EAGER: Using Human-Centered Design to Conceptualize and Prototype Ways to Increase Graduate Student Engagement with Transformative Research

Harvey Mudd College, Claremont CA

Investigators

Abstract

The engineering and engineering education community is intensely interested in generating trained engineers who can address large scale, "important" problems. Such challenges rarely adhere to traditional boundaries, yet graduate students are frequently admitted and trained with the primary intent of teaching them to be deeply focused on highly specific problem domains, with markedly less emphasis on breadth, creativity and curiosity. This project seeks to explore the hypothesis that graduate engineering programs suffer from a lack of potentially transformative and creative applicants. Individuals from all stages of the graduate student pipeline will be interviewed with the goal of identifying potential problems in attracting students to graduate research. Based on the findings from these investigations, novel strategies to remediate these problems will be designed and tested. This project has the potential to develop approaches to overcome barriers to retention of creative thinkers in graduate engineering studies. Given that the future engineering community is shaped, at least in part, by individual decisions to pursue or not to pursue graduate studies, this study could radically impact the engineering community and its potential for transformative research. Notably, interviews across a wide spectrum of racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds may also provide insights into differential influences on the decision to engage with graduate education, and improve strategies for diversity and inclusion. This study will use a human-centered design approach, Design Thinking, to explore the question of how to increase graduate student engagement in transformative engineering research. A central tenet of the Design Thinking approach is that one must listen closely to and understand "users" before designing or implementing solutions to their needs or wants. Therefore, participants at all stages of the graduate student pipeline (undergraduates, graduates, faculty, administrators) will be interviewed using a framework of ethnographic techniques to understand whether potentially transformative students select out of the admissions process, and if so why. Additionally, the graduate admissions process and engineering education will be examined for their propensity to encourage or discourage creativity, intellectual curiosity, interdisciplinary perspectives, and a focus on large-scale important problems. Knowledge gained in these investigations will be used to develop prototypes to attract and retain potentially transformative thinkers, as well as to reframe first year graduate engineering curricula in order to stimulate creativity and interdisciplinary thinking. The overall goal of this research is to develop approaches to stem the hypothesized loss of creative, interdisciplinary thinkers in graduate engineering studies by overcoming barriers to recruitment and retention.