Developing and Evaluating a Framework for Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design Courses

This project aims to serve the national interest by preparing engineering students for complex, real-world problems they will encounter in industry by creating opportunities for students from different engineering disciplines to work together in multidisciplinary capstone design teams. Traditional engineering education often separates students into disciplinary silos, limiting opportunities to develop the communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workforce. To address this challenge, the project plans to develop and evaluate a flexible framework for multidisciplinary capstone courses that can include students from any engineering field while still meeting accreditation requirements. The project plans to create new learning experiences that strengthen students’ ability to collaborate across disciplines, apply broad perspectives to engineering challenges, and produce innovative project outcomes. The project also plans to generate openly available educational resources, including course frameworks and example project briefs, that can be adopted by engineering programs nationwide. By improving how future engineers are trained to work collaboratively, this Level 2 project has the potential to enhance engineering education broadly and strengthen the nation’s STEM workforce. This project plans to design, implement, and evaluate a multidisciplinary engineering capstone framework capable of incorporating students from multiple engineering disciplines into collaborative design teams. The project scope addresses four major barriers to widespread implementation of multidisciplinary capstone programs: limited disciplinary representation in existing models, the absence of a published framework compatible with accreditation requirements across disciplines, limited project examples suitable for multidisciplinary capstone teams, and insufficient assessment methods for measuring interdisciplinary learning and team effectiveness. The project plans to establish a multidisciplinary capstone course and conduct a comparative evaluation over the first two years of implementation. The project plans to: assess student project outcomes in comparison to single-discipline projects; assess the effectiveness of cross-disciplinary student teamwork; and assess student gains in cross-disciplinary knowledge. The project plans to utilize quantitative and qualitative assessment methods including personality tests, teamwork competencies and perceptions scales, interview-style evaluations, interdisciplinary skill assessment, and industry stakeholder assessments of project quality. The project will also develop and disseminate open educational resources, including implementation guidelines and successful project briefs, to support adoption of similar multidisciplinary capstone programs at other institutions. Findings from this work will contribute new knowledge regarding the design, assessment, and scalability of multidisciplinary engineering capstone education. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.