. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests is that student design teams become fixated on (and consequently prioritize) certain parameters they interpret as important because they feel these parameters were described more explicitly in terms how they were met and assessed. Students fail to consider other parameters, perceived to be less directly assessable, unless prompted to do so. Failure to consider other parameters in the early design phases subsequently affects their approach in design phases as well. Case studies examining students' study strategies within three Australian Universities illustrate similarities with some student approaches to design.

2007

Professionals in all disciplines are continually engaged in problem solving, design, and research. Because steps in these processes appear similar, many faculty conceptualize a single, universal model for all three processes. However, for students who are just learning these processes, a universal model may not be the best way to build performance skills. This work was undertaken to help novices understand unique characteristics of each process and the circumstances under which each process is most effective and efficient. This paper examines two tools that were created to build this understanding: (i) a matrix analyzing the similarities and differences among the processes and (ii) a graphical presentation highlighting key skills that are hypothesized for each process. Effectiveness of the two tools was evaluated in a freshman design course where teams of five students work on a six-week design mini-project. Data collected included notes by the instructor, observations by peer coaches who observed an activity, and written feedback provided by student teams. In the activity, teams were asked to use the tools to distinguish between problem-solving and design activities that they had performed earlier in the semester. Next, the students were asked to classify a number of simple scenarios. Finally, feedback was solicited about the greatest strengths and areas of improvement for each of the tools as well as insights gained through this class activity. Findings were validated by separate focus groups with design faculty and with students enrolled in a capstone design course. Both students and faculty envisioned the two tools to be a natural extension of project work, prompting new insights about the role of problem solving, design, and research in engineering practice.

2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings, 2000

Design is widely recognized as a keystone of engineering practice. Within the context of engineering education, design has been categorized as a type of ill-structured problem solving that is crucial for engineering students to engage with. Improving undergraduate engineering education requires a better understanding of the ways in which students experience ill-structured problems in the form of engineering design. With special attention to the experiences of first-year engineering students, prior exploratory work identified two critical thresholds that distinguished students' ways of experiencing design as less or more comprehensive: accepting ambiguity and recognizing the value of multiple perspectives. The goal of current (work-in-progress) research is to develop and pilot a self-report instrument to assess students' relation to these two thresholds at the completion of an illstructured design project within the context of undergraduate engineering education. The specific research questions addressed in this study are 1) if the piloted self-report instrument can be used to identify discrete constructs, and 2) how these constructs align with prior qualitative research findings. The objective of this study was addressed using a quantitative exploratory research design. Items for the self-report Likert-scaled instrument were designed to distinguish student experience that either accept or reject the presence of ambiguity and the value of multiple perspectives. The instrument was disseminated to a total of 214 first-year engineering students. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the constructs that emerge from the self-report data, and these constructs were checked for alignment with the previously identified thresholds. The results of this investigation will be used to help advance progress towards an easily administered instrument able to assist engineering educators with the identification of students in need of intervention or explicit instruction related to critical aspects of learning engineering design. The instrument could also be used to track student growth over time, and, with further development, to provide evidence for ABET student outcomes.

2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

A critical aspect to engineering practice is the ability to design solutions to ill-structured problems. Prior research has shown that such solutions are highly effective when they are evaluated in relation to multiple design concepts. However, prior research has also shown that engineering students tend to fixate on their initial design ideas rather than base their solutions on the integration of many diverse concepts. One recently developed method to overcome the problems of fixation is 77 Design Heuristics. This method for generating design concepts comes in the form of 77 cards, each with a different cognitive prompt for generating a solution (e.g., reduce material, flatten). By using the cards, engineers and engineering students are able to expand their horizons of possible solutions to challenging design problems. Using a first-year engineering course, we integrated the 77 Design Heuristics cards to document how these students develop final concepts in relation to their initial ideas. We analyzed 12 firstyear engineering students, distributed across 3 different design teams. Our findings demonstrate key influences that did foster idea fluency (Theme 1: Influence of 77 Cards on Early Design Concepts) but also ways that students remained attached to particular concepts throughout their design process (Theme 2: Resilient Concepts after Concept Generation).

DS 60: Proceedings of DESIGN 2010, the 11th International Design Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2010