2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete evidence-based practice paper describes a study of three design interventions and a survey conducted of first-year engineering students to understand the impact on their design self-efficacy. The research question being addressed in this study is whether there is an impact of documenting the design thinking process, the engineering design process, and project communication on students’ level of self-efficacy to solve engineering design problems. And if so, to what extent did students find value in using the documentation activities for enhancing their engineering design capabilities? The aim of this study is to identify the best strategies for improving first-year students’ design skills that will help them succeed in future design projects. Many tools have been developed to improve engineering design skills of first year students like design thinking exercises, the Engineering Design Canvas, and strategies for communicating ideas. The evidence-based practice described in this study consists of in-class exercises for each of these tools which include 1) an IDEO design thinking worksheet at the beginning of the project, 2) the Engineering Design Canvas at the middle of the project, and 3) the Heitmeier Catechism design communication strategies at the end of the project.

This study was conducted at a large private university in the first-year multidisciplinary introductory engineering course. Each semester, half of the 700 first-year students enroll in this course which requires all students to complete a multidisciplinary semester-long design project. The engineering design self-efficacy questionnaire developed in 2010 was used before and after to determine the impact of the three design exercises. In addition to the design self-efficacy instrument, open-ended questions were asked about students' feelings toward the design process. This study encompasses one semester with 300 first-year students in an introductory engineering course. The pre- and post-surveys take place before and after the first and last design intervention, respectively. Statistical analysis of the Likert responses to the engineering design self-efficacy questionnaire are used to compare before and after data to determine areas where the design interventions had the greatest impact. Other data collected included major, year, and the project type they completed to identify if other trends impacted their self-efficacy.

The survey results indicate that students' design self-efficacy had statistically significant improvements in all areas except for motivation to select a possible design. In general, the motivation dimension of self-efficacy had the smallest practically significant increase. However, student self-efficacy for confidence and success increased for each step of the engineering design process. The anxiety dimension saw a statistically and practically significant decrease for each engineering design step. While the causation is limited by the course design project being completed between the pre-survey and post-survey, the qualitative results indicate that many students found the design interventions to be helpful in understanding aspects of each engineering design process step.