Authors:

Chijhi Chang

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

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About Paper:

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) emphasizes that engineering graduates must be able to apply engineering design to meet specified needs with consideration of broader societal factors such as public health, safety, economics, and the environment. However, undergraduate engineering curricula rarely include explicit instruction on how to incorporate information on broader societal factors into design projects. As a first step in developing appropriate pedagogy, this study sought to gather concrete and detailed data on how ten engineering students processed a variety of information, including information on different stakeholder groups and broader societal factors, provided to them for an open-ended design task: designing a campus study space. We provided each participant with our design prompt and 25 pieces of information related to the design instruction and asked participants to sort the provided information into three piles: clearly relevant, possibly relevant, and not relevant. We also asked participants to sort clearly relevant information based on topic and interviewed participants to learn their justifications for how they sorted the provided information. For clearly relevant information, we found that engineering students used keywords, criteria/constraints, and perceptions of user needs to group information under the clearly relevant category. Factors leading to the classification of information as possibly relevant or not relevant include it being outside the scope of engineering solutions and information that is not currently relevant but may be in the future. The information sorting approaches observed in this study can inform pedagogies on information gathering and synthesis in engineering design courses.

Source:

Purdue University / 2023

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Chijhi Chang