2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Comparing Complexities of the Understanding of the Engineering Mindset between First-Year and Capstone Students

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Technical Session 9

The Engineering Mindset (EM) refers to the values, attitudes, and thinking skills associated with engineering. It is especially important for undergraduate engineering students to understand the Engineering Mindset as it can help those students tackle the challenges they will meet in their professional lives. To examine how well students have been able to understand the Engineering Mindset, students in a first-year engineering course and a multidisciplinary engineering capstone course were asked to make a concept map about the Engineering Mindset. The prompt asked students to complete a concept mapping exercise to benchmark their knowledge about Engineering Mindset that is required in the Engineering Design or Product Development Process. The students were asked to implement a visual representation of ideas for the Engineering Mindset using concept maps, and then the concept maps were scored on the complexity of the students’ understanding of the topic using the traditional concept map scoring method. This method scores concept maps using the number of concepts, the highest hierarchy of the map, and the number of connected concepts between concept branches. The traditional scoring method was completed manually and through an automated tool to compare the scores between the two methods. The purpose of this paper is to examine the difference in understanding of the Engineering Mindset between first-year students and capstone students and understand complexity differences amongst themselves. This paper also includes an examination of how well an automatic scoring program can score concept maps and its potential uses in scoring maps from a large number of students.

Authors

Ms. Lauren Taylor Wagner The Ohio State University [biography]

Lauren Wagner is an Undergraduate student who is studying Environmental Engineering where she serves as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for the Engineering Education Department at The Ohio State University. She is advised by Dr. Krista Kecskemety in her First-Year Research in Engineering research group. Outside of that, Lauren is interested in Carbon Capture Technologies and hopes to use her undergraduate degree to pursue that field.
Tyler Milburn http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2117-7134 The Ohio State University [biography]

Tyler Milburn is currently a Ph.D. student studying Engineering Education at Ohio State University where he serves as a Graduate Teaching Associate for the first-year engineering program. He is co-advised by Dr. Krista Kecskemety and Dr. Rachel Kajfez and his research interests include understanding how students apply to engineering majors and the experiences they face when they do not get into their first-choice major. Tyler earned his B.S. (2016) and M.S. (2018) degrees in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University.
Dr. Krista M. Kecskemety http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1192-4172 The Ohio State University [biography]

Krista Kecskemety is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University and the co-Director of the Fundamentals of Engineering Programs. Krista received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University in 2006 and received her M.S. from Ohio State in 2007. In 2012, Krista completed her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State. Her engineering education research interests include investigating first-year engineering student experiences, faculty experiences, and the research to practice cycle within first-year engineering.
Mr. Bob Rhoads The Ohio State University [biography]

Bob Rhoads currently functions as the Multidisciplinary Capstone Program Director for the Department of Engineering Education at Ohio State University. He has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Ohio State University and Masters in Business Administration from Regis University. Prior to his involvement as the program director, he had over 11 years of experience in industry with roles that varied from process engineering to sales engineering to design engineering. He has also functioned as an engineering technology faculty for three years at Zane State College in Zanesville, Ohio, where he developed and taught courses that included CAD, solid modeling, statics, strength of materials, machine design, and statistical process control. As director of the Multidisciplinary Capstone Program, he brings his experience from over 15 years mentoring over 150 capstone design teams to the cooperative effort of translating the research findings into concrete recommendations for teaching engineering design. He is currently active in curriculum development and education research focused on capstone design and student-centered learning.

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