2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A comparison of shared mental model measurement techniques used in undergraduate engineering contexts: A systematic review

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Technical Session 2

Design courses and experiences in undergraduate engineering contexts is common at many universities. There is a significant amount of research aimed at understanding how to best support students working in teams in these complex problem-solving environments. Research teams use a variety of methods for measuring both behavioral and cognitive elements of effective teamwork behaviors. One way this has been done is to examine the shared mental models – organized knowledge structures – that students create as they work through design problems. This literature review provides a short synthesis and comparison of the techniques that have been previously used to measure mental models in those contexts. We identified and reviewed a set of 13 articles to draw insight and summarize how these measurement techniques have been implemented. In general, our findings aligned with previously published literature. We provide commentary comparing these techniques and explain why these results are helpful to engineering educators who teach design in their classroom.

Authors

Mr. Gregory Litster http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-8794-9814 University of Toronto [biography]

Greg Litster is a PhD student in Engineering Education at the University of Toronto in the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice. He received his MASc degree in Management Sciences (2022) and a Bachelor of Knowledge Integration degree (2020), both from the University of Waterloo. His research interests are focused on mental models for engineering design teams, group dynamics and how collaboration influences design cognition more broadly.
Prof. Patricia K. Sheridan University of Toronto [biography]

Professor Sheridan is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) and the Institute for Transdisciplinary Studies in Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP), and is cross-appointed to the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. Prof. Sheridan teaches teamwork and leadership in the first-year cornerstone design courses and oversees the integration of teamwork and leadership learning into the upper-year courses. She previously designed an online team-based self- and peer-assessment system that was used in multiple Canadian universities. She has also taught leadership and teamwork courses at Northwestern University, where she is a Leadership Fellow. Prof. Sheridan holds a BASc and MASc in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD in Engineering Leadership Education. She has previously worked on large plant-design teams in industry, and on algorithms to develop co-operative multi-agent systems in robotics.
Dr. Emily Moore P.Eng. University of Toronto [biography]

Emily Moore is the Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (Troost ILead) at the University of Toronto. Emily spent 20 years as a professional engineer, first as an R&D engineer in a Fortune 500 company, and then leading innovation and technology development efforts in a major engineering firm.

Download paper (988 KB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session