This engineering education research addresses how to best prepare students for the grand, complex challenges of 21st century engineering projects. The hypothesis of the project is that such grand challenges require "broad thinking". This research project attempts to understand when and how broad thinking develops in engineering students in order to create better learning experiences. To gain such insights the PI?s will examine data collected in the Academic Pathways Study, a multi-institution dataset on the paths students take when navigating an engineering degree program. More specifically, the project focuses on three separate questions: 1) What degree of broad thinking do students demonstrate during the course of four years of undergraduate engineering education? 2) What is the relationship between broad thinking and intention to pursue engineering beyond the undergraduate years? 3) How do educational experiences help engineering students develop broad thinking?
The broader significance and importance of this project is to learn how to better design college learning experiences for engineers so they are broad thinkers. Since many of the grand challenges and opportunities for engineering in the 21st century are broad in scope, complexity, and impact, engineers with a narrow focus may not be successful at addressing these challenges. The study may also learn if those who think broadly earn engineering degrees at the same rate as more narrow thinkers, and if not why this is.
This engineering education research project’s main goal is to understand when and how broad thinking develops in engineering undergraduates in order to help educators provide them with the kinds of learning experiences that prepare them for the complexity of contemporary engineering challenges. Broad thinking includes situating engineering problems in their environmental, global, economic, and political contexts. Broad thinking also includes taking a wide perspective on what it means to be an engineer and the range of skills and knowledge that engineering practice demands. ABET (accreditor of U.S. postsecondary engineering programs) and the National Academy of Engineering have repeatedly stressed the importance of both of these aspects of broad thinking in engineering. However, in contrast to extensive research on the teaching and learning of traditional, technical knowledge and competencies in engineering, there has been less engineering education research on the broad-thinking competencies that our project focuses on. Many questions remain about how much students develop these broad thinking abilities during the course of four years of undergraduate engineering education and what kinds of learning experiences contribute to this development. This project takes advantage of the wealth of unique data collected from engineering undergraduates at multiple U.S. institutions in the Academic Pathways Study (APS), an effort of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). APS data is unusual for its scale and breadth and includes students across class standing, engineering major, and institution type, with oversampling of demographic groups historically underrepresented in engineering. It also includes data collected using innovative methods for examining the ways in which students approach open-ended engineering design problem-solving. The project team was involved in APS and has a deep understanding of APS data and methods, as well as specific research on engineering design processes and conceptions of engineering practice. The project’s multiple analyses have yielded insights that can guide improvements in undergraduate engineering education. For instance, one set of findings indicates the value of extracurricular activities, which appear to help students develop professional skills like communication and teamwork, as well as core engineering skills like solving open-ended problems. Students also cited extracurricular activities as one category of learning experiences that help them think more broadly about engineering design problems and their context. Other learning experiences associated with consideration of problem context include capstones, internships, conference attendance, and family and other personal interactions. These findings might signal an opportunity for educators to facilitate more effective design learning through identification, legitimization, and integration of these relevant learning experiences. Another set of findings concerns shifts during the undergraduate years in the ways that students perceive and perform engineering design. Students’ estimation of the importance of design activities such as identifying constraints, iterating, making trade-offs, modeling, and prototyping increased as they progress through four years of undergraduate study. In contrast, the importance of activities such as building, imagining, using creativity, and visualizing went down. Comparing students’ approaches to the same open-ended engineering design problem in their first and junior years, by junior year most students exhibited more consideration of relevant factors, although not necessarily thinking more broadly about the context of the design problem. There were gender differences in both the first- and junior-year data, with women considering more problem context than men did, on average. These findings suggest that educators can do a better job of helping students develop competence in consideration of problem context. Learning contextual competency can come from students working together, leveraging the diversity of problem-solving approaches the gender findings suggest, as well as from the integration of learning experiences like those mentioned above. Beyond publication and presentation of findings to both researcher and educator audiences worldwide, the project team has engaged in other activities to help translate research findings to educator and student practice. One example is the development of assessment and teaching methods for contextual competency. Locally, the project team has also engaged in discussions with University of Washington College of Engineering leadership about project findings and their practical implications. Throughout this project’s duration, multiple master’s and doctoral students have had opportunities to be mentored in carrying out engineering education research, as well as exposure to insights about engineering education that can inform their own future careers practicing and/or teaching engineering.
