Research Initiation: Enhancement of transfer of design thinking in undergraduate Bioengineering students

Temple University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

A major goal of engineering education is to train engineering students to approach complex projects with design thinking strategies. These include systematically analyzing the problem at hand as well as the needs of the clients and of the community, generating a variety of creative possible solutions, applying a rational process to select the best option for the circumstances, designing a prototype of the solution, and testing the prototype and improving it until it is optimal. Unfortunately, despite being taught these design thinking strategies in undergraduate courses, many engineering students do not transfer them to their capstone projects and to their engineering careers. Instead, they fall back on simple strategies such as getting fixed on single solutions and using unsystematic trial-and-error methods. The project builds on a theory that explains why people fail to transfer problem-solving strategies across contexts. We plan to redesign a bioengineering course in a way that will increase the likelihood that the students will transfer the design thinking strategies from the course to their capstone project and into their careers. The outcome of the project will be a framework that other engineering educators can use to redesign their courses so that their students are also more likely to transfer design thinking strategies beyond the current course into their engineering professional roles. This project will increase the community of researchers who are studying engineering students’ development by training a bioengineering professor and an engineering doctoral student in engineering educational research. Whereas a central goal in engineering education is developing students’ design thinking for creative real-world problem solving, decades of research have demonstrated that students commonly fail to transfer design thinking strategies they learned in undergraduate courses to their capstone projects and to their engineering jobs. The research question guiding this project is: how can engineering instructors enhance transfer of design thinking strategies among bioengineering undergraduate students? This project proposes to build on contemporary theories of role identity, motivation, learning, and transfer to develop a theoretical framework and theory-informed pedagogical principles to teach design thinking strategies in a manner that supports their transfer across contexts and tasks. The project will involve a collaboration between a bioengineering professor, an engineering doctoral student, and an educational psychology professor who will adapt the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) to a conceptual framework of engineering students’ transfer of design thinking strategies across context-based role-identities, and the formulation of pedagogical design principles to promote such transfer in engineering undergraduate courses. The theoretical framework and pedagogical design principles will then guide a two-year design-based research that will involve the design of transfer-promoting activities focused on design thinking strategies into a biodesign undergraduate course. In year 1, the project will focus on implementing activities and investigating students’ engagement in these activities and their degree and type of transfer of the design thinking strategies into their capstone project. In year 2, efforts will focus on using the findings to reformulate the conceptual framework and pedagogical principles, redesigning the activities, implementing them, and investigating students’ engagement and transfer. Deliverables from this project will include the conceptual framework of design thinking strategies transfer, and the pedagogical principles of designing for transfer of these design thinking strategies. The researchers will disseminate these products in engineering education research conference presentations, peer-reviewed journals, and educator workshops. The findings will also provide the basis for future NSF engineering education proposals. 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.