2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Introduction: The evidence the of engineering design process needs to be specifically demonstrated in our graduating engineering students based on the revised ABET criteria 4, which requests that programs show that students have “ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs...” (ABET EAC 2019-2020 SO 2) [1]. The requirements for showing “engineering design” have been well defined with the current ABET student outcomes and starts with empathy with the end user through development and testing of potential solutions. In 2014, we started incorporated curricular interventions on the design thinking (DT) process, which included adding DT-focused bioengineering elective courses, modules in required courses, and advising by bioengineering faculty on senior capstone projects. We are exploring how our bioengineering specific interventions have a positive effect on our students’ internalization of the DT process as part of their senior capstone projects.

Materials and Methods: Final senior design documents (SDD) (n = 152) from our College of Engineering were reviewed using an in-house rubric [2] from selected semesters starting in Spring 2018 (baseline), Fall 2019 [3], Fall 2020, and Spring 2021. Spring 2020 SDD were not included as the students’ work was interrupted due to the pandemic. The documents were based on projects from four major disciplines within the college at this time (BE – bioengineering, CE – civil engineering, EE – electrical engineering, and ME – mechanical engineering). These documents were evaluated by 5 graduate students that had no interactions with these SD teams. Each rubric was based on a 4-point Likert scale and ranked from 4 (master) to 1 (novice) based on multiple DT concept categories. Multiple ANOVA tests with Tukey post-hoc corrections were used to detect differences between disciplines and cohorts.

Results and Discussion:  General improvements occurred for all engineering disciplines from baseline (Spring 2018) through subsequent semesters with BE showing the greatest improvements over other disciplines. Specific areas of improvements were with evidence of multiple solutions and context across all SDD. Specific area that showed a decrease in the quality of evidence was for “final testing” for all disciplines except for CE, but it has been noted that CE projects tend not to develop a device [2]. Only CE showed a consistent and steady improvement of their SDD scores over time. Teams with students that experienced the additional intervention materials generally scored higher in several categories; however, these gains disappeared over time. Changes in instructors, faculty mentors, and/or course materials could affect resultant scores.

Conclusions: Overall, improvements in design thinking evidence have been shown across all disciplines as shown in SDD. Future work will include interviews with other engineering disciplines to determine how design thinking is approached and assessed to see what is being offered elsewhere.

Acknowledgements: Research supported by NIH 5R25EB023846-05