Assessing students' consideration of context in engineering design

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5) This engineering education research award to the University of Washington will employ researchers to develop a number of assessment techniques for use by both instructors and students to assess students' consideration of context in engineering design. Success in addressing grand challenge problems of the future will require that engineers be able to place engineering problems and design alternatives in the larger complex context of societal and organizational constraints. The assessments will be tested in four different engineering classes. This research is transformative in rigorously investigating the effectiveness of methods used to develop students' consideration of context in design. In addition the assessments developed will be easily used in a classroom setting rather than being limited to a research laboratory with labor intensive evaluation methods. Understanding of how to incorporate context into engineering education will be advanced by widespread use of this assessment tool and will lead to engineering programs which better prepare engineering students to fill future engineering jobs.