Collaborative Research: Research: Understanding and Improving Design Activity Engagement in the Engineering Capstone Experience

This project will focus on improving the ways that engineering students and professionals learn to design solutions that benefit a wide range of people who use these solutions. Engineering students come to learn engineering design through an intensive project-based course known as their capstone course, a process critical to their formation as engineers. In these courses, students often emulate industry practices by designing projects within a team, in a process intended to be similar to what they might experience in the workplace. However, research in engineering education and practice continues to show that much design learning happens after students graduate with their engineering degrees. Might engineering students be better equipped to practice high-quality design in the workplace if they were more engaged in their capstone course? And how might capstone courses be designed in a way that motivates students to learn design with a deeper connection to the process? This project will address these critical questions through an in-depth study of engineering students and professionals and a sustained plan to equip engineering design instructors in preparing students for the workplace. There is little knowledge of the specifics of how engineering students engage in capstone courses and how their engagement is driven by identity and motivation needs. The objective of this project will be to investigate how and why civil and mechanical engineering students and practicing engineers engage with engineering design activity. In particular, this project will be characterized by the following objectives: 1) Develop a model of design activity engagement and identity motives of students and professionals, 2) Expand our model to account for resistance and synergies, alignment and tension between academic and workplace settings and across disciplines, and 3) Advance holistic and authentic engagement of students in multiple academic settings through extensive collaboration with and training of engineering faculty. The capstone design experience is particularly unique because explicit and implicit goals focus on simulating the engineering design experience to the extent possible. How and why students engage in engineering design in capstone courses is therefore foundational to understanding and improving the efficacy of capstone courses. We will use constructivist grounded theory (CGT) to examine the how and why of this phenomenon in four important settings. The rationale for this research is that understanding differentially how students and engineers in different disciplines engage in design is a critical step in enhancing our understanding of engagement in academic and workplace settings and results can broadly inform efforts to enhance student engagement. This project is further characterized by the formation Engaged Design Learning Institute (EDLI), where we will enroll a cross-institutional cohort of 8-10 capstone instructors to support them in their design instruction and to develop contextually relevant insight on how the research findings may be applied by educators. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.