Collaborative Research: Teaching Engineering Design with a Contextual Perspective

About This Grant

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving students’ understanding of how social, cultural, economic, and political systems can inform their engineering designs. Traditionally, engineering design courses have focused primarily on the technical specifications and requirements of a design without full consideration of the wider context in which they will be used. There is also a lack of engineering design courses in the middle two years of a typical engineering curriculum. This leads to a gap in learning design principles and skills for students between their first design course and the final capstone design course. The project plans to develop, implement, refine, and evaluate engineering design courses for second and third year students at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of Texas-San Antonio. The courses should help students learn how to conduct in-depth analyses of the implications of design choices for society using historical and current examples of engineering design. This project intends to develop an instructional framework for the middle years of engineering programs' courses along with instructional materials for those courses. Using interviews and student surveys, the project will assess the impact of the courses on students. Project results will be disseminated to engineering educators through professional development workshops. The goal of this project is to help students learn how to consider social, cultural, economic, and political factors during the engineering design process. This project is based on Critical Consciousness theory which suggests that students need to develop an awareness of inequitable societal conditions that can occur due to engineering design decisions. A new teaching framework for engineering design in the middle years will be developed and refined so that engineering design includes a contextual perspective. The goals for the new engineering design course are: (1) to empower students to be more socially and critically driven engineers, (2) to help students learn about the engineering design process from a Critical Consciousness perspective, and (3) to help students become validated in their aspirations to pursue an engineering career. An inter-group dialogue approach will be used in the course to establish communication relationships, facilitate dialogue, and encourage collaborations between students. This study will address two research questions: (1) What teaching strategies are most helpful in developing students’ critical consciousness through an engineering design course? (2) How and in what ways do the programmatic features of the project impact students’ learning of engineering design and engineering identity development? The project team will use quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze data from classroom observations, course artifacts, and student surveys. The NSF IUSE: EHR 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.